Expatriates in Trouble

Note: I am always up for a novel about expatriates in trouble (my favorite genre), especially set in China in the Twenties. See The Sand Pebbles and The Painted Veil.

Julia Paradise: A Novel - Rod Jones

This 1986 book was the first novel of this Australian writer, short at about 120 pages. It is set in Shanghai in the months running up to the massacres of Communists by the Kuomintang in 1927.

A Scottish doctor and Freudian psychotherapist Dr. Kenneth Ayers treats a woman who's an agitated insomniac and having hallucinations of pests and critters, and little girls jumping out of burning buildings. The patient, the title character, is the wife of a missionary and begins an adulterous Tuesday afternoon with the therapist. Describing disturbing scenes of incestuous rape, she tells him her case history as a victim of her father, a famous explorer and insatiable pervert.

The dry detached tone brings to mind Maugham and his stories of expatriates in trouble in Asia. Thematically it reminded me of The Year of Living Dangerously in the sense of centering on a complacent man who is tested by the pressures of social and political unrest in a foreign setting.  

Here the flabby hedonistic apathetic doctor has had it pretty easy in his life. He casually exploits local people and fellow expatriates, robotically breaking simple rules such as never with minors, never with force, don't treat people like objects. Through some twists and turns he sees the light and devotes the next 20 years to healing the sick in northern China. It is not a likely outcome but there is some fine prose in this even if the exploitation and harm of children and examples of sexual obsession get really hard to take.

If awards mean anything, this book 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 in Paris. It could be one of those novels that reveals more complexity and artistic power on re-readings but I don't think re-reading is happening for me in this case.