Summary
Now Marianne and Connell are home in Carricklea, watching a football match in Connell's childhood bedroom. Marianne is home for the summer, but Connell comes in from Dublin each weekend to be with her. Her brother follows her around and tries to start arguments, but she does her best to avoid them. In Connell's room, the two of them casually discuss a social gathering the night before. Marianne describes an odd encounter with Connell's old friend Eric, who apologized for bullying her as a teenager. Lately, Marianne has been thinking about Rob's death, and the reactions of his old friends, many of whom wrote him public messages on Facebook. She'd once judged them for doing something so pointless, but she now feels that they were simply coping in the only way they could. Marianne and Connell also talk about Jamie, who had told everyone at Trinity about Marianne's sexual submissiveness in order to hurt her reputation. Marianne brings up a moment last night when the two of them were dancing, and asks Connell if he was annoyed with her. He says no, and they dissect a minor misunderstanding, working through the conversation they had while dancing to understand why Marianne misinterpreted Connell's behavior. Connell tells Marianne that their friendship is difficult sometimes, because he's still attracted to her. They agree that the period when they were together, early in college, was the happiest either had ever been. Connell says that he wants to think things through before agreeing to get back together, and Marianne, though she tries to be understanding, is visibly hurt. She gets ready to walk home when Connell apologizes, kissing her hand. The mood between them changes, and they are about to have sex for the first time in years. However, Marianne asks Connell if he will hit her, and he says no. This causes her to panic, assuming that Connell finds her desires disgusting. She feels depressed and ashamed and hurries home, where Alan confronts her. He tells her that she should not spend time with Connell, who is mentally ill, and begins to chase her. She barricades herself in her bedroom, but Alan pushes the door open, hitting her in the face and causing her to bleed.
Back at his house, Connell is in a bad mood following the fight with Marianne. Lorraine comes home, but he doesn't participate much in the conversation she starts, except to ask her if she regrets having him as a teenager. He thinks about Marianne and how she seems to lack a normal self-preservation instinct. He also thinks about how easy it would be to retell the story casting himself in a flattering light, as a man who is too moral to hit a woman, and how that retelling would be true and yet obscure the complexity and nuance of his and Marianne's relationship. He is distressed by Marianne's willingness to obey and please him, and wonders if breaking off their relationship entirely is the only cure for this—but he simply can't imagine a life without her. As he is brooding, his mother, preparing to go to sleep, tells him firmly that she loves him, is proud of him, and does not regret having him. Then he gets a call from Marianne. She says only that she has tripped and hurt herself, and urges him not to worry, but he senses that something worse has happened. He drives to her house, where she is waiting by the door. He tells Marianne to wait in the car, and then closes the door, cornering Alan inside. Connell tells Alan never to hurt Marianne again. Alan is crying, and Connell, meanwhile, feels dazed and dizzy. Leaving Alan in the house, Connell joins Marianne in the car, telling her that he loves her and that she will be safe. She appears to be completely exhausted.
The next chapter begins at Marianne's Dublin apartment. She and Connell are in a relationship now. Marianne goes to take a shower and get ready for work while Connell checks his email in bed. She is no longer in touch with her family, and now works a boring but steady job to support herself. For Christmas, she had gone home with Connell to stay at Lorraine's house, and had been welcomed into the extended family's chaotic, informal holiday celebrations. She, Lorraine, and Connell had run into Marianne's mother only once, and they hadn't spoken. Connell and Marianne had gone out with old classmates for New Year's Eve, and Connell had kissed Marianne in front of everyone, which she knew he did just because it would please her.
When Marianne gets out of the shower, Connell looks dazed. He has just gotten an email informing him of his admission to a creative writing graduate program in New York. Marianne is upset that he hasn't told her he applied, and wants to know whether he told Sadie, his friend at the Trinity literary magazine. He says that Sadie encouraged him to apply in the first place. Marianne asks if he is in love with Sadie, and he is shocked and annoyed, saying that he doesn't even particularly like her. Marianne, though, wonders whether he would rather be with someone who understands him better—perhaps someone with a rich imaginative life and literary tendencies. Connell impatiently says that it is Marianne who understands him, and that he has no desire to be with anyone else. He tells her that he kept his application a secret from her because he felt insecure, especially given Marianne's intelligence and self-possession. Marianne encourages him to go to New York. He is hesitant to leave her, but says he will do whatever she thinks is best. She says that they will survive a year apart, and that she will be there for him when he returns.
