Beware of getting involved with anyone too wealthy or glamorous: something will go horribly wrong – that’s what literature tells us. Think of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Hartley’s The Go-Between. Rosie Price’s hotly tipped debut, What Red Was, begins as a shy young woman meets a charming young man of means. I braced for the blow.
At first all seems well. Kate is nervous and lonely, a newcomer at an “elite” English university; there she becomes close friends with Max, scion of a famous French film director and an old English family of the grand-house-falling-down-in-Gloucestershire variety. Kate is charmed and a little in awe of Max, and the way “he seemed to know everyone”. She learns that his life is not quite as perfect as it seems: his uncle is a suicidal alcoholic whose behaviour causes tension within the family. Kate’s own mother was an alcoholic, and it brings her and Max closer. Their bond grows stronger until Kate is sexually assaulted by someone Max knows, on Max’s mother’s bed. The majority of the book follows the fallout, its title derived from an occasion when the colour red causes Kate to have a flashback to her attack. In that moment she feels that her whole life has been “recalibrated”, her understanding of the world entirely changed by the rape.
This is a social novel, focusing on Max’s family and their interactions with outsider Kate. The character types are recognisable: the brilliant, “mad” grandmother, whom one imagines played by Maggie Smith; the callous businessman; Max, the young dilettante; his mother, a talented but troubled artist; the cousin who uses outward markers of success to hide his inner bitterness.
The omniscient voice skims between the inner lives of various characters. This level tone is delightful when employed for humorous effect; for example, a fling is summarised as “a Norwegian called Erik who had broad shoulders and was the kind of man who looked forward to reading online reviews of electrical appliances prior to purchasing them”. At other moments, concision works for dramatic effect: we are offered the thought that one character “ so often got what he wanted even without needing to be liked”. The paragraph then cuts to dialogue and the reader is left with a fizz of dread.
But at times I wished Price had dwelled longer with her characters. For example, we learn that a woman, “re-traumatised by a bloody and difficult birth, began to travel more for work”; then the text marches quickly on. If that sentence had been a scene, we might have felt for her more thoroughly. But perhaps this is unfair to Price’s endeavour. Her interest lies less in the interior lives of her characters and more in an analysis of what it means to be a woman in a world saturated with masculine aggression.
Again and again in the novel, we see how this aggression is tolerated. An acquaintance who is dumped by his girlfriend says: “Women are fucking crazy.” Kate is told stories of a boss caught sleeping with his junior and given a “tidy severance package”, while the young woman is left with no hope of promotion. A male customer at the cafe where Kate works complains that a breastfeeding mother is a sign of “broken Britain”. When she mentions it to Max, he calls the man a “cunt”; Max is Kate’s greatest male supporter, but he never questions what it means to use the female body as a slur. At moments like this you feel the sharp edge of Price’s prose.
When Kate learns that her older female mentor was raped decades earlier, she thinks: “Nobody had ever said anything about this third rite of passage, somewhere between virginity and motherhood; but there it was, as ugly as it was undeniable: the first rape.” What happens to a shy young woman may also have happened to someone who appears to have all the trappings of success. It is not Kate’s individuality that causes the rape: the novel underlines that it can happen to any woman.
I don’t want to call this book timely, because the crisis began long before the #MeToo era. And it is capturing the horrendously common nature of rape that is Price’s greatest accomplishment.
• What Red Was is published by Vintage. To order a copy for £11.43 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
