Julia Paradise: Text Classics

by Rod Jones, Emily Maguire (Introduction)

Shanghai, 1927: hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymous expatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world, a kaleidoscope of incestuous eroticism and grotesque hallucinations.

But Ayres hides an even darker secret...

Rod Jones is the author of five novels, short stories and travel writing. His first novel, Julia Paradise, won the fiction prize at the 1988 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for France's Femina Etranger prize. It has been published throughout the world. His third novel, Billy Sunday, was the 1995 Age Book of the Year for fiction and won the 1996 National Book Council Award for fiction. Nightpictures was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Swan Bay (2003) was shortlisted for both the New South Wales and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards.

'Jones should be counted amongst Australia's most interesting and talented novelists. His gift lies in his ability to write with crisp clarity about the murky and the intangible; with confidence and force about the uncertain; with detachment about passion and with passion about detachment.' Australian Book Review

'Utterly original...a remarkable accomplishment.' New York Times

'Marked by lush, erotic imagery and subtle, complex handling of motifs, this slim and powerful first novel from Australia is a carefully controlled psychological study.' Publisher's Weekly

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Historical Fiction, Psychology, Novels

117 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Rod Jones is an award-winning Australian novelist. He was writer in residence at La Trobe University for four years, and has also been the Australia Council's writer in residence in Paris.
He studied English and History at the University of Melbourne.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this strange, hallucinogenic gem of a book feels like undergoing dream therapy, or a particularly intense bout of psychoanalysis. It's a grown-up novel, which takes the world seriously and whose themes are a lot darker than they at first appear.

The scene is Shanghai in the 1920s, where bored psychiatrist Kenneth Ayres makes a good living treating (and sometimes seducing) a string of hypertense colonial women in his practice at a top hotel. One day, in walks Julia Paradise, the morphine-addicted wife of a missionary, a look of ‘glittering disorientation’ in her eyes, suffering from a variety of nervous disorders including morbid hallucinations of animals.

She saw mice, rats, insects, snakes – her imagination seemed to select the clasically loathsome creatures. One of her most persistent hallucinations was a small brightly patterned snake moving across the floor in the periphery of her vision. Her zoöpsia was accompanied by a terror of real animals. The mere touch of fur, even in a coat, caused her nausea. Her pet miniature dog, which formerly she had fawned over, now revolted her and she had killed it with a walking stick in a fit of terror.

Under hypnosis, Julia begins to tell Kenneth Ayres a series of bafflingly colourful tales about her childhood in tropical Queensland. There are animals everywhere – indeed nature in general, in her childhood regressions, seems to be out of control – wild undergrowth, vines, creepers, writhing roots, thick mosses, and riverbanks surging with uncontrollable water.

With each wet season, the house had fallen deeper into decay. 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 alone in an old wicker chair 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.

Slowly, a number of very disturbing and yet horrifyingly erotic episodes of sexual awakening creep into Julia's hypnotic stories of her preteen years. Her mother is dead, her father has his own dark desires, and she has to grow up much too fast. Kenneth Ayres is excited. He has certain predilections of his own, that you gradually realise are more sinister than he has been able to admit to himself. But is it possible that Julia Paradise knows more about him than she's letting on? Can her appalling childhood stories really be true? Why do so few of the facts check out, and what could she really be playing at?

And then just as you're coming to terms with this psychosexual stuff, the book very artfully allows you to realise that the absence of any political context in the first half of the story is merely a way of telling you something important about Kenneth Ayres. The expat bubble in Shaghai is just that – a bubble – and the real world of the Chinese Civil War and the looming conflict with Japan is about to come bursting in. Some people are set for a political awakening, and some others might be beyond redemption.

Is Julia Paradise really mad? – and if she is, maybe madness is the only sane response for a woman in a world where whole cities of wives, children and old women are being violated, and where even in peacetime Ayres can walk down Bubbling Well Road and find any number of child prostitutes who are destitute enough to allow themselves to be raped for small change.

There are no big solutions at the end of this book. There are just puzzles to chew over. It's the kind of book you want your friends to read so you can dicuss theories with them. The key quote is in the epigraph, from one of Flaubert's letters: ‘stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth….’ There is, as one of the characters realises at one point, ‘something subtly and inevitably manipulative in the silences’.

It's short and dense and very well put together: an intriguing exploration of the places where sex and politics meet. Read it as a jumping-off point, and let your subconscious do the rest.

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 1 out of 5]

An author who would inspire you to write. What he did here was to assemble a cast of interesting characters: an analyst who studied with Sigmund Freud, a woman (Julia Paradise) suffering from strange hallucinations, and her Methodist minister-husband. He chose an exotic place and time: Shanghai just before, during and after the second world war. But apparently he didn't have any clear idea of what to do with these materials. He put in some sex, some mystery in the woman's hallucinations, but still failed to find any direction, or a story to tell, or any bright idea to develop, so he just killed his principal protagonist at page 123, stopped writing, got himself a beer, and called it a day.

The Australian literary circles, not knowing what to make of this, decided to get astonished and hailed the author as a promising new writer.

