Rating 3/5

(An average of 1/5 for the first two thirds of the book, 4/5 for the last third)

Warning: This post will contain BIG SPOILERS, so if you don’t want to find them out please stop here. Also be advised that this book covers a rape trial, and the issues of consent and emotional manipulation/abuse, so if you find any of these themes distressing you may also wish to stop here.

I thought I knew where this book was going. So much so that I didn’t want to attend this month’s meeting of Gloucester Book Club to discuss it. In a book that is a good 100 pages too long, the latter third was disturbing enough for me to grab for my chromebook and write about it almost as soon as I was done.

We begin with the He and She of the book’s title, a young couple called Kit and Laura, who exchange narratives across a period of time, from a solar eclipse they both witnessed in 1999, to a present day eclipse, in 2015. Kit is travelling to the Faroe Islands to see this one alone, leaving pregnant wife Laura alone at home in London. Kit is obsessed with solar eclipses, so the couple aim to both see as many as they can throughout the years they spend together, but the narrative event that really ties the two time points together is the Laura and Kit’s interruption of a rape at an eclipse festival in 1999, and its subsequent fallout, which culminates during the solar eclipse weekemd of 2015.

The subject of the assault, Beth, is presented as the ‘mad woman in the attic’, after she follows Kit and Laura to London after her rape trial and starts lingering around their home. We are led to believe that, like Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Beth Taylor is a wronged woman whose madness and instability ultimately lead to her create a devastating fire that wounds the male hero and destroys his home irrevocably. The difference in He Said/She Said is that Kit scalds his hand on a burning doorknob as he rescues Laura from their burning flat in Clapham Common, and Beth doesn’t jump to her death from the flaming roof…but more on that later.

As a result, Laura led to believe that the woman she once sought to help after a sexual assault now has a crazed vendetta against her, calling into question the very idea that what the couple witnessed at Lizard Point Festival in 1999 was in fact an interrupted rape, and not some part of a damaged woman’s mind games. This is the point of the novel I had reached when I was due to attend my book club meeting, and, as I imagine Laura would be, I am not to be dissuaded from the idea that sexual consent should, and can be, withdrawn at any time and still remain valid, and so was not keen on the idea of discussing a book that took nearly 200 pages to muddy this water.

Before I get on to the turning point of the novel, I just wanted to give kudos to Erin Kelly for her realistic portrayal of Laura’s anxiety attacks. Other than Laura’s initial feeling of her arms being trailed by ‘gossamer’, (which I find far too lovely a description for such a hellish feeling), Kelly’s unflinching references to Laura’s repeated arm scratching, for me, accurately depict not only how visceral the psychosomatic feelings of an anxiety attack can feel, but also how easily self-harm can become a coping strategy for the subject without them even being aware it.

So, to the revelation that changed the book for me…or, if you’ll pardon the pun, eclipsed where I thought the original plot was going. (Come on, I couldn’t not go for that one!)

The fact that Kit (with her consent) slept with Beth the night before she was raped, made her lie about this at her trial, cut his own foot, set fire to his own flat and then hide this all from his wife for the next 15 years, to the detriment of her career, as well as mental and physical health, all to protect himself and his relationship with Laura, continues to astound me more than any of the physical assaults the rapist Jamie carries out in the course of the novel. This isn’t to say that one type of assault is greater than the other, or one type of abuser more valid than the next, but rather how much I am still shocked at how normalised the narrative of female hysteria is, to the point that I didn’t see this twist coming until it was revealed.

For all the advances we have made since the days of Jane Eyre, Kelly’s unsettling story has made me wonder why as a society we still see emotional and psychological abuse as a woman’s domain, the feminised reaction to the comparatively male weapons of physical violence and rape, when in reality, far too many people learn to their detriment that any form of abuse isn’t gender specific. He Said/She Said reveals an unsettling truth too about the secrecy of abuse within romantic relationships, that, before revealed, the lover’s role as abuser can seem to the victim as unfathomable as the moon blocking out the sun.  Yet as we know, these events do, and will, keep continuing to happen.