When is pornography not pornography? When it is well written, Mario Vargas Llosa said in a recent interview. That is tempting the gods, or at least the reviewers. Is The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto well written? Is that enough to stop it from being pornography? And does it matter if it is? The answers are yes, no and yes.

Vargas Llosa's arrogance is justified (but arrogance generally is; if not it's something else, delusion or pretension). He writes well, and has done so ever since Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter 20 years ago. In fact, he has never written better than that. Only one thing has ever happened to him: falling in love with his much older aunt when he was a boy, and marrying her against the wishes of his family. Of course, much else has happened to him since—the marriage ending, for example, and running for President of Peru. But for many writers there is one main thing that moves them to write. And that is the other half of Aunt Julia: the young narrator's longing to write, like the mad, tragicomic Scriptwriter.

Peru is Vargas Llosa's other great subject, as in The War of the End of the World. But he is regularly drawn back to the twin peaks of Aunt Julia: semi-incestuous sex, and art. In Praise of the Stepmother, a decade ago, he made the aunt into a stepmother; in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto she remains a stepmother, and the boy is only 10.

Apart from a paragraph or two about Fonchito's tiny tongue in Dona Lucrecia's ear, the physical sex between these two is in the past (and perhaps the future), and never described. Thankfully, therefore, we do not have to consider whether this book is paedophilia as well as pornography. But we come to that now. I grant that The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto is well written. Fonchito is a powerful, if not entirely believable, creation; the book's structure is cunningly varied, and its suspense (who wrote the anonymous letters?) teases, even though we can easily guess the answer. Yet all this is not enough to stop it from being pornography. The reason is this. The book consists only and entirely of Don Rigoberto's erotic fantasies about his wife Lucrecia, whom he has had to leave after the sexual incident with his son. These too are well written; though there is a limit to what you can describe in sex, as to what you can do in it, without slipping into perversion, and this The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto does not avoid: voyeurism, transvestism, S & M, licking by kittens, to mention only a few. All these are imposed on the helpless, because imagined, Lucrecia, who is pictured in a constant state of quivering receptivity. Now, I am disgracefully unfeminist, but even I was outraged. This is pure manipulation of the woman as object, despite all Don Rigoberto's invocations of love.

He—or rather Vargas Llosa—tries to dignify it further by reference to the books and paintings which Don Rigoberto collects and which inspire his fantasies, and by a theory, repeated ad nauseam, that what most enriches and expresses our individuality, and distinguishes us from ‘the herd’, are our manias, phobias and sexual fetishes. The first is mere showing off; the second is arrogance again, and plain wrong. People are trapped and reduced by their manias, not freed by them: the book itself ultimately shows this to be true of Don Rigoberto, and the only thing that can be said in its defence is that that may be its final self-cancelling implication.

This is a cold, clever, narcissistic book. It is pure pornography, because it is about nothing else but sexual fantasy. Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, was about so much more—politics, class, love; and it came when we needed more sex in literature. If you're a man you might enjoy The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. If you're a woman, and/or if you'd like to read a really good and entertaining novel about a wicked child, buy Nancy Mitford's The Blessing instead.