Connie Gault's fourth novel, A Study in Red, draws on Edgar Degas' painting Combing the Hair, colloquially known as "the big red monster," which uses the color red to evoke passion, love, danger, and violence in a scene of a young woman having her hair brushed by an older woman.
The Painting as a Motif
Gault recruits the enigmatic image as both motif and blueprint for telling a different story. The painting's tension between two women, tethered by a crimson rope of hair, mirrors the novel's central mystery. Gault suggests that some mysteries resist explanation, and that resolution may diminish their power and allure.
Duel Narrators and a Shared Secret
The novel features duel narrators, Amy and Carol, who tell sometimes conflicting versions of events in alternating chapters. Their story begins in 1962 when they were among guests at a Northern Alberta retreat owned by Hattie, a successful romance novelist who publishes as Miranda Morehart. Carol, then 13, is captivated by a "golden girl" and an erotically charged couple she calls the "honey couple." Her sexual awakening leads to a catastrophic event poolside, which the women and girls are convinced by Hattie to unsee.
According to the review, Gault "wastes no time making us privy to what happened poolside, how it happened and to whom it happened. Even why it happened." The question becomes what the characters do with what they know, as facts and truth are not always reconcilable.
Decades Later
Amy and Carol, forever tethered by their shared secret, vanish from each other's lives but are reunited decades later by Hattie's death at age 102. Her demise resurrects the undisclosed past, forcing them to confront the decision to consign it to silence and what they have done with their lives since.
Gault, a master of understated revelation, explores how the women revive the unspeakable—less the devastating event itself, more the choice to remain silent. The novel asks what each has done with "one wild and precious life."
