Cult Canadian novelist Mona Awad is best known for her 2019 novel Bunny, which explores the toxic relationships between students on an elite creative writing programme. Her new book introduces us to beauty junkie Belle, so obsessed with her skincare routine she finds room for little else in life. The opening sees her catapulted back to California, where her mother Noelle, a failed screen actor, has recently died. Noelle’s death has been ruled an accident; for Belle, the story does not ring true. Why would her mother have been walking along a dangerous cliff edge after dark, and who is the stranger with a key to her flat? And why was Noelle, normally so in control, increasingly distracted and vague in the months before her death?
Further investigations reveal that Noelle was thousands of dollars in debt. Desperate for answers, Belle discovers that her mother had become involved with La Maison de Méduse, a high-end beauty spa whose members’ obsession with secrecy and ritual seems disturbingly cult-like. For Belle, the offer of a free treatment is impossible to resist. And it is there, in “the Depths” of the spa, that Belle begins to gain petrifying insights, not only into what is really going on at La Maison de Méduse, but also into the deliberately erased traumas of her own past.
The beauty – pun intended – of Awad’s fascinating literary experiment lies in her lyrical, almost dreamlike use of language and in her employment of archetypal symbols to illustrate a very modern fairytale. The novel’s prologue offers a bedtime story scene between mother and daughter: “Each night you lay in your princess bed, surrounded by your glassy-eyed dolls, waiting for her like a wish. Tick, tick went the seconds on your Snow White clock. The moon rose whitely from the black clouds.” The mother is described as “fair, slim and smooth”, while the daughter is “a beastly little thing, not at all like Mother”.
Already we are in a world of fairytales: as well as Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, references to Red Riding Hood, The Hare and the Tortoise and The Three Little Pigs occur in quick succession. Though it comes dressed in the traditional clothing of tales told to children, the stories’ imagery becomes increasingly dark and strange: “the wolf moon in the window, two grey-bodied spiders dangling from webs on the pink walls”. Later on, repeated mention of the distinctive red packaging of the Maison’s products, held enticingly against the cheek like that famous poisoned apple, bring us back to Snow White; as do the strangely distorting mirrors which, like gateways to another dimension, crowd the walls of Noelle’s flat and reveal to us the savagery and viciousness at the heart of most fairytales.
The title is deliberately chosen, for this is a novel in which colour is always of greater significance than decoration. Noelle’s red shoes – a clear allusion both to Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz and the demonic ballet pumps in Powell and Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes – alert us to danger, as they lead Belle deep into the heart of the kingdom where scarlet silk, crimson lips and demon eyes flash and glow.
White – the fairytale colour of purity – is here the pallor of ghosts, of invisibility, the satin sheen of erasure. The question of whiteness is further complicated by the fact that Belle is mixed race. Her redhead mother is the epitome of whiteness; Belle’s Egyptian father died when she was five. Belle insistently recalls how her mother seemed both to envy her darker skin and yet feel repelled by it. “You were lovely. You were lucky,” Noelle tells her daughter, yet Belle “knew then that she was lying. Definitely.”
Though it is tempting to equate Belle’s surname, Nour, with the French word for black, in Arabic it signifies brightness. The mannequins in Noelle’s upmarket clothing boutique – Belles of the Ball – are repulsively, almost shockingly white, with the same blood-red lips as the high priestesses of beauty at La Maison de Méduse: snake-thin, phantom-pale women who aspire to “the Glow”, the fake pearlescence of a dream of whiteness that can only mean obliteration.
In Awad’s hands, the very idea of whiteness becomes a dangerous delusion, and I could not help but be reminded of 18th-century cosmetic treatments in which lead was used as a whitening agent, destroying the skin of women raised in a society that prized a pale complexion above all, a preference that worked actively to entrench the racism at the heart of western imperialism. Similarly, the dolls we glimpse at the novel’s beginning – perfect, expressionless, white – hold up a distorting mirror to how girl-children ought ideally to appear and to behave.
At its heart, Rouge is not so much a fairytale as a vampire story. The childhood abuser who repeatedly appears to Belle in the guise of Top Gun-era Tom Cruise is surely a stand-in for Count Dracula himself; note how Belle must personally invite him into her room before he can enter.
The trancelike, rhapsodic language and deepening atmosphere of unreality make for a narrative that oozes with unease. The sense of threat is palpable, and Awad handles her material with enthusiasm, imagination and a refined knowledge of her sources. As the book wears on, however, I could not help feeling that the symbolism, like rouge too generously applied, becomes a little obvious. Belle seems too ready to proceed down a road whose dangers are apparent to her even from the start, and I would have liked to know her better in the real world before being sucked into the labyrinth of fantasy. For me at least, the balance between the real and the imagined in Rouge is out of kilter, and by the novel’s end I was left feeling I’d poked my head down this particular rabbit hole once too often.
• Rouge by Mona Awad is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
