This haunting book was originally published in 1966. It was immediately banned in England and Germany, then taken up by the Parisian press that also salvaged Lolita and The Story of O from the junkyard of priggish censors. Gordon is not a major work of literature - it discusses ideas of the period very closely but never masters them, and much of the dialogue is dated. Nevertheless, it is a powerfully fascinating work of bold, desolate honesty.
Louisa Walbrook is sitting in a pub in London just after the Second World War, having left the army and her husband. To begin with, her narration is crisp and bald - she is wearing what anecdotal evidence suggests is her prettiest dress. She is just speculating on the orientation of a fellow drinker ("Very smooth, I thought, something nasty there, too. Probably a Mayfair pansy") when the drinker in question commands her to leave with him. He is not, as it turns out, a pansy. Despite objecting to almost every aspect of his appearance and mien, she walks with him to a club. He reminds her of Mephisto in Faust. Our heroine knows her Goethe - indeed, ranges freely through German literature and demonstrates, in her sensibility, a strong affinity with the very bleak intellectualism of the Romantics.
Anyway, they then go to a tumbledown park where he has sex with her on a stone bench. There is a barbed, needling top note to their dialogue, but Louisa is so far describing nothing more (nor less) than a sudden and consuming lust. What comes next - a malevolently erotic master-slave dyad - is spelt out in concise bluestocking-ese as our drinker (the eponymous Gordon) wreaks a kind of violence against her elbow while leading her out of the park. "I had never before thought of my elbow as a place for peculiar sensations. Exposed to full view, it does not carry with it the erotic secrecy of the thighs and the breasts. And yet I felt now like belonging to him more shamefully and more deeply than I had done on the stone bench".
This is the model for all future sexual encounters Louisa describes - she presents this very credible and passionate and sometimes beautiful description of her own erotic pleasure, and then, just when you've been lulled slightly, she unleashes what came next: always an act of incredible, if subtle, violence or humiliation. While she plays masochist to her sadist, the reader plays masochist to her unflinching narration.
Gordon is a psychoanalyst. With a few well-aimed blows, he unearths what a standard-issue behaviourist would say was as shriekingly obvious as a fire engine - Louisa's father complex. Very soon, our narrator cannot do anything except at the behest of this man; she cannot dress, undress or go to the loo. In brief, Gordon discusses her in terms of the Electra complex, but if Electra were ever half this useless, Clytemnestra would still be alive today. These are the conversations that date the book; there is an ongoing tension between literature and psychoanalysis throughout. Literature, at the start, is female and circuitous where analysis is male and unswerving - as Louisa becomes more enslaved, literary devices and myths turn out to be sham, while analysis is not interpretation but truth. There is something sinister in the way the discussions proceed and the way they are mediated through sexual agony. But the subtlety is obscured by the narrator's arch mockery of such phrases as "identify with" and "Oedipus complex", which are now so familiar.
The central helix of Louisa's masochism is expertly and movingly presented - the appeal of her lover is that he can see right through her, guess her innermost workings immediately; she repeatedly voices her delight at this, yet fears him vastly, even before she becomes aware of his capacity for violence. This is because, with a mournful, Germanic certainty, she knows that at her core, she longs for death; if he is to satisfy her longing to be understood, as well as act on his understanding, he must understand this, and ultimately he must kill her. It is terrible, believable and inexorable.
Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian
