A hotbed of S&M?

Be under no illusion and prepare yourself, should you be of tender sensibilities, to be shocked. Gordon, a book with an intriguingly checkered publishing history, has at last, almost 50 years after its first publication, been issued under its author's real name, Edith Templeton. A book held to be about sex, and by a woman. Yet there is worse.

For this, despite the best - that is, worst - efforts of Viking Penguin, is a book about the neurotic and psychological attachment that is, by some personalities, depending on your viewpoint, either mistaken for or recognised as love.

The truth is that the really shocking thing is the false character that has been constructed for this fascinating text by those who have elected to bring it to the market tricked out, for commercial reasons, as what it is not.

The cover resembles a sepia knock-off of a photograph by Guy Bourdin. In the book there is a fine evocation of the sexiness of the veiled face. On its dustcover, out of which it is as easily slipped as a maiden from her camisole (this dirty-mindedness sticks), nudity and millinery are gingered up by the predictable string of pearls.

The blurb carries the same ersatz surprise that ladies are foxes, the same indecorously lewd suggestion of something hot between these very covers. How sadly the point is missed, the book let down.

Not that it matters, once you are reading. The cool style of Edith Templeton simply steps out of her publisher's vulgar toils and offers itself up to the mesmerised reader.

An adjective of praise much spangled about is "mineral" . Well, Gordon is a veritable mine. It reads more like a case history than a novel, with the implausible yet perfectly authentic detail pinning into truth the flow of narrative. The authors of whom I thought as I read were Anna Kavan and Anita Brookner. The presiding moods are those of pain and control, the prevailing temperature cool, yet the book is not, as its pimps would have you believe, a hotbed of S&M.

The Story of O is both more explicit and more erotic, and certainly more fetishistic; what the two really have in common, besides having been written by respectable and intelligent women no longer nubile, is good grammar. That and the understanding of power in all its forms that strikes insecurity into those who suffer from the infatuated belief that they are possessed of free will.

Louisa loves Gordon, her older psychiatrist lover, because he knows her before she knows her own self. So he maddens her. He refuses to praise her beauty, which, undescribed, we clearly see. To Gordon alone, in the beautiful words of her author (and acknowledged double), she "opens up" her hair.

She means the crown of plaits upon her head, which are not the only hint in this spell-binding book of the lost Austro-Hungarian world. How short, it seems to say, an empire's future is, how much shorter that of a woman.