A bit disturbing and the ending a bit rushed but it gets you thinking how crazy was Julia? ( )

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. ( )