MARCH 10 2018 LISTENER 29
he loves about it. “Ha. I just sort of grew
up with it. Everything’s revealed, really.”
He enjoys contradictions.H
e is very good at observing damage,
and the damaged. His parents,
Llewellyn and Joyce, never spoke
about their pasts, which were harrow-
ing. Llewellyn was an orphan, one
of six children discovered in a room
with their dead mother in 1914. And
according to family legend, Jones’s
grandfather Arthur Jones had drowned
at sea. Joyce was given up for adop-
tion at four. You might say they lockedSCOTT MCAULAY; SOPHIA DUCKOR-JONESup these childhoods in cages of their
own making and tossed away the key.
In The Cage, two half-starved, filthy
men wearing scraps of salvaged clothing
are cast adrift in a place they don’t know,
without any identification. At first, they
are known as The Strangers, then later
as the Doctor and Mole, but we assume
they’re migrants or refugees. They are
taken into a small country hotel, where
the sign reads “All welcome”, and given
a room and food. They can’t or won’t
say what has made them into stran-
gers. Instead, they build a contraption,
“a conundrum”, out of wire by way ofexplanation. This is then replicated, on a
much larger scale, by the hotel owner and
his mate. This becomes the cage of the
book’s title and the strangers walk into it.
There is a key, but it’s apparently lost. The
strangers therefore can’t get out and can’t
be let out. The cage becomes their home.
Food is fed to them through a small hole.
They are hosed down, occasionally for
cleaning, but more often for punishment.
The cage fills up with their shit. The
book is full of shit. You feel, I tell Jones,
that you have to wash your hands in hot
water after each reading. The Strangers
stink. The book stinks. You can smell the
shit. Another sentence I was going to have
trouble with: I’ve never read a book so full
of shit. He says: “I had more! I’ve taken a
few shits out of it.” It’s still full of it. “Yes.
It’s still full of shit.”
The tone is cool, detached and clini-
cally observational. He wrote it in a rage,
in indignation, and he wanted it to read
“almost in the language of a report,
because that would make it much more
believable, and you can sort of suspend
judgment ... It’s the sort of language Kafka
was expert at. You think about The Meta-
morphosis and the very first sentence: ‘As
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from
uneasy dreams, he found himself trans-
formed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’
You want to say, ‘Bullshit’, don’t you? But
because it’s written in language that’s just
like a report, you believe it.”
In a report on him, I learn he is “pleas-
ingly contradictory, immensely thoughtful
and rather old-fashioned”. This must be
true, because I read it in the Guardian. The
contradictory bit? “I’m good at that. Ha.”
But “old-fashioned? Really? How can you
be thoughtful and old-fashioned at the
same time?”
Perhaps it means he has good manners.
“Well, I like manners.” He isn’t on Face-
book. Snort. “Of course not.” He writes
in longhand, because if he’s writing on a
screen, he’s not “listening” to his charac-
ters. Perhaps that’s the old-fashioned bit.
The immensely thoughtful part speaks for
itself.
He is also a terribly good novelist. I’d
say he deserves to win the Man Booker,
but that, I think, would be a cage he really
wouldn’t want to be locked inside. lThe Cage is out now. Jones appears at the
Writers and Readers section of the New Zealand
Festival on March 9.There were thousands of refugees
at the station, but no sanitation. The
place and the people stank. “We
have forgotten we have a smell.”
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