Gordon by Edith Templeton

A chilly case of anaethetised post-war se

Less well known than The Story of O, Edith Templeton's novel Gordon has enjoyed a similar cult status. Published pseudonymously in 1966, it was banned for indecency in England and Germany, and re-emerged in an edition by the Olympia Press in New York two years later, retitled "The Demon's Feast". Two years ago, Templeton agreed that the book should appear under its original title and bearing her real name.

Born in Prague in 1916, Templeton married an Englishman in 1938 and eventually became a captain in the British Army. Her novel is set in London immediately after the Second World War and uses euphemisms – "I only existed to receive him" – that evoke a coyness which would be blown away by feminism and the sexual revolution.

Written 20 years after the story it records, the book deals with a period that was fast receding into the past. The passage of time has done the novel a favour, for the society it describes, full of people uneasily trying to adapt after the moral dislocations of the war, is a corrective to simplistic notions about the Forties. The narrator, Louisa, describes a febrile world of rationing and strained relations between men and women who eye each other in pubs in defiance of stricter post-war codes.

At the book's centre is Louisa's relationship with Richard Gordon, a psychiatrist, who rapes her in a secluded garden within an hour or two of meeting her. Louisa is explicit about her own rape fantasies, which she assumes to be common, and the pleasure she takes in being dominated. This is not to suggest the novel is remotely erotic, for Gordon's insistence that she lie passively on her back, in a pose reminiscent of a skinned rabbit, renders their sexual encounters coldly clinical and comically absurd.

What emerges is a portrait of a sado-masochistic relationship between two very damaged people. By putting up token resistance and then submitting, by allowing her lover to analyse her fantasies along crude Freudian lines, Louisa binds Gordon to her in a relationship that involves much mental and some physical cruelty. It does not make comfortable reading, for she presents herself as a victim and is willing to undergo humiliations.

Nor is it clear to what extent Templeton colludes with the explanation for Louisa's behaviour offered by Gordon, who fixes on her absent father as the root of her wish to be dominated by older men. An alternative reading is that Louisa represents the warped power of a certain kind of femininity, whose true aim is domination through apparent weakness. As the relationship progresses, Gordon becomes enmeshed to a point where only drastic action holds out any hope of escape.

It is all done so coldly, so dispassionately, as to seem like a struggle between people anaesthetised from genuine feeling. Perhaps this is a commentary on the emotional after-effects of prolonged war, or a moment when the power relation between men and women could be subverted but not interrogated. Gordon is a period piece in more than one sense, more likely to produce a shudder of revulsion in contemporary readers than the nostalgia invoked by its sepia cover.

Joan Smith's latest book is 'Moralities' (Penguin)