In an interview on Adultery

Tell us about Julia Paradise by Rod Jones, which is about a woman who’s married to a Christian missionary…

She has an affair with a Scottish doctor - a very unpleasant Scottish doctor - a disciple of Freud. She’s an hysteric and he wants to find out the etiology of her hysteria. And he does it, basically, by ass-fucking her.

And how does he think this is going to unlock the secret of her etiology?

Because it turns out that her father used to do that. Or at least that’s what she tells the doctor. In fact she fabricates an entire childhood for him in which her father sexually abused her, and they lived in this very lush place in China. A place that you can’t find on the map. She talks about animals and the vegetation and the mould in the house. Anyhow, it turns out that the whole thing’s a fabrication anyway. She’s trapping him in a completely different way.

A fantasy of control.

Well it’s interesting because it’s the male writers who like to do this. Male writers all talk about anal sex. It’s the fundamental exposure of the body. Rod Jones uses it in Julia Paradise and Salter uses it in A Sport and a Pastime. And it has such strangely mystical overtones. Salter’s character claims after anal sex to understand “the meaning of numbers”. Where does this come from? All I can imagine is that this is what men think about.I guess each gender is bound to have a different set of fantasies. Curious how often they match up in practice. But that aside - here we have a woman fabricating her past in order to trap a man, but in fact that fabrication is being imagined by the author, who is a man. Why is this book of particular interest to you?

For the same reason as the others. It’s about people doing things almost beyond their will. They have secrets, both of them. And they have these perverse, taboo desires. And they recognize each other. They fall into adultery almost without any conversation. It’s like they know a secret handshake, a secret code. And then the novel takes a terrible, political turn.

Political in what way?

The murder of a young girl. They live in a lawless culture in Shanghai, these expats. So what the doctor does with a friend who’s a painter is that they hire a young girl prostitute – a twelve-year-old. And then they get the prostitute to pose for the painter and then both men rape her. And then the girl dies. It’s horrible. And you suddenly realise that Rod Jones is talking about the cost. Not just the fantasy, but the cost of the fantasy. It makes the novel a much, much darker thing than you were expecting. It’s about real brutality and also about indifference to that brutality.