He Said, She Said

Set in late 2016, the unnamed narrator of this novel has a friend, Marco Rosedale, who is accused of sexually assaulting a woman forty years earlier.

An expat Brit living in America, Marco gets a call one day from a British reporter.

“We’re running an excerpt from a memoir by one of your old girlfriends, and I wanted to have a quick word with you about the contents. Take your temperature, as it were.”

The passage from Julia Gault’s memoir was ‘on the face of it, an affectionate portrayal’, but contains a hidden bombshell. After an evening of drinking in the late 1970s, Julia had gone up to Marco’s room, but then

she’d had an attack of fidelity, and told Marco very apologetically that she didn’t want to go to bed with him after all. “Did he take any notice?” her piece continued in its oddly jaunty way. “Not a bit of it! Next thing I knew, my buttons and buckles and fasteners were being undone by what felt like about a hundred pairs of exceedingly powerful if also exceedingly nimble and well-practiced hands, and I was lying naked underneath him on the bed. If memory serves, it was all over very quickly.

Marco realizes that such a statement, in 2016, could be the end of his career as a journalist. At first he tries to keep the whole story quiet, except for his friend the narrator. To the reporter, he denies Julia’s story completely.

“I never indulged in those behaviours: never wanted to, never needed to, never felt they were ‘acceptable’ even in ‘those days’. […] The article is defamatory.”

Our (male) narrator has a life of his own, which is described just well enough to give him some background, but has little relevance to the novel. More to the point, Julia Gault had been a family friend in his shy teenage years, and he had something of a crush on her. He and his family also moved in the same circles as Marco’s parents, the eminent barrister Sir Alex Rosedale and his wife the ex-model. They had grown up “in the same London world”, while Julia was “a quiet girl from the Midlands”.

The entire novel is written from a slightly remote third-person view, rather like The Great Gatsby or Brideshead Revisited, and in a style that struck me as somewhat old-fashioned.

I had a foreboding, as I spoke, of what he was about to tell me. [..] It stirred an odd mixture of reactions: empathy, but also something more like self-protectiveness. Certainly I didn’t want to indicate any willingness to be recruited in support of some defunct male prerogative, if that was where this was going.

The style is perhaps appropriate for the middle-aged British characters, but is also a startling contrast to the very current topic.

Only two people know what happened in that room 40 years earlier, and they have different versions: there is no basis for an objective judgement. Why would Julia make up this story, and why bring it up so many years later? Money, suggests Marco: Julia has been hard up of late. Marco has other ideas too: the reporter and his paper were engaged in a class-war against Marco and his upper-crust family, or are simply out for gutter journalism.

Every facet of the sexual harassment arguments we’ve all read and heard are neatly covered by one character or another:

“You did go on working with him, though?”

“Yes. I wasn’t going to give up my career. Why should I?”

“And you never said anything about it at the time? Never reported it? Not that not reporting it means nothing happened, obviously…”

She gave a grim laugh.

And makes sure to draw connections to well-publicized cases in the last few years. “Cosby, Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jian Ghomeshi, Anthony Weiner, ..”

Marco, being well-connected, brings all his armament to bear: old apparently anti-Semitic writing by Julia is used against her to squelch the publication of the memoir. Is that fair? It is certainly realistic. Marco, though victorious,

had a lingering, somewhat morbid tendency to talk about his ‘ordeal’. […] Sometimes it was the moment of victory he’d want to relive [..] Sometimes it was the dread that had come before — the sense of imminent ruin. [..] The progressive liberal in him would rejoice in the fall of some dinosaur mogul or smug college jock, drunk on their sense of unassailable omnipotence. But then, misgivings would seize him. Might the accusations be false? Or at least exaggerated? Or oversimplified? [..] Was it possible to get a fair hearing in the current climate?

Of the two people at the center of the novel, Marco and Julia, the reader gets a much closer look at Marco, because of the narrator’s physical and social closeness to him. Despite the narrator’s apparent inclination to be carefully neutral and a unemotional examination of Marco’s words and behaviour, the reader is always aware that this is an incomplete portrait, what Marco is willing to say and remember at every point. So it is not entirely surprising when, over the course of the novel, Marco reveals additional snippets of information that are more ambiguous than his initial strong statements.

Julia appears in person only once, and the narrator’s interaction with her is complicated by his youthful admiration. Yet he reminds her that her story will

“destroy his life.[…] He will be destroyed. As long as you realize that. He’ll be finished as a journalist, a filmmaker. His personal life will be wrecked. “

Neutral or not, in the end the narrator puts the burden of responsibility for Marco’s life on Julia. This is also, sad to say, a realistic picture of the way many people react to stories of rape and sexual harassment, that the life of the harasser is more important than the life of the victim.

This is 2016 in America, and so the presidential election cannot be ignored. The denouement comes during the debate soon after the leaked tapes that showed the ‘Republican candidate’ (unnamed, for some reason) bragging about assaulting women.

At a concise 160 pages, this is an elegant and well-written novel that presents all sides of an extremely topical subject, but retains a distance from its characters throughout.