I HOPE the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People goes well — Rooney’s novels are deservedly popular, so the series could be good. But it is hard to adapt fiction to TV drama. I worry how Rooney’s deadpan way of describing emotional turmoil will translate to TV.

The forthcoming series having 12 parts might also stretch the story to meet the “box-set” format for marketing rather than aesthetic reasons. Still, the team behind the adaptation is strong: Rooney herself is writing the script. The directors are Lenny Abrahamson, who made a good film from the novel “Room” and Hettie McDonald who has a long, effective TV drama career.

Normal People takes a couple from teens to twenties in an on-off love affair. Rooney has been rightly celebrated as a voice for “millennials” because she can get across all the anguish, anxiety and confusion of young adulthood — including how people can hurt each other when they mean to do the opposite.

She does so with characters who communicate, naturally and convincingly, by text or email as well as “in real life.” She writes about emotional turmoil in an apparently detached style — an ironical tone that reminded me a little of Muriel Spark — that exposes emotional pain with economy and wit.

It also stood out for me that Rooney’s characters inhabit a world of small and large social and financial hierarchies. They have to negotiate with the “in crowd” and with the landlord. While neither Normal People nor Conversations With Friends are “about” the world as created by the 2008 crisis, it is part of the characters’ life, trapped as they are in “generation rent” and precarious employment.

Rooney is a fine writer and can clearly see and understand what’s going on around her, but this also points to a way Irish fiction has responded to, reflected and interpreted the crisis far better than English fiction.

In Britain there are any number of novels which “respond” to Brexit in some metaphorical way, but we are very short of fiction that reflects the 2008 crisis and the austerity that followed — even though Brexit hasn’t yet actually happened in any deep way, whereas the crisis very definitely did.

Kerry Hudson’s 2012 debut, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, is a very vivid story about hard times in Britain, but I struggle to think of other good novels that reflect the period as it affected millions of folk. I was very disappointed in John Lanchester’s “Capital,” which some say dramatizes the boom and then crash, but it felt like a pulled punch compared to some of his other writing.

By contrast Irish literature has taken the crash and the crisis head-on. Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012) is a black comedy written as testimony for an inquiry into the crisis. Paul Murray’s excellent The Mark and the Void (2015) is also a black comedy, with a postmodern touch, but also plenty of humanity, which goes from the complexities of the banking crisis to what hard times do to happiness and friendship. 

Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2013) shows what happens to small-town folk left in the lurch after a big property developer runs out on them, as boom turns to bust. It’s a deservedly prize-winning, Steinbeck-y take on the crash of the Celtic tiger.

Even Irish fiction that isn’t “about” the crisis can, like Sally Rooney’s books, have the crisis woven into the fabric. This is certainly true of Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints (2011) and Two More Pints (2014): spare, dialogue-only novels, both laugh-out-loud and with a dash of Samuel Beckett.

Ireland has a strong literary tradition, but England alone has ten times as many people. So the weakness of the English literary response to the crisis does speak of a middle-class insularity in English fiction — notably the best British novel reflecting the tough times of the period comes from a Scots writer, the aforementioned Kerry Hudson.

It also reflects how the crisis was lived and understood as a national crisis in Ireland, one that threatened the status of the whole country. Authors are the voice of the nation, so they spoke of the crisis. In England the crisis was individualised, privatised and passed off. Those who owned a decent house felt it so much less than those who relied on benefits. Unfortunately, the English literary scene might be too comfortably close to the former than the latter.

The way the crisis presented as a national crisis in Ireland was also the experience in Southern Europe — Ireland being like a Southern European state without the sunshine – which is also reflected in the way Southern European literature also refracted and ruminated on the crisis.

In Greece, creative writing in every register reflected the financial crimes of the few and economic punishment of the many: Petros Markaris, one of Greece’s leading thriller writers, made bestsellers from the banking disaster, with a trilogy beginning with Expiring Loans (they’ve been translated into French , German and Italian, but sadly not into English).

Poets also wrote from the crash — as shown in the collection Austerity Measures (2016). Literary fiction — particularly Christos Ikonomou with his story collections Something Will Happen, You’ll See (2010) and Good will come from the sea (2014) — also looked at how people try to live, and suffer, and fight among each-other in a downturn.

Similarly one of Spain’s leading novelists, Rafael Chirbes, turned to how people on the periphery of Europe profited out of the boom, but then get stuck when the money runs out, as the title of his 2013 novel On The Edge suggest.

l  found Chirbes book at times brilliant, but over-long and overwhelmingly bitter. But the way one of Spain’s leading authors wanted to look at the real crisis as it gripped his fellow citizens, where there doesn’t seem to be an English equivalent, doesn’t speak well of our literary scene. I’d love to be told that there is some deep vein of British literature — or even a few more novels — about the profound reality we are living through that I have missed, but I fear there isn’t.