Julia Paradise Read online

  ROD JONES was born in 1953. He grew up in Melbourne and studied at the University of Melbourne.

  Jones’s first novel, Julia Paradise (1986), won the fiction award at the 1988 Adelaide Festival, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and was runner-up for the Prix Femina Étranger. It has been translated into ten languages and published throughout the world.

  Prince of the Lilies appeared in 1991 and Jones’s third novel, Billy Sunday, four years later. Billy Sunday was the 1995 Age fiction Book of the Year and won the 1996 National Book Council Award for fiction. The Boston Globe called it ‘the Great American Novel’.

  The follow-up, Nightpictures, was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. Swan Bay (2003), Jones’s fifth and most recent novel, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s and Queensland Literary Awards.

  All of his books are short and complex, avowedly literary and sometimes controversial. ‘We tell stories about things we can’t talk about,’ Jones has said.

  He has taught at various Australian institutions, including a four-year stint as a writer in residence at La Trobe University, and overseas.

  Rod Jones lives near Melbourne. He is working on a novel, Empire Street, to be published by Text in 2014.

  EMILY MAGUIRE is the author of the novels Fishing for Tigers, Smoke in the Room, The Gospel According to Luke and Taming the Beast, an international bestseller. Her non-fiction book, Princesses and Pornstars, was also published in a young-adult edition, Your Skirt’s Too Short. She has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, Age, Australian and Observer.

  ALSO BY ROD JONES

  Prince of the Lilies

  Billy Sunday

  Nightpictures

  Swan Bay

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Rod Jones 1986

  Introduction copyright © Emily Maguire 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by McPhee Gribble Publishers 1986

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147127

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148193

  Author: Jones, Rod, 1953–

  Title: Julia Paradise / by Rod Jones; introduced by Emily Maguire.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Cure

  by Emily Maguire

  Julia Paradise

  JULIA Paradise had no shortage of fans when it was first published. Winner of the South Australian Premier’s Fiction Award, runner-up in France’s Prix Femina Étranger, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and hailed by the New York Times as ‘a remarkable accomplishment’, Rod Jones’s slim debut was taken up enthusiastically by readers around the world. A quarter of a century (and, for Jones, another four highly acclaimed novels) later, Julia Paradise will seem to first-time readers as startling as it did back in 1986. To those picking it up again it will be even better: few books reward rereading quite so richly.

  Kenneth Ayres, a thirty-four-year-old Scottish doctor with some resemblance to his one-time master Sigmund Freud, spends his days psychoanalysing the ‘hysterical’ wives and daughters of British expats, and his nights in the Chinese brothels and international clubs of decadent, cosmopolitan, seemingly lawless 1920s Shanghai. He has ‘no interest at all’ in his adopted homeland. He arrived on a whim and stayed because it is a pleasant, easy life and because, having disappointed his military father with his career choice and been made a widower by the 1919 flu epidemic, he had no good reason to leave.

  Julia Paradise, a young Australian morphine addict who hallucinates animals and fire, and recently beat her pet dog to death with a walking stick, is brought to Ayres by her husband, the Reverend Willy Paradise, a Methodist missionary. Under hypnosis she describes ‘wild and often obscene flights of fancy into her world of the animals’, and reveals a nightmarish childhood on an isolated northern Queensland plantation:

  Mosses crept around the window frames, tree ferns sprouted from the outside walls, and when leaves and overhanging branches fell onto the roof they rotted there and provided a rich compost base for the next generation of parasitical growth. A small softwood tree with shiny oval-shaped leaves grew out of the veranda and the roots hung down through the holes in the rusted iron roof, where they tickled the face of anyone foolish enough to walk along that veranda in the dark. It was from one of these twisted clumps of roots one afternoon as Julia sat reading her Golden Treasury and listening to the groans of her father and a woman making love inside the darkened house, that a green tree snake began to unwind itself...

  Her tyrannical and increasingly disturbed German father, an explorer and naturalist, doesn’t content himself with making love to women while Julia waits outside, though; and by thirteen, motherless, friendless and mute, ‘she had come to accept the insertion of his erect penis as a natural and unremarkable bodily function.’

  Ayres is convinced that he is curing Julia of her hysteria by drawing out every last detail of her visions and traumas. Perhaps, but Ayres has another reason to encourage the graphic spilling of her secrets: his taste for small, childlike (or, simply, child) prostitutes. Julia’s tales of being rutted by her father really get him going. Before long Ayres and Julia are lovers.

  It is extraordinary that Ayres—a glutton and an opium addict; a pimp (he procures street girls for artist friends), rapist and worse—considers himself qualified to analyse and instruct others. But mostly he avoids self-reflection. On one occasion, drifting into an opiate haze, he feels that ‘he was on the point of making a crucial confession to himself, but that he was holding himself back from such an irrevocable step as an admission of guilt: like a murderer might feel, for instance.’

