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Or sign-in if you have an account.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.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorThere 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.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.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.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.”Let’s say, she gets one.A Study in Red Connie Gault ThistledownGault, 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.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?Their separate narrative voices are idiosyncratic, interesting, disparate. Amy is the prose to Carol’s poetry. Pragmatic and self-directing, defined by exile, Amy appears on superficial examination to be a cooler customer than Carol, but in the end, we feel Carol’s chill, too. These women are two parts of a whole, defined by their self-belief, much of it borne of isolation, and their willingness to embrace how many ever selves that it takes to make a life.This is a novel of ideas, expressed elegantly, its beauty of language plain and accessible, its story rooted in characterization rather than a pile-on of plot or event. Gault never resorts to melodrama, calmly defying the conventions governing mystery — there are no insert-here epiphanies, no finger-snapping moment. Like Degas, she plays with ambiguity, endorses thinking, but defers to feeling, even makes room for denial, opts to hypnotize rather than proselytize or explain.She understands that the recitation of banalities can be meditative and revealing, not unlike brushing someone’s hair. In the opening chapters, A Study in Red is awash in light and water, how the sun sparkles on the water’s ever-moving surface, how it glimmers through the tree canopies. And Hattie’s pool! Those women, the girls in deck chairs, in bathing suits, by the blue water, X-rayed by the white light of the sun. It’s a sophisticated image that lingers in the reader’s mind like the memory of being young, a current so strong even the young feel its pull.By novel’s end, both women reunite when they are old, and the light, though still present has shifted, no longer a function of summer, but of winter. Amy visits Carol who says of her: “There was snow on the rims of her boots and little clumps of snow already melting on the mat. How beautiful they were, those melting bits, the only bits of gleam in the hallway, or glisten really more than gleam.”Life is the true mystery here, Gault concedes, and no novel nor painting, no harrowing episode, nor fine-toothed comb will ever crack that nut. But that doesn’t mean the mystery isn’t worth illuminating, or that the light ever loses its sparkle.Elizabeth Kelly is the author of Apologize, Apologize!, The Last Summer of the Camperdowns and The Miracle on Monhegan Island. 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