a snippet

I have been too busy, and then too exhausted, to keep this up properly. But here is a snippet, before I go on holiday, that should really go in the cuttings blog, except that doesn’t exit yet properly. It was published in the Independent’s excellent Talk of the Town magazine which got killed at the end of February. There should be no blogging next week, because I will be in Ithaca, feeding the Odyssean curiosity of my daughter the web designer.

The Literary Review’s Bad Sex prize is justifiably famous, but it rather begs the question, who writes good sex in novels? It’s clear that you can’t now write a novel of any sort that does not contain a description of the characters sex lives. Most of these are perfectly competent — they don’t make you cringe or giggle — but it is astonishing how few of them advance the story in any way, by adding to our knowledge of the characters and their motives. Of course, this is a very difficult task, because, in a sense, almost everyone who climbs into bed with someone else is climbing out of character. When the writer fails we’re left with is something like the suffocating detail of a Victorian genre painting.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, there were a number of writers who researched the subject very thoroughly: Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis come to mind; but what is striking about their descriptions is the indirection involved. One of Amis’ heroes finds himself performing a task comparable to “eating a ham sandwich while playing the piano with the other hand”, while Fowler, in The Quiet American, when a noisy American drunk expatiates on the joys of a threesome with Vietnamese whores, reflects that the most erotic sight he has ever seen was a woman brushing her hair out at her dressing table

Earlier this week I read three widely different novels by good writers. All were ‘genre’ fiction. Jolie Blon’s Bounce, a crime novel set in Louisiana, is the most theological novel I have read in years — certainly the most theological thriller since Graham Greene. The most unspeakable villain, the emissary of evil, is called ‘Legion’, and sometimes speaks in the tongues of diabolical possession. He is killed by an angelic, homeless drifter — or perhaps he isn’t: the body is recovered without any bullet wounds but bootless and burnt as if it had been struck by lightning, and surrounded by drowned swine. The drifter (who goes by Sal Angelo) walks into the woods and disappears. But the whole thing is told with such skill as well as subtlety that it would be possible to enjoy and appreciate the book without noticing those bits at all.

The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford was an impulse purchase in Fopp, the paperback CD shop. It’s an astonishingly assured piece of alternative history, with characters one cares about. The mix of high mediaevalism with a little magic is very reminiscent of the good bits of Pullman, though the anti-Christian bias is more general and more pagan: Pullman’s Church is recognisably a protestant atheist fantasy, descended from the Reformation’s horror of priestcraft and the Inquisition; Ford simply has Julian the apostate triumph, and the Christians reduced to a savage and fanatical guerrilla sect in the badlands of the Scottish border.

Be Cool is old Uncle Elmore whisking a piece of magic out of nowhere, a book whose plot turns round a movie producer’s search for a plot and characters in his own adventures. In lesser hands this would be a recipe for ballsaching pretentiousness and boredom. But Elmore Leonard has very sure hands indeed, even when he is doing the dance of the seven veils. I hurried quite entranced to the end.

Now, all these are modern novels, so all the sympathetic characters must have sex — not even being dead can stop them, in the case of Ford’s German vampire. You just know, anyway, in any James Lee Burke novel, that at some stage a compassionate woman with large, pale breasts will climb on top of the hero and make him feel much better. This has happened in every book since The Lost Get Back Boogie. Some things do change: the heroes are now sober when they’re mounted, and the heroine’s bazongas less extravagant; but it remains true that in these books a woman in the missionary position is not sincere.

In Ford’s book, the sex is mostly off-stage, and achy. This is better, though rather sad. But it doesn’t add very much to our knowledge of the characters involved. If anything, it turns them more into types. Perhaps that’s what interest him: he has apparently spent a lot of time writing role-playing games, though it’s possible that these are simply more lucrative than the alternatives.

It’s the old master who gets it right. For years and years Elmore Leonard couldn’t do women and wasn’t much good at sex, either. Now, Be Cool is a bit too filmic for my tastes: the hero’s gimmick of imposing his personality on people by saying ‘look at me’ worked better when he was a loan shark than a Hollywood producer. But the sex scenes are a master class in showing character in bed. For the ultimate transgressive intimacy, his heroine pulls from her bedside table an ashtray which the couple share in the middle of the bed while they smoke and talk. What could be more shameful, or more pleasurable, in California today? No further acts are specified, and none need be.