Apple Tree Yard

Yvonne Carmichael, a successful geneticist in her early fifties, gives evidence to a parliamentary committee and afterwards is approached by a man who offers to show her something in the Palace of Westminster.

The affair that follows is conducted anonymously and entirely on his terms. The novel opens with her in the dock, addressing him in the second person throughout.

She is in the dock at the Old Bailey, and the entire novel is addressed to the man in the next seat.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Yvonne narrates to her lover throughout, which means the reader is reading a private address rather than an account, and information is withheld because he already knows it.

The device is the novel's central technique and it works: it produces intimacy and evasion simultaneously, and the withholding is motivated.

The reader spends a substantial portion of the book not knowing what either defendant is charged with, and the disclosure is managed carefully.

The structure converts a domestic novel into a suspense narrative without altering the register, which is the book's most impressive achievement. Doughty also withholds the identity of the victim for a considerable time, which keeps the reader assembling the situation from fragments of cross-examination.

A central sequence depicts a rape, and the novel's subsequent concern is how Yvonne's own conduct — the affair, her silence, her choices — is used against her.

The material is handled with care and is genuinely difficult, and the courtroom sections are precise about how a complainant's history is deployed.

The novel's argument is about who is believed, and about how a woman's sexual autonomy is converted into evidence against her when something is done to her.

Doughty makes the case through procedure rather than through statement, and the cross-examination sequences are the book's most effective writing.

She is intelligent, professionally accomplished, and comprehensively self-deceiving about her own motives throughout the affair.

The characterisation is unsparing, and the novel's refusal to make her either a victim or a fool is what gives the trial its weight. Her professional competence is also established thoroughly, which makes the contrast with her judgement in the affair more disturbing rather than less.

He remains substantially unknown: his name, his work and his life are all uncertain, and Yvonne knows almost nothing about a man she has taken enormous risks for.

The asymmetry is the point, and the novel is precise about how little information she accepted and why.

Yvonne's genetics work supplies both a professional context and a set of metaphors about inheritance, risk and determinism that the novel uses lightly.

The material is accurate and is not overworked, which is more restraint than the setup invites. Her lab work also supplies the novel's only scenes in which she is entirely in control, which makes the contrast with the courtroom sharper.

The trial runs in the present while the affair is recounted in the past, and the two converge on the event that produced the charges.

The alternation is strictly maintained and the pacing of disclosure is carefully managed across four hundred pages. Doughty also uses very short chapters in the trial sections and longer ones in the recollections, which distinguishes the two registers without any signposting.

Controlled, interior and unshowy, with the courtroom passages written in a noticeably flatter register than the recollections.

Doughty is a literary novelist and the writing is better than the category average, particularly in the descriptions of professional life. The scenes of her giving evidence are particularly good, and the experience of being cross-examined is rendered with a precision that suggests careful observation.

A BBC television series adapted it with Emily Watson and Ben Chaplin, and is faithful in plot while necessarily externalising the second-person narration.

The novel's technique is its principal distinction, and no adaptation can reproduce being addressed directly by a defendant. The series also relocates several scenes and gives the lover considerably more presence, which reduces the asymmetry that the novel's structure depends on.

Readers who want a courtroom novel that is genuinely about credibility and consent, and who can accept a narrator lying to herself.

It is one of the more serious books in this section and requires no legal knowledge. Readers should be aware that the sexual violence is central rather than incidental.