Tom Fleming
BAD SEX IN FICTION AWARDS 2007

The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards were inaugurated in 1993. The purpose, as originally set out, was to ‘draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ By the ‘modern novel’ what was meant was the modern literary novel, where clichés and ill-judged lyricism are most egregious. Indeed there is frequently an overlap between nominees for the Booker Prize and the Bad Sex Awards. A few authors can even claim to have won both, if not to have actually achieved the elusive ‘grand slam’ of winning them both in one year. Anne Enright carried her good form from this year’s Booker into the Bad Sex but ultimately showed a commendable lack of interest in winning it, with judges being able to pull only a few phrases from The Gathering: ‘her pubis like the breast of an underfed chicken under my hand’ was a highlight, if not for the character whose hand it was.

This year's winner, announced at a lavish ceremony in St James' Square, London, was Norman Mailer. It is the first time that the award has been given posthumously. Judges used the occasion to pay homage to the great man, and the 400 guests raised a glass to the memory of a writer who dominated, in his innovative, exciting, combative way, American letters for so long. The winning passage was taken from The Castle in the Forest, Mailer's last book: an unorthodox family saga about the birth and life of Adolf Hitler, the passage describes Hitler's conception. Witness to the scene, and narrating it, is one of the devil's henchmen; for the 'Evil One' is overseeing this fatal union:

'Are you alright?' she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.
'All right. Yes. No,' he said. Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.
The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. it surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

One of the joys of being a judge of the Bad Sex Awards, if temporarily, is that one can put to use a skill learned long ago in adolescence, that of skimming through books in search of the dirty bits. It’s amazing how quickly one picks it up again, like playing the piano or speaking French. But it’s refreshing none the less to come across a book that has so much sex in it that skimming becomes unnecessary. Will, by Christopher Rush, is a beautifully written novel about the life of Shakespeare, with many dirty bits in it. Some of them, perhaps, go too far:

O glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise. Let me sing the black banner, the blackbird’s wing, the chink, the cleft, the keyhole in the door. The fig, the fanny, the cranny, the quim – I’d come close to it now, this sudden blush, this ancient avenue, the end of all odysseys and epic aim of life, pulling at my prick now, pulling like a lodestone.
Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language, solace lovelier than words. She pulled my hand away, positioned the prick, slid her buttocks deep into the grass, raised her thighs back high, crossed her legs behind my back, dug her heels into my spine and hauled at me savagely and hard. I fell into her.

Fig, fanny, cranny, quim - whatever it’s called, the female genitalia inspire poeticising and euphemising aplenty. This is usually the cardinal sin of literary authors writing about sex – the difficult task of conveying the power of the orgasm on the printed page leads so many novels to be thrown off balance by metaphor-drenched, stream-of-consciousness accounts of lovemaking. Ali Smith, in Boy Meets Girl, is surely guilty of this:

Her hand opened me. Then her hand became a wing. Then everything about me became a wing, a single wing, and she was the other wing, we were a bird. We were a bird that could sing Mozart. … I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel can we really keep this up?

It goes on for a while. Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters, too, contains a breathlessly described sexual encounter:

When at last he reached in to touch me, there was nothing else left, nothing in the world but his fingers and the delirious incoherent frenzy of pure sensation they sent spiralling through me, as though I were an instrument vibrating with the exquisite hymns of the angels. Did that make him an angel? My toes clenched in my boots and my belly held itself aloft in a moment of stillness as the flame quivered, perfectly bright. I held my breath. In the explosion I lost sight of myself. I was a million brilliant fragments, the darkness of my belly alive with stars. When at last I opened my eyes to look at him, my lashes shone with tears. He raised a finger to his lips and smiled.

Many authors eschew the lyrical route and go for farce instead. Absurdistan, by American writer Gary Shteyngart, contains this droll passage, in which the narrator, like young Will Shakespeare, is wowed by his lover’s pubic hair:

Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media – a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges – the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo, while providing the inspiration for two discernible trails of hair, one running up to the navel, the other to the base of the spine.

A character not so impressed by female genitalia, and with nothing to turn to in the face of an unspectacular sexual encounter except humour, is the innocent, obsessive-compulsive teenager Adam from Richard Milward’s fantastic Apples:

She had on no knickers, and my heart went crash-bang-wallop and my eyes popped out. She hadn’t shaved, and her fanny looked like a tropical fish or a bit of old carpet.
‘So, you just gonna sit there?’ Abi asked, and I laughed nervously.  I was hardening up, but it was all a bit of a shock really.  All I’d planned that night was listening to a selection of records and maybe some homework. I tried to go down on her, thinking back to the Razzle and how the boys did it in that.  But my heart wasn’t into it – her cunt smelt a bit like an armpit, and when I pulled the lips open I knew I’d have to shut them numerous times or else I’ll die of Aids or I’d fall into it.

But perhaps most remarkable of all genitalia are those encountered in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods:

Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.
To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the problem. ‘Spike, you’re a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?’
She answers simply: ‘They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission.’
…
‘So you had sex with spacemen for three years?’
‘Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.’

It’s rare to have an actual robot in a sex scene; usually the mechanical element is metaphorical. Some authors even like to combine machine metaphors with elemental nature imagery, producing sex scenes reminiscent of TV adverts for off-road vehicles: Catalan author Quim Monzo’s The Enormity of the Tragedy, a thoughtful book about a man with a permanent erection, contains this short passage:

She felt the cylinder rod of his plunger. Tried to work up a precise rhythm. Felt the sand sticking to her knees through her trousers. She and Lluis-Albert were all there was in the world; she swallowed him centimetre by centimetre (whenever a wave hit the beach) and then immediately let it go centimetre by centimetre (as each wave retreated).

But for proper beach action we turn to Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. The book was included on the longlist because it is, simply, about bad sex. McEwan’s pitiable characters attempt to consummate their marriage with disastrous consequences:

Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a pile of towering soup plates.
In horror she let go, as Edward, rising up with a bewildered look, his muscular back arching in spasms, emptied himself over her in gouts, in vigorous but diminishing quantities, filling her navel, coating her belly, thighs, and even a portion of her chin and kneecap in tepid, viscous fluid.

McEwan didn't make the shortlist. The waiter analogy is gauche but perfectly in keeping with the female protagonist's innocence. Here it's a case of very bad sex magnificently represented - and that, unfortunately, doesn't qualify.