I wonder how much the title of Louisa Treger’s second novel, The Dragon Lady, colours expectation of who you’re going to meet inside. The Lady in question is Virginia Courtauld – a real Lady with a capital L, Ginie to those who knew her – who had a tattoo of a snake running the length of her leg. Not so unusual now, perhaps, but in 1920’s high society?
The novel is set mostly in 1950’s Rhodesia. Having moved from Europe to escape the shadow of the Second World War, Ginie and her husband, the soon-to-be-Sir Stephen Courtauld find their African idyll isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Struggling with the inherent inequality they seek to quietly use their position and wealth to improve the situation for the Africans, and in doing so find resistance from their peers and danger from unexpected quarters.
The structure of the novel works really well, setting the scene and the tension in 1950’s Rhodesia, before jumping back to post World War I Europe to show us how Ginie became the person she is. For my part I didn’t find her a particularly sympathetic character. She is hard at times and undoubtedly calculating but the interesting thing for me is that I had to be reminded of these facts. She is gloriously complicated, and that’s the golden key that lets us love at one moment and dislike the next; shake our head at the action and yet nod ruefully at the cause of it.
For all that the book covers a broad expanse geographically and spans the two world wars, it’s something of a close, quiet affair. There’s a sense of looking in on not just a world very few of us would recognise but also a very private world, of peering into Ginie’s heart. It is Ginie’s story, after all, and this is something I found myself coming back to again and again – what moves and motivates her, what hurts and what heals, who she loves and how.
Though the research must have been extensive the writing wears it very lightly, those nuggets of information that tie the fiction to the fact brought out through characters in action rather than unwieldy info-dumps so you get these lovely little moments where you remember that it’s not just on the page that these people lived and breathed.
I do like the subtlety that is the fact of Catherine’s narrative, the question that it poses to those of us who would be horrified to realise that, regardless of our inclination, we would have been viewed as part of the problem: what’s changed?
The Dragon Lady was published by Bloomsbury on the 13th June 2019 ISBN:9781448217267
You can find Louisa on Twitter @louisatreger and at her website louisatreger.com
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