Rosie Price’s debut novel, What Red Was, won a place on the Observer’s best debuts list in 2019. If her second, The Orange Room, hints at an arching rainbow of titles, let me be flip and say I’m looking forward to yellow. The more profound thread in Price’s work, however, is its dissection of the relationships between sex and power, men and women: What Red Was dealt with the aftermath of a rape, while The Orange Room slowly unravels a toxic affair. Price is concerned with the murkiness of the everyday – her narrative is slow, quiet, the stakes understated until you realise with a shudder how much our heroine has been eroded by a controlling partner.
Rhianne is a 23-year-old art student, who’s dropped out after her teacher, Alexander, made a move and then threatened to fail her when she didn’t reciprocate. Price writes the greyish areas: Rhianne is both attracted to and repulsed by this older man; she goes for cocktails, gets in the cab, and afterwards feels ashamed for entertaining his interest even to that extent. Price is astute, too, on how Rhianne’s belief in her own talent is tarnished once she realises how fake Alexander’s admiration was; that he only praised her work when he thought she might sleep with him.
The self-doubt Alexander ignites in Rhianne – about her art and her worth as a human – proves the perfect canvas for what comes next. She goes home to Gloucestershire to live with her father, Dominic, and her stepmother, Melissa; her mother died when she was a child. A job at a nearby hotel keeps Rhianne afloat, but she is soon buoyed up by working with a chef called Callum.
One of the distinct pleasures of Price’s writing is the low-key jokiness in her dialogue; you believe in the piss-taking initial connection between these two. But, steadily, Price allows the reader to spy how Callum consistently undermines or manipulates Rhianne, keeping her needy. He is threatened by her creativity, her art, any glimmer of independence. There is a horrible weekend away, where Callum weaponises what happened with Alexander against Rhianne, and where his physical domination might be “a joke” – or it might not.
Just as subtly drawn are the relationships between Rhianne and Dominic and Melissa, bristling as they do with the complexities of parent-child care when the child is just becoming an adult. Dominic becomes fixated on Alexander and on his own failures; he misses what’s right beneath his eyes, the more insidious damage that Callum is inflicting. Melissa – a compassionately drawn character – proves sharper-sighted.
Price takes us into all the characters’ perspectives – even Callum’s – but Rhianne is the book’s glowing heart. The Orange Room is a reminder that abusive relationships don’t have to involve smashed glasses or black eyes. The deliberate diminishing of a partner, the dimming of their inner light, is something so many of us have either experienced or witnessed in a friend – and Price reveals it, here, with tender care and quietly devastating accuracy.
• The Orange Room by Rosie Price is published by Vintage (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
