When Rose, the narrator of Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character, first visits the bathroom of Gary Gravelly, ‘there in the toilet bowl, frayed around the edges and so long languishing that it had stained the water, was the most enormous rope of turd. That, I said to myself, is the death of romance.’ Rose soon forgets, overwhelmed by the boyish charm of her new lover, but the reader is left with an indelible image. Whatever Rose might think of Gary at any stage – and she changes her opinion many times over the next couple of years – we continue to associate that repulsive image with him. This is not just a bit of earthy bad taste designed to shock. It is a bold and nauseatingly effective way of influencing the reader’s attitude to Gary.

Rose, in a fragile and desperate state, requires regular therapy sessions with the exquisite and sympathetic Fleur. We gradually become aware, as the narrative circles round a subject too disturbing to broach directly, of the reason for this. On page two, she writes, ‘My husband, David Flower, had gone away’. A deserted wife, how sad, we think. On page nine, she mentions how he hoped to ‘charm them into giving him bail’. A criminal, then. Poor woman. We don’t know the nature of his crime until page thirty-two, when she wakes in the middle of the night and remembers, ‘My husband is a rapist. My husband. A rapist.’ Forty pages later it gets worse: ‘My husband raped a schoolgirl. There. I never noticed them before but now I see them everywhere.’ Eventually, Fleur advises her to tell Gary exactly what her husband did, ‘to let Gary understand how very traumatised [she] was’. She doesn’t tell him straight away, but, as if prompted by this, she now relates the details to the reader. When she does talk to Gary about it, his reaction is shockingly solipsistic.