  Not that he’s entirely in denial about his predations. He recognises these ‘indulgently’, comforting himself with Freud’s observation that ‘some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people.’ He doesn’t wonder about what perverse trait may be present in the girls he rapes—or might have been present had they had been allowed to develop sexual lives of their own volition.

  That a man who spends much of his time listening to ‘female problems’ could remain so oblivious to the experiences, inner lives and potential agency of women is the key to solving this tightly packed puzzle of a book. Ayres, thoroughly enjoying his wanderings through Julia’s kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, believes her to be ‘the most suggestible patient he had ever come across in his life’. Oh, Kenneth, there really are none so blind...

  It’s not only Ayres who misreads Julia. Her husband tells Ayres that ‘one of her delusions was that she considered herself to be a “serious” photographer’—and yet there is no evidence of delusion in Julia’s actions. She walks the streets of Shanghai’s Chinese quarter dutifully recording the lives of the city’s most oppressed and exploited inhabitants. But being doubted and dismissed is the story of her life. When she was a small child, traumatise
d into muteness, her father, ‘never entirely convinced of the genuineness of her affliction’, would sneak up behind her ‘describing all the wickedness he had in store for her’.

  *

  Despite Ayres’ lack of insight, it seems that his talking cure—his fucking-and-talking cure—works, and Julia recovers sufficiently to vacation with a friend, the German missionary Gerthilde Platz. Shortly after this trip, Ayres is invited to visit Willy Paradise’s mission to celebrate Julia’s thirty-first birthday. That night the mission school burns down, Willy is arrested and Ayres learns that Julia is in far more control of herself—and, it seems, him—than he imagined.

  While this is going on, China is erupting with communist insurgencies and nationalist crackdowns. Other forces, political rather than psychological, are on the march. Ayres sees the columns of strikers moving through Shanghai and the bodies hanging from lampposts, but they have as little to do with him as the legless beggars and starving children he passes on his way to his favourite brothel. An unpleasant scene, certainly, but irrelevant to the real stuff of Kenneth Ayres’ life: sex and food and the knowledge he has prevented yet another expatriate wife from embarrassing her husband by jumping at shadows.

  Nevertheless, Julia’s revelations are troubling—could she have been playing games with him? Julia is ‘a brilliantly coloured jigsaw puzzle dismantled and spread across the floor of his mind’. He obsesses over her words and expressions, her stories and rantings, but the puzzle is unsolvable so long as he refuses to look at the other pieces: the ones staring out from the background, from the jumped-at shadows.

  Chekhov—Freud’s contemporary and fellow writer-physician—believed that ‘man will become better when you show him what he is like.’ But Ayres is not made better by what Julia has revealed to him, only wretched and despairing. Though he continues his work, he has ‘lost faith in his calling, in the whole scientific approach of psychoanalysis’. He is adrift and broken. Only when the mysterious Gerthilde re-enters his life and shows him how he might be—how the world might be—does redemption become possible.

  As for the truth about Julia Paradise: well, this is a novel to be read and read again. Convictions about her honesty, her knowingness and her motivations dissolve, re-form, solidify and fade as you notice missed details and realise the import of seemingly trivial asides. But her madness, at least, is not in doubt. Julia is mad, just not in the way Ayres or her husband think she is. It is an appropriate reaction to the horror of being female in a society that uses and discards women and girls, and the horror of being forced to listen as the justifications of the powerful drown out the cries of the weak.

  Twenty-seven years after Rod Jones’s elegantly crafted novel was published, and eighty-six years since the start of the Chinese Civil War, that madness continues to be recognisable and relatable. It will remain so for as long as the world is divided between those who do whatever they wish while telling themselves that such indulgences are ‘seldom absent from the lives of normal people’, and those who must remain silent while subject to those indulgences, lest they be condemned as troublemakers or hysterics. Julia Paradise stands as a stunning exploration of consciousness, empathy, and the murky intersections between the personal and political.

  For Chris

  This is a work of fiction. Some events and settings are based on historical material but no resemblance is intended between the characters and any person alive or dead.

  ‘In not a few cases, especially with women and where it is a case of elucidating erotic trains of thought, the patient’s co-operation becomes a personal sacrifice, which must be compensated by some substitute for love...’

  FREUD, Psychotherapy of Hysteria.

  ‘Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth...’

  FLAUBERT, Letters.

  I

  For several years a Scottish physician named Kenneth Ayres, popularly known as ‘Honeydew’ Ayres, had made his living from British expatriates in the International Settlement and, more particularly, from travellers stopping at the Astor House Hotel. A newcomer soon discovered that it was Honeydew because of the tobacco to which Ayres was addicted, Gallaher’s Honeydew, and with which he was habitually filling his pipe. He might later hear whispers that there was another, more sinister source of this appellation.

