Book review: A vision of a predatory and callow world

Olivia Petter's 'Gold Rush' is set in 2017, just before #MeToo, and the fall of Harvey Weinstein — before, in other words, there was a strong new context for exposing sexual exploitation by powerful men
Book review: A vision of a predatory and callow world

Olivia Petter captures the faddish glamour of the London media scene. Picture: Coco Petter

  • Gold Rush 
  • Olivia Petter 
  • 4th Estate, €16.99

In Olivia Petter’s Gold Rush, a naive young woman flies too close to the sun. 

Rose is a PR assistant at Firehouse, one of London’s biggest magazine publishers, her job is to set up lunches and launches, and tempt along the biggest celebrities and influencers she can. 

You can imagine the trail of tears this involves, and Rose, who studied art and once dreamt of becoming a painter, is growing weary of all this phoniness when she meets somebody very famous indeed.

Asked to escort the pop star Milo Jax into a PR event, Rose is surprised and flattered when he starts to flirt with her. 

At first she thinks she’s imagining things, but when he begins texting her afterwards, they arrange to meet at his London home. 

Drink is taken, lots of it, and when Rose awakes the next morning, she wonders how she got back to her own flat, and why she is bleeding.

Gold Rush is set, very deliberately, in the early summer of 2017, just before #MeToo, and the fall of Harvey Weinstein — before, in other words, there was a strong new context for exposing sexual exploitation by powerful men. 

Rose, as a consequence, has no road map for the trauma she is feeling and at first rejects it, assuming she might have been imagining things. 

It will take a wise colleague, and more predatory sexism, to make her accept the horror of what really happened.

Olivia Petter is a journalist, columnist and podcaster, and this is her debut novel. 

Her prose style is rough around the edges, especially early on, when flat sentences and lazy similes suggest the absence of an editor. 

But one thing Ms Petter does do well is capture the faddish glamour of London’s endlessly self-involved media and entertainment scene.

People are forever going for lunch at The Wolseley or Cecconi’s to cry into gin and tonics and scrupulously avoid the food. 

As a character, Rose grows on you — her workmates and school friends all went to public schools, but she was raised by a single mother, Lola, and has a deficit of confidence that predators like Milo Jax are quick to spot. 

He is hardly a character at all in the book, a mildly sleazy jackal who takes full advantage of a messy situation he has engineered before disappearing into the ether to haunt Rose like a shape-shifting ghost.

The traditional print industry’s contempt for influencers is also addressed, courtesy of a highly sought after influencer called ‘Cosmo Clara’, who seems dreadful but is a lot less shallow than her online profile might suggest. 

Another issue Ms Petter intelligently analyses once she gets going is younger people’s sometimes toxic relationships with their mobile phones, which they scroll day and night in search of validation. 

Online dating doesn’t sound like a picnic either.

The prose in Gold Rush might be workaday, but the way in which Rose tries to face up to her ordeal is nicely done: she almost doesn’t want to fully remember what happened in a way, because then she would have to acknowledge the enormity of her ordeal. 

And while there are no nice men at all in this book, perhaps that equates to the life experience of many young women.

Meanwhile there are lots of buzz words and techie slang to entertain the reader. 

Ubered, for instance, is now a verb — a most regrettable development but hardly Ms Petter’s fault, and her brisk and lively book is at its best when channelling the callow energy of 21st century London.

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