Last night, Rowan Somerville won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award, joining an ignominious, yet illustrious, crowd that includes Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. Now first things first: the Bad Sex award is an excellent bit of fun and a canny PR circus for the Literary Review, which has seen the event become firmly enshrined within the British literary calendar. But I also have a slight problem with this snigger-happy ceremony.
In the words of its founder, Auberon Waugh, the "prize" is for "redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel" – a perfectly reasonable notion in itself but one that seems to have become confused. What exactly is "redundant"? It seems to me that anything that grapples head on with the sexual act can be considered so.
And this leads to a wider concern of mine: prudishness. There is something peculiarly and pitiably British about tittering along in the audience at the Bad Sex awards as hammed up actors make a mockery of earnest authors' attempts to render the mystique of the sexual experience. Certainly, it's a laugh. And granted, bad sex in fiction lends itself to parody and hilarity more than the depiction of most other parts of life. But I think this says as much about readers as it does about writers. After all, shouldn't sex be a part of fiction just as much as it is a part of life (even if, in the words of David Lodge, "Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round")? Why should the mechanics of a fever (see Crime and Punishment) or a hangover (see Lucky Jim) be fair game, but not the mechanics of an orgasm?
In a sense, my question is: what is good sex in fiction as opposed to mere pornography? (Which also leads me to ask: does good fiction suddenly stop becoming good if it's arousing?) I suppose one problem is that sex is so often idealised in books, as it is in films. Earth-moving, transcendental, simultaneously-orgasmic sex is far more common in the history of the world's storytelling than is an awkward, exhausted and querulous quickie between setting the alarm and getting up to calm the baby. But good bad sex (the embarrassment, the mutual misunderstanding) should be honoured in fiction no more nor less than the real fireworks.
And so I propose a modest counterpoint to the good japes at the Literary Review: a Good Sex in fiction award – for good bad sex, good great sex and good sex of the middling variety. (And now I just need to persuade the Guardian to sponsor it.)
To get things rolling, I'd like to inspire you with a sex scene that, rather than being "redundant", I consider to be genuinely beautiful. It comes from Vikram Chandra's story "Kama" in Love and Longing in Bombay. The whole passage is too long to quote in full, but here's a little taster. The context is a reunion between a detective, Sartaj, and his estranged wife, Megha, who is now engaged to someone else"
"This time they found each other somewhere over the coffee table ... He laboured with the complications of her skirt as she shrugged off her blouse. Her pull at his nada dug into his side but his pyjamas came down efficiently in a single movement of her wrist ... Then she was over him, squatting. She held him and he thought of the other man viciously ... But then he cried out in love at the scalding oily embrace of her. She took him in, a fraction, just so much, so little. His hips bucked and she put a hand on his stomach. Don't move. He knew her pleasures. Her engulfing would last an eternity, little by little. She was absolutely still, not moving at all but yes slipping down eighth by infinitesimal inch ... There was the fleeting awkwardness, a move this way and that and an unsatisfactory impact and a farting sound between their bodies, but then she pushed herself up on his chest, palms spread, hair falling over his face, and together they had the movement, and he was moving in and out slicked from the sweet pocket of contentment, his thumbs on nipples pulled from the brassiere and rolled, and she made now small sounds on every stroke, halfway between protest and welcome, between all worlds, and Sartaj somewhere aware of the bed below, the roof, the building, and what they were doing ... and he held her by the hip and strained up to her, rising off the bed and reaching in her, saying Megha, and she rolled down to meet him, and at the closest point of their meeting he felt the spill, ecstatic and alive, and in a last moment of thought he asked, is this me? Is this you?
"The condom made a sad plop on the floor next to the bed. As he turned over Sartaj had the sensation of time starting to stir again."
Now then, how was that for you?
