Somehow that opening sentence seems to aspire to the shock-value of, say, ‘Maman est mort aujourd’hui.’ but fails, for this reader, even after two readings of the novel, to attain it. I recall one now-eminent novelist’s derision at the opening sentence of another’s first novel’s first sentence: ‘It was inconceivable to Walter that a person could be well educated yet morally bad.’ But this sentence, I suggest, if it provokes risibility provokes it at the expense of the character, Walter, and not of the narrator, let alone the author. Perhaps doubt should be reserved for Rod Jones’ narrator, for the irony of the novel is that he, in this opening ejaculation, signally fails to perceive a third possibility: that one may kill someone because one has unsuccessfully repressed a desire to ‘fuck’ them. That one has, in Sailor’s case, failed to acknowledge homosexual attractions.

That third possibility is even more ironic if one observes that this novel is built upon a triangulation, as René Girard would have it. The Australian ‘Sailor’ and Dieppe are locked in a lubricious Venetian liaison; it is not until two-thirds of the way through the novel that ‘Sailor’ and the reader meet Dieppe’s husband, Marco, the appropriately named Venetian. As Eudora Welty observes in ‘No Place for You, My Love’: ‘Whatever people liked to think, situations (if not scenes) were usually three-way – there was somebody else always. The one who didn’t – couldn’t – understand the two made the formidable third.’ I find myself appreciating Welty’s ‘usually’ over ‘Sailor’s Kantian imperative.

When Nightpictures seems factitious to me, I remind myself that the influence of the already-inscribed is perhaps inevitable in a Venetian novel. The shades of Henry James, Thomas Mann, Nicholas Roeg, Ian McEwan, Italo Calvino, and countless others rise up in this pestilence-prone city of ‘agoraphobics’ with its ‘labyrinthine calles’, as ‘Sailor’ puts it.

Indeed, he is a man out of place, for is not Venice an anti­Australia, whether we look inwards to the centre or outwards from the littoral, of this island continent? Not to mention Venice’s being steeped in history and culture, and European Australia comparatively deficient therein. Yet this is an intensely literary novel, with its epigraphs from Proust, Chamfort, Jung, Rilke; its allusions to Apuleius, Petronius, Virgil, Boccaccio, Dostoievsky; its echoes of Poe, Mann, Durrell, Borges, and Bertolucci, among others. In its linking of ‘erotisme’ and ‘freedom’, it recalls also David Brooks, Frank Moorhouse, John A. Scott.

Nightpictures will doubtless achieve a certain notoriety on account of its explicit and lubricious accounts of heterosexual love-making. Its accounts of clitoral dimensions and female ejaculation may provoke incredulity in some quarters. In many senses, it is a Boy’s Book. It is also a detective story, and a Plague of the Re[a]d Death for our time, with AIDS inevitably emerging as a Death in Venice. Yet it is a profoundly serious book, which aspires to dramatise its Proustian epigraph: ‘The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, bey

Nightpictures, to a reader residing in Sydney, has an urgently contemporary call, in its account of Venetian paedophile rings, discipline and punishment, mass graves. An Everlasting Secret Family on the lagoon.

When ‘Sailor’ observes of Dieppe: ‘She knows the use of words as aphrodisiac. I’m content to be the focus of her erotic gaze, her reader. But I also feel disquiet in that, for her, the erotic is really a mask for something else.’ I, too, feel disquiet. I feel that these remarks are self-referential with respect to Nightpictures. Yet surely, on the evidence of these three sentences alone, he is Dieppe’s text as well as, if not rather than, her reader? And I am unclear for what else ‘Sailor’s, and Jones’, erotic text is a mask. I feel, after not one but two readings, my vision obscured by a Venetian mist, a miasma. In this I perhaps resemble Calvino’s Kublai Khan.

Extract from an interview with Rod Jones by Ramona Koval

Ramona Koval: Much of the book is highly erotic, perhaps even pornographic. Did you think of yourself as writing pornography when you were writing this book?

Rod Jones: Well no. I should hope that the writing is better quality than what we’d normally associate with pornography.

RK: I suppose some people think that pornography is written especially to get a sexual response in the reader. I don’t necessarily think we’re talking about levels of writing.

RJ: If you want to be sexually stimulated, you’re not going to go out and spend $24.95 on a hardback book. But I was obviously interested in exploring the sexual passages or rather the sexuality of the characters in a pretty honest way. Why should people who are writing serious literary fiction be bound to outmoded conventions? It seems to me that people are still talking about stirrings in the dark loins and the rest of it, all the cliches of the old Mills and Boons and the rest of the world is pretty much free of the old sexual taboos. You see it everywhere. Virtually everyone uses the good old Anglo-Saxon words for parts of our body and for the sexual act in normal respectable middle-class conversation these days and so I figured this was a way for literary fiction to catch up with what everyone’s doing anyway.

