Female, Nude by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett review – a seductive drama of art and rivalry

It is the summer of 2019, and Sophie Evans, the reckless protagonist of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s unsettling second novel, has arrived on an idyllic island in the Cyclades with her university friends Helena, Iris and Alessia to celebrate Helena’s forthcoming marriage. Helena doesn’t want it called her “hen … Like we’re dumpy little featherbrains going cluck, cluck, cluck”, but all the same, the men – including Sophie’s curator boyfriend of six years, Greg – will not arrive for another five days.

She may be on holiday but Sophie is not at ease in the villa’s atmosphere of “almost offensive” good taste, with luxurious meals, cocktails on tap and endless sunshine. In the 10 years that have passed since they first met as students, the differences between the women have become more pronounced: money has “made itself known”. Elegant, chilly Iris, whose parents have bought her a place in Peckham, works in publishing; the family of spoilt, patrician art dealer Alessia seem practically to own the island on which the women are holidaying; and Helena’s aspiration is to be a trophy wife with a house full of “nice things”.

By contrast, Sophie – whose father is an electrician and mother the full-time carer for her disabled sister – is working in a museum shop while she tries to make her way as an artist. She is also under pressure from her reliable, thoughtful partner, Greg, to have a baby, when what she urgently wants is freedom to paint. Apparently understanding this, Alessia commissions a nude portrait from Sophie, to be painted during their time on the island in her private studio. But when the beautiful Ky, waiter, archaeologist and extraordinary lover, appears at the villa and begins to look at Sophie in a certain way, the rivalries that have been simmering turn toxic, and unease becomes something more dangerous.

As Sophie wrestles to reconcile what she wants, what she needs as an artist and what is acceptable in polite society, it becomes clear that this account is written with long hindsight from far into a shadowy future. The island narrative is punctuated at regular intervals by brief passages in which Sophie engages with female artists from history, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Francesca Woodman, deconstructing their experience as she stands in front of their work in museums and galleries down the succeeding years and setting it against her own struggle to find fulfilment as a painter. We skip to and fro between these meditations and the dance of the characters in their Greek idyll, moving towards the arrival of the men, and the certainty of disaster.

Female, Nude is an energetic and ambitious novel. Cosslett – a Guardian columnist – is excellent at the sensual detail of light and food and physical pleasure; she immediately engages us with a seductive drama of friendship between women in an exotic and glamorous White Lotus-like location, while at the same time offering a serious-minded interrogation of art. Add in an unpicking of the complex burden that is motherhood and the trade-offs a woman must make with her body and society if she is also to find creative fulfilment, and it’s not entirely surprising that the triple threads sometimes become unmanageable.

The artistic analyses are interesting but inevitably feel clunky, as though parachuted in to provide a gravitas that the millennials-on-a-hen-week narrative rejects. It is less easy to believe, too, in the wise and weary future Sophie these passages offer us than in the messy, resentful 31-year-old, lashing out at her frenemies on their Greek idyll, ravenously solipsistic, ruthless and selfish – entirely convincing as an artist in the making, in other words, and as watchable as she is unlikable.

The characterisation more generally is a little uneven: while her husband-to-be is splendidly unpleasant, bridezilla Helena is no more than serviceable, Iris the ice queen not far from a cipher and her partner Edwin almost entirely theoretical. But if Ky is pure romantic fantasy, the novel gives Sophie a delightfully free rein with him that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read – just as Cosslett’s seriousness of intent must also inspire respect.