They meet at a conference, where both are engaged as interpreters, he acting for a nameless high-ranking male Spanish politician, she for a nameless highranking female British politician. Thus both politicians are betrayed by their interpreters, and, as we the readers already know, the interpreters will fall in love with and betray one another. He evokes a Piranesi nightmare of endless misinterpretation. The only way to control us completely would be to have a second translator there, equipped with headphones and microphone, who would simultaneously translate us back into the original language, in order to check how effectively we were saying what was being said in the room at that moment. The plots are full of doubles and impersonations and double impersonations, as well as of malicious or provocative mistranslations.
Deliberate confusion reigns.
Nor am I sure that we are intended to do so. The atmosphere of all these novels is one of high sexual tension, which verges on the pornographic. I don't read enough contemporary English-language novels about sexual violence to know whether similar motifs would be found there, but I would be very surprised to find they had the same dark, hot, erotic resonance. These passages seem to me to have a flavor that is all their own, and it is not simply pornographic. As a woman, I find them more disturbing than offensive.