The backstory
Claudia is my fifth novel and the first I am close to happy with. Its titular heroine is a high-end call girl, resident of King’s Cross, not an outcast or desperate case, but a well-paid worker who mostly enjoys her complete independence. The theme was inspired by several coincident sources – personal anecdotes, the accounts of some sex workers, and with a nod to some classic tales of courtesans and prostitutes, such as Nana and La Dame aux Camelias, with an eye to looking how attitudes have both changed and not changed.
The chief appeal for me was the chance to portray a transgressive, rebellious female figure, who tries to live by her own peculiar values well outside the norm, maintaining a form of combat both with society and family. Through Claudia, I could portray what could be a kind of straight-faced satire on our post-feminist ethos where prostituting one’s self, in whatever form, can be passed off as some kind of “empowerment”; the fate of figures like Britney Spears, I think, illustrates the contradictions in this beautifully. But Claudia is the butt of no cosmic jokes; she is herself aware of these contradictions, and the slow accumulation of frustration in her life, both those she causes for herself and those life thrusts upon her, finally drives her to almost lose everything she loves in the course of fighting for it. Claudia is essentially cool, a guarded and emotionally cautious woman who nonetheless chases erotic delirium and emotional enrichment. Her life careens from giddy romps with lovers to bleak confrontation with life’s limitations.
Claudia’s story is defined by the difficulties she faces in trying to compose a personal morality, independent of traditional references – family life, etc. There is an element in the story of a study of modern generational conflict. Claudia and her lover, the poet Alec, are both young but reaching a point where they expect to find themselves gaining a foothold in life that they still find denied them; the revolutionary ’60s generation, represented by such characters as Claudia’s father, a famous painter, and Alec’s various artistic elders, ironically now hold an iconic status that the younger people are forced to struggle with. I would, chiefly, define the novel as a very peculiar love story. Obviously its themes are often erotic, and it celebrates sensuality, but I’ve bent over backwards to avoid pornography.
I wrote this for intelligent readers who want more than books about handbags and office politics or ancient history; I make no great claims save that I wanted it to be about now, to conjure a modern mood generally and Sydney specifically.
* * *
Claudia – a call girl, a bohemian, a bawdy rebel stalking Sydney nightlife, avatar of sweat-slick dance floors, neon-bloodied streets, rain-flecked crowds, hush-hearted beds. Most men and many women would pay a king’s ransom to have her as the shining trophy on their arm, her sleek and supine form the engine of everyone’s fantasies. Well, that’s the writing on the wrapper. For Claudia herself, it’s the finest way to maintain her carelessly sensual lifestyle, to maintain her open war with society in general.
Left stranded by her mother’s death, Claudia is driven by hungers far outside the common, determined to live far outside the norm. She loves an earthy poet, Alec, working to his own vital ethic that makes him an alien in his era. She loves a woman, Selena, childhood comrade and jazz-playing duchess of chic, style to burn and heat in her heart, who adores Claudia’s sensuality but detests her emotional experimentation.
For Claudia, such a fraught threesome strikes as reason for life itself, down to the edge of danger of losing everything. Her anarchic sense of romance is equalled only by her distrust of family as a desirable concept. Her father, painter Rémy Larquey, is an art superstar, survivor of a heroin habit, now safely locked within the shells of North Shore aristocracy with a blue-blooded wife. His heir apparent is younger daughter Tania, who, at twenty years of age, is talented as Michelangelo and as moral as Lucrezia Borgia. Getting close to this family means stepping into high-voltage currents of money, publicity, and jealousy, which Claudia knows damn well could fry her like an egg.
At twenty-five, Claudia knows change is necessary, and for her there is no option but to keep moving. To keep from losing both her lovers. To stop her sister destroying herself in a welter of hedonism. To find a half-measure of peace in herself before she crumples up, another wasted shell of feminine glory, the marrow sucked out by a grubby era. For herself and Alec, life in the twenty-first century means contending with everything they most loathe, fighting an always-losing, never-beaten war to hold off forces that slowly compress them into what they don’t want to be.
Here’s the noir-fit landscape where Claudia enacts a longing pas-de-trois with Alec and Selena; the money-gilded shores where she resists becoming the pet of rich men and another broke and lonely old whore, and spurns easy temptations of cash and cowardice. Here are the pubs, clubs, and streets where she’s solving herself before she cracks her own heart and those of the people who love her.
– Roderick Heath
THE EXCERPTS:
* Part One. She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous.
* Part Two. A modern woman in the oldest profession. Fifteen hours, four thousand dollars.
*Part Three. Those were very good times for Claudia to remember because the world was so rich and she did not know some things that later she would know too well.
*Part Four. Claudia sat at her kitchen table and sobbed as she felt all the muscles in her body grinding like gears on each other. Then came lucid emptiness, and it all seemed small, another of those daily absurdities life seemed to keep in store for her. Claudia dressed shortly after, donning her best, blackest dress.
* Part Five. She had long known she wore her outsider status like a jailhouse tattoo, but something new had provoked her now. Too many ghosts had just waved their rag-and-bone scriptures in her face.
Posted on March 26, 2007