Book Review: Canadian author Connie Gault draws on subversive painting in new novel

Article content

If you want to derive the full measure of A Study in Red, the fourth novel by Connie Gault, start by familiarizing yourself with Edgar Degas’ painting, Combing the Hair. Colloquially dubbed “the big red monster,” for its mesmerizing use of a colour saturated in meaning — passion, love, danger, violence — it inflames a deceptively simple, domesticated but searing image, a young woman having her hair brushed by an older woman.

Article content

Article content

There is a story here. We can see and intuit it, the tension between the two women, separate but aligned, tethered together by a crimson rope of hair. Look too long and the uncertainty only deepens—call it, the red see.

Article content

Article content

Perhaps, Degas and author Gault, who recruits the enigmatic image as both motif and blueprint for how to tell a whole other story, are reminding us that some mysteries resist explanation. Brush away, but there’s always another tangle that resists unravelling. Maybe that’s a good thing, in art and in life, where resolution rarely lives up to the power and allure of wonderment. Maybe mystery once solved loses its authority and its magic — and even its talent to enact change.

Article content

Just ask Amy and Carol, the novel’s duel narrators who tell sometimes conflicting versions of events in alternating chapters that hearken back to their memorable first encounter in 1962, when they were among a few guests, mostly girls and women, holidaying at the woodsy Northern Alberta retreat owned by Hattie, a pivotal if inscrutable presence and a spectacularly successful romance novelist who publishes as Miranda Morehart.

Article content

Article content

Carol is 13, captivated by the arrival of a golden girl, feminine half of an erotically charged pair she nicknamed the “honey couple.” Carol’s sexual awakening skips spring and propels headlong into the heat of summer as she watches the couple, engaged to be married, humidly paw away at each other, all that voyeuristic young-girl yearning a precursor to catastrophe.
Held hostage to her romantic imagination, Carol wants to “feel death the way I felt poetry,” and desperately craves a “secret she could carry to her grave.”

Article content

Let’s say, she gets one.

Article content

Article content

Article content

A Study in Red
Connie Gault
Thistledown

Article content

Gault, a master of understated revelation, wastes no time making us privy to what happened poolside, how it happened and to whom it happened. Even why it happened. So, now we know. The question is what do we do about what we know? The facts and the truth are not always mutually reconcilable even as the truth, unlike the facts, is not always knowable, even to those who bore witness.

Article content

The women and the girls, convinced by Hattie, to unsee what they saw, disperse, and try to resume normalcy. Amy and Carol, forever tethered to each other by their shared secret, vanish from each other’s lives, but are roused decades later, from a kind of self-induced stupor, by the death at 102, of Hattie. Her demise resurrects the undisclosed past in ways they can’t any longer control. Gault tasks Amy and Carol with the complicated job of reviving the unspeakable — less the devastating event itself, more the decision to consign it to silence.
And what have each of them done since with their one wild and precious life?