[Patty_pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Il dottor Ayres esercita la professione a Shangai, nei primi anni del secolo scorso. In realtà vivacchia aiutando le psicosi delle signore portate nelle colonie e costrette a vivere in un ambiente troppo lontano da quello in cui sono cresciute e la cui cura definitiva è spesso il rientro in patria. Poi arriva Il signor Paradise che gli chiede di curare sua moglie Julia, che soffre di allucinazioni. Da qui in poi il libro non mi è piaciuto per nulla... Non mi è piaciuta la storia, troppo ingarbugliata tra passato e presente e sogni; non mi sono piaciuti i personaggi, senza capo né coda; l'ambientazione poi non mi è parsa particolarmente curata. E poi ho trovato tutti un po' troppo fissati con il sesso, che sebbene soltanto accennato e buttato lì, come per caso, in realtà permea molti dei comportamenti degli interpreti. Era il libro d'esordio dell'autore nel lontano 1986, chissà se ha scritto altro? Per evitarlo, ovviamente!

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a little shocked this book has such a low average here. Sure, it's singularly unpleasant and possessed of a certain decrepitude (in that the characters sink to considerable moral lows) but wow, it's a compact powerhouse of a book. From the get go I was drawn into its dark charm and, despite the forays into some pretty uncomfortable places, I was wholly hooked for its 90-odd pages. It's kind of weird that a book (and author) with such lyricism and insight seems all but forgotten. Weird thing, this writing caper.

[Pilar Hanes · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can’t tell if it’s meant to be disgusting because the author is actually just gross and sees women as subjects to be mutilated in literature for the mere sake of causing a ruckus and creating exciting discomfort, or if it’s a sort of ironic disgustingness that he is over exaggerating with the intent of making us feel the discomfort that women have felt forever. But he is a man writing so I can’t help but think it’s the former, but he also does a great job at making Ayres disgusting to me. I can’t tell, but the book had me hooked. 3.5 stars.

[Abby Rosmarin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I...really don’t know what I just read.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m okay with taboo subjects. I’m okay with strongly political backgrounds. But this... again, I don’t know what I just read.

I found myself wondering what the point was with the story — and, without giving away any spoilers, I thought I had stumbled across it. But, alas, no. There was just this weird meandering, a main character that you neither liked nor loved to hate, and side characters that seemed to do nothing but flit in and out of the story. Perhaps that was the point? Who knows.

I always try my hardest to find something redeeming in every book. Perhaps this book’s most redeeming feature is that it’s short and a fast read. I see the pieces; I see what could’ve been done with those pieces; and I see what I was given instead. And I don’t know if I’m even disappointed. Just...really, I don’t know what I just read.

[Helen Cho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this book because Carolyn See called it "one of the finest novels in the language." So I'm going to have to bow to her superior knowledge that that is true. For me, not sure what was going on.

Julia Paradise, obviously very troubled mentally, allows the protagonist, Kenneth Ayres, a physician, to delve into the minds and lives of women who according to the author is endlessly fascinating. I'm just going to go with endlessly crazy.

So I'm going to guess is that what Carolyn See finds so fine about this book is this opinion. And of the opinion of the Japanese army (which is covered in her daughter's book, "China Dolls") and Chiang Kai Shek during WWII. Not sure they have anything on the events of today.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars

[Pam Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well that was strange. Picked it up as it was set in Shanghai and it was a second hand copy for $1.

Really strange, not sure what to say about this and were it was going.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Julia Paradise is a disturbing novel. Not long, at only 131 pages, but I found myself flicking back through it again and again when a seemingly innocuous character or event turned out to have unexpected resonances. It is so well-crafted that every word and sentence seems to have more meaning than at first reading. But its themes are dark and many readers will not like it.

Kenneth ‘Honeydew’ Ayres is a Scots physician who lost his young wife to the Spanish flu in 1919 and set sail for the east as a cure for his grief. Would he have been less of a monster had she lived? That’s one of the imponderables of this novel: what absence of inhibition made a sexual predator of this man?

Jones describes China of 1927 as ‘a pestilential dreamscape of suffering’ but for Ayres, life as an expat is very pleasant. He is oblivious to the looming civil war and the impending invasion of Japan, and in the British Concession there are no constraints on his appetites. The irony of his profession isn’t subtle: he’s a disciple of Freud and his practice consists of treating the ‘hysterical’ women of Shanghai – though his methods would have him disbarred in any jurisdiction today…

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/09/01/ju...

[Text Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Jones should be counted amongst Australia’s most interesting and talented novelists. His gift lies in his ability to write with crisp clarity about the murky and the intangible; with confidence and force about the uncertain; with detachment about passion and with passion about detachment.’
Australian Book Review

‘Utterly original…a remarkable accomplishment.’
New York Times

‘Marked by lush, erotic imagery and subtle, complex handling of motifs, this slim and powerful first novel from Australia is a carefully controlled psychological study.’
Publisher's Weekly

‘A very clever and satisfying little book.’
Esther, Paperback Bookshop

[Karen Hogan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A psychiatrist tries to treat a schizophrenic housewife in the early 1900's. I didn't understand this book. Too disjointed....

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

My fav by this writer.