RK: The character, Dieppe, seems to me to be almost a standard presence in many erotic imaginings, which is to say she’s utterly sexually available, mysterious, cool, a liar, a fantasist, and not emotionally involved with this man Sailor. And really until the point in the book where Sailor is able to see her at home in the company of her husband and later when she gets ill, she seems not to be human, only a fantasy? Is that what you wanted her to be?

RJ: I think it would be possible to argue that both the main characters in the book are sex objects; they’re sex objects for each other but …

RK: … but because he is narrating it we have much more of a sense of him in his whole person and we see what his memories are.

RJ: Well there’s also the question which I think runs through all of my books. It’s almost a theme – of how much can we know about another person? And when another person does share their intimate life, when they tell you about a dream, for example, how much does that really tell us about that person? And should we always believe them? Because they may have a reason for telling you about that dream. In fact invariably, they will have a reason for telling you about that dream. For example, in Julia Paradise there are conflicting versions of her childhood which are told to us. In Billy Sunday there are conflicting versions of his childhood, about his mother who worked in a circus. I think that a lot of the heat in the narratives that I write comes from the fact that it sort of oozes up from the unconscious like lava, and this shadowiness of the factuality, if you like, is part of the fictional terrain, part of the territory. I’m interested in technical aspects of narrative obviously because I work narratives so … I fine tune them so much. So I’m interested in spending a long time on the art of narrative. I guess the sort of tension between the shadowiness or the not being able to know everything about the character – and the tension between that and the fine tuning of the narrative – is something which interests me a lot.

RK: But as soon as Sailor understands certain realities about Dieppe and she no longer invites the erotic in him she seems to shrink, to lose her allure. The room in which they used to meet seems shabbier; the gloss that the erotic and compulsive puts on things wears off very dramatically. I think you’ve seen that with a very sharp eye, that we create in our heads these erotic states and they can be just as easily removed as they can be created.

RJ: That was one of the things I was trying to examine in the book: that erotic attractions between human beings are temporary forms of madness or they’re simply ways in which people trick themselves and they’re a form of self-delusion basically. They certainly happen in life and when people are deluding themselves in this way they act differently, they might make decisions that they would not normally make. They exercise poor judgment. So this erotic attraction really happens in the world but I guess what the book is saying is that it’s almost an infantile state where a person lacks self-knowledge and what they’ve got to do is basically learn a little bit about themselves and ask themselves why they’ve fallen victim to this particular trap if you like. But having said that I think I’d also have to say that in this book the characters end up perhaps not learning very much about themselves – which I suppose they should because in a novel you want the characters to learn something about themselves, and yet in this novel they don’t.

RK: Sometimes in life they don’t.

RJ: I guess some people go through their whole lives without learning anything about themselves so it’s okay to go through a novel. But even though Sailor is the narrator and he gives us a version of a childhood, there’s a sense in which he doesn’t want to think about himself. He doesn’t want to face up to the person he really is and there are sexual aspects of that obviously. He’s a highly repressed person behind all of the revelation that he’s doing. So he’s telling a story for a particular purpose as well.

RK: This book seems to be a homage to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as well as to Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. How important are those two books to you?

RJ: Well I’d say that the Durrell book is more important to me than the Mann. I’ve obviously made a few nods towards Mann in the book but to me the Durrell is much more important. It was a much more seminal reading experience to me. It really shaped my life; I mean it was after reading Durrell that I decided to quit teaching and go and live on a Greek island and try and be a writer. It was a very important experience for me.

RK: And what was it about the book that formed such a resolve in you?

RJ: Well it wasn’t just Justine. It was the whole quartet and a lot of his other work, his early work – the lusciousness of the language; his commitment to the romantic vocation of the writer; the seeing of being a writer as a whole way of life – not just something you do between nine and five. That’s something that I feel more and more strongly as I get older, in this age of people trying to reduce creativity to word manipulation on a screen and all the theory-based English courses in university where you can go through a whole degree now without reading a single text. I rebel against that very strongly and I still like very much the romanticism of Lawrence Durrell for example.

RK: But is there anything romantic about the life now?

RJ: Yes, the freedom of it. The freedom to be able to live a lot of your time in your own head and not to have to deal with all the things that I hate about modern life like the Internet and mobile phones and all that kind of crap. I’ve got no time for any of that kind of stuff. So to me it’s a question of freedom and that freedom is the romantic thing. There are still aspects of travel which I find romantic, not the travelling itself but often years later when the travel experience has had time to mulch down and then to represent itself in a different way in fiction. That’s really the only truth that I believe in. In often quite unexpected ways, I find that a long time later – months or years even – there’s a sort of a mental journey that’s been going on that I haven’t been aware of – and then this sort of flashing of insight, the most exciting part of being a fiction writer. That’s definitely part of the romantic temperament because that’s a fiery, liberating, thrilling experience and that’s why I do it.

This extract from the interview on Radio National’s Books and Writing program is reproduced here courtesy of Radio National.