Analysis
The climactic scene of confrontation between Alan, Marianne, and Connell represents not the protagonists' innate differences, but rather the way in which each of them has changed the other. Up until this moment, Marianne's response to abuse has been essentially to vacate her body, completely detaching from her senses and surroundings. She experiences this detachment not only when she is actually under threat, but also in a variety of social and sexual situations, and, in her lowest periods, all the time. It is primarily around Connell that she experiences real relief from this. Now, when running away from Alan, she experiences the opposite of detachment. She is filled with adrenaline and sensation. Her experience is fearful, not pleasant, and she remains full of guilt and shame—yet her fight-or-flight response finally kicks in, negating Connell's recent worries that she lacks a self-preservation instinct. Though it's not enough to save her from Alan's aggression, Connell's assertion of Marianne's value does at least give her the ability to feel healthy fear. Connell, meanwhile, has always suffered from a fear of conflict. This fear of conflict is actually what kept him from defending Marianne during their high school days. As he gets older and his depression worsens, his fear of confrontation spreads into a general paralysis and anxiety, making him feel that it is impossible to make any choice or take any action at all. His decision to overcome these fears in order to help Marianne is a reflection, not just of his love for her, but of the way in which her assuredness has influenced him.
These last few chapters are packed with drama, including the climactic scene of the book. Yet they also contain a quieter, more contemplative undercurrent, concerned with the purpose and value of language itself. Marianne finds herself thinking about the posts old classmates have written to Rob following his death. She considers whether these posts serve a purpose. What does it mean to write a message to a dead person? She ultimately decides that these messages are, essentially, not her business. She knows that this type of writing must be helpful for the people who do it, and accepts that fact. Yet writing to someone who isn't alive to read it requires a certain suspension of disbelief that Marianne finds personally difficult, even abhorrent. Connell, on the other hand, is a less rational person, with a remarkable imagination and a passion for recording his ideas in fiction. As a result, he spends a good deal of time concerned with the possibility that he might express himself badly, or twist reality with his choice of words. For instance, after refusing to hit Marianne, he considers all the ways he might verbalize and describe their interaction, aware of how easy it would be to misrepresent. The contrasting preoccupations reveal different, and perhaps complementary, relationships to language and communication. For Marianne, language should represent reality truthfully, and should be carefully chosen, because language that fails to usefully represent reality is essentially a waste. For Connell, language actually has the power to reshape reality, and therefore must be carefully chosen to avoid creating harmful realities. Marianne worries that Connell prefers the company of Sadie, or of other "literary" peers. But Connell dislikes most of these peers, in large part because he finds their interest in literature to be an exercise in ego rather than a real passion. He and Marianne, however, share a certain moral and intellectual conviction that language matters, even if they come to this conviction through different routes.
There's also another quiet scene, between Connell and his mother, that tells us a great deal about the romantic relationship at the center of the book. Lorraine is in fact a major player in Marianne and Connell's romance. Not only does her job in Marianne's house bring them together in the first place, but her anger helps Connell rethink his hurtful behavior towards Marianne in high school. Now, without explicitly telling her son to support rather than abandon Marianne, she encourages him to do so simply by expressing love for him. Connell feels guilty simply for being alive, since he knows that his unexpected, unplanned existence greatly upset his mother's plans and disrupted her life. This actually parallels his own relationship with Marianne: his love for her was unplanned and disruptive, altering his life in unforeseeable ways. By telling Connell that she is glad he was born, Lorraine implicitly affirms the value of these disruptions. At the same time, her expression of love is also a reminder that certain things in Connell's life can't be disrupted—mainly, his close relationship with his family. Instead, that relationship expands to include Marianne.