  In the spring of 1927 Ayres was thirty-four, and he made a considerable impression, not least because of his physical appearance. He was a huge man, some eighteen stones of him, wrapped uncomfortably into a starched collar and a blue serge suit. As he propelled his bulk from the Club and back to his hotel (his apartment on the third floor of the Astor House Hotel contained his consulting rooms) Ayres had to stop often, panting, for little rests. Rickshaw drivers had to struggle to get Ayres’ weight into motion in a stream of Shanghai afternoon traffic.

  You might have come across him at the Shanghai Club, to which he had been given a temporary membership which never quite became permanent and never quite expired, where he took up his allotted station half way down the Long Bar, in the ill-defined ‘professional’ ranks between the managers of business houses and the chief clerks. Or you might have found him upstairs, in one of the Club’s deep leather armchairs with his brandy and post-prandial pipe engaged in talk with another young man, perhaps recently arrived in the East. For, apart from his bulk, the other thing which impressed one about Ayres was his conversation.

  There were three things he loved to talk about: the City of Edinburgh, where he had spent his childhood and attended university; Sigmund Freud, under whose aegis Ayres had studied for a year in Vienna, and to whom, with his beard, Ayres bore a vague resemblance; and finally Ayres loved to talk about his countryman, J. M. Barrie, whose play Peter Pan Ayres had seen in its premier season in 1904 as a lad of eleven up in London on a school holiday with his father, and in which he had promptly fallen in love with the actress who had played Wendy. (Barrie, entirely by the way, was to become Chancellor of Edinburgh University in 1930.)

  Ayres was a success by any standards but his own. He was the son of a Scottish Colonel, and after school he had disappointed his father when he refused to join the regiment, turning instead to the study of medicine. It was while he was at university in Edinburgh that he first became interested in the treatment of nervous disorders.

  He had spent the war in a military hospital in Herefordshire, where he had worked with the shellshocked. In the nurses’ station at the hospital he had met, then married, a local girl. After the war, when her family, solid Hereford gentry, began casting around the district for a secure practice for him, his Caledonian restlessness surfaced and for a time Ayres and his young wife travelled on the Continent. At first he had thoughts about returning to the hospital to continue his work with the nerve cases, but found himself instead, as effortlessly as if it were an accident, spending the next year in Vienna, enrolled as a member of Freud’s graduate seminar.

  Ayres was no genius, but he was a talented and conscientious student. He was overshadowed by the fiery leading lights in Freud’s circle, but even mediocre men have their year, when their lives seem to take on a coherent direction—and that year in Vienna was Ayres’. But he was about to be touched by something larger in that winter of 1919: the Spanish influenza epidemic. His wife fell ill in Vienna and by the time they had returned to London she was dead.

  For three years. Ayres worked to the point of exhaustion to forget his grief; could not; and determined upon that other classic palliative of the English—a steamship ticket to the East. He sailed for Sydney, Australia, but on a whim disembarked in Shanghai, and had been there ever since.

  Ayres had remained something of an outsider in Shanghai. He spent his time at the Racing Club and in the Long Bar, but among all his acquaintances there he could count none as a friend. Socially, the British there treated him with a polite and deferential suspicion. It was as though, with his appointment book full of the names of their wives and their daughters
and their cases of petit mal, hysteria and the nervous collapses which followed broken love affairs, he had learned quite enough of their secrets, and they tended to exclude him.

  In China, that pestilential dreamscape of suffering, he had no interest at all. He was not like those Englishmen who learned Mandarin and became scholars. The great thing about Shanghai for Ayres was its transience. Sitting at the Long Bar, or in the lobby of the Astor House Hotel, Ayres watched all those other foreign lives pass before him—the Englishwomen, even the healthy ones looking pallid and ill; the young adventure-seekers, the aspiring painters and writers on the cadge for a fiver; the fresh-faced young American missionaries who hoped, it seemed, to spread Christ in China by their sheer numbers. Some of these were insufferably boring. They were exhausted and fanatical and would talk of nothing else but Christianity and China in the same sentence. Others were frightened, the new ones whose only experience of a big city had been the three days they had spent in San Francisco before sailing, and who now, faced with the sights and sounds of eight million heathen people, suddenly felt their faith grow brittle and crack. They were sweaty-palmed and hollow-eyed, hoping the fear did not show on their faces. Sometimes they would turn up months later, broken men and raving women, reduced to being a part of the detritus of the city, and often victims of the various drugs of addiction.

  It was into this foyer of the Astor House Hotel, late one Saturday afternoon, a woman flew, hesitated a moment, then turned and was gone behind the revolving glass panels of the still-spinning Berlin door as suddenly as she had arrived. Ayres caught just a glimpse of her face. Her eyes held him with their look of glittering disorientation. He saw that the desk clerk had noticed her too, suspecting perhaps that she might be a prostitute. All this took a second, no more; even as Ayres noticed her, she was on her way out.