Different Women Dancing

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I’m a big fan of Jonathan Gash. A recent post here ("Very Public Diary of a Call Girl") reviewed a book that’s rumored to be one of his first pieces of writing: an autobiographical account of prostitution. 

I’ve just finished re-reading Different Women Dancing, the first novel in a series of four set in the world of crime and prostitution in a northern English city (it’s Manchester, though that’s never actually explicitly stated). In fact, I wish there were a lot more in the series. Gash wrote 20-odd “Lovejoy” novels, set in the world of antiques crime, and I think this is his only other series, other things he wrote being one-offs. Gash is retired now (he was a medical doctor when not writing great fiction), so maybe there’s no chance of more to come. If you’re reading this, Mr Gash, I’d really appreciate just one more, please?

Different Women Dancing’s a fantastic read. There’s various things I like about it:

1. The complete immersion in the slang terminology. Each Chapter comes with a definition: “Goer: a male hired by a female for sexual purposes”. The main protagonist is Bonn, a goer who was a former seminarian, which makes for some interesting narrative.
2. The fact that the book plays out almost as an assemblage of scenes, with the plot going on in the background. I like books like this: it somehow seems more like a reflection of real life.
3. The fact that the book is definitely the start of a series. I mean that in the sense that at the end of the book, there are still things happening in various plot threads. Very little has been completely resolved, and there is more still to happen. Again, a bit like life!

I only have one very minor niggle, which really mustn’t stop you reading the book. Towards the end, there’s a conversation on one page which a character plays back differently just a couple of pages later. I had to flick back and check “no, she didn’t say that”. So come on, Mr Editor. In fairness, if I’d stopped at the end of a Chapter and had a break I probably wouldn’t have noticed. It’s little glitches like that, “continuity errors” as they’re known on TV, that are rare enough to be surprising when they occur.

Jay read this one, too, so over to her soon for a better review than this!

Very Public Diary of a Call Girl

A few weeks ago I was browsing a catalogue of second-hand books, and came across one called "Streetwalker"; subtitled "An autobiographical account of a prostitute". Not usually my thing: the whole "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" cult and its ilk hold no appeal for me. "Streetwalker" caught my eye because it has been attributed in authorship (maybe ghost authorship) to Jonathan Gash. Gash is a hugely prolific author, best known for the Lovejoy crime novels set in the world of antiques; he also wrote some excellent, excellent novels set in the world of prostitution. I think they're fantastic, and will write more about them and Gash's other books before too long. 

The book was a rather costly first edition, but I found a more affordable copy of a later impression. A nice old hardback, with a testimonial on the cover from Sir John Wolfenden, author of a major government report in the UK in the 1950s that featured prostitution and led to the legalisation of homosexuality. 

So did Gash write "Streetwalker"? I've done considerable research* but it was inconclusive. The book reads more like fiction than fact. If it was written by Gash, I would guess that it has some basis in fact. It's not a great book. There's no hugely titillating sex, in fact the small amount of sex is glossed over. The protagonist's life comes across as pitiful, tawdry, and entirely unenviable; full of rejection, fear and violence. The book itself has the ring of fiction, but the story itself rings true. 

*  Research = I Googled it

   Extensive research = I used Wikipedia

   Considerable research = I Googled it and clicked on more than one link

Goodbye, old friend

 A hot bubble bath, blissfully kid-free (at least for a few minutes), with a good book and a glass of rich, Spanish wine – sometimes life doesn’t get much better.

Until, that is, the glass topples, you reach to save the wine, and in your haste, what once was a good book becomes a soggy mass as it sinks slowly into the sea of bubbles.

By the way, it turns out you can’t just place the sodden book on the edge of the tub to dry out.

The truth is, though, I really wasn’t enjoying Delta of Venus all that much. I had purchased it in college on a whim after stumbling across an Anaïs Nin display in the campus bookstore. Amazed to find erotica displayed prominently alongside all of the, well, non-dirty books, I picked up both Delta of Venus and Little Birds. (Along with a pile of textbooks, odds and ends of school supplies, and a Go Bucks tee so I didn’t look like a total perv.)

I must’ve enjoyed reading the book at one point because it was still on my shelf after all these years. But with the passage of time and life and whatnot, I found that I wasn’t liking it much at all any more.

That’s not entirely true. I love the actual writing - beautiful, almost poetic prose (despite Nin’s instructions from her benefactor to “leave out the poetry”); vibrant imagery and rich texture.

But the subject matter? Oy, oy, oy. Pedophilia, rape, incest. About as unsexy as it gets.

Yes, I know Nin wrote the bulk of these stories for a private collector (for a dollar a page) and they weren’t published for the masses until after her death. Still doesn’t mean I have to like them.

Now granted I only read about 5 stories before dropping the book (but saving the wine – I chose wisely, as it were), and I do recall them getting less icky (i.e., consensual sex between adults) as the books progresses. But I still have zero desire to re-read Delta of Venus.

I won’t be replacing this book in my collection.

Not tonight, Josephine, I'm in a Onesie

Unlike Jay, I haven’t read Fifty Shades, but I do find it interesting that the book that made erotica mainstream, however temporarily, has themes of S&M. 

Historically, browsing books at stations and airports in the UK, one has always been confronted with a sorry selection of “bestsellers” (which I’m sure only get bought because they’re “bestsellers”, rather than being any good) and a disproportionately large section of “erotica”. The covers would feature a lingerie-clad buxom hottie, and a surprisingly large number of them would feature ropes and/or whips and rather impractical-looking rubber underwear (try taking that to the dry cleaners). The cover blurb would always tell a tale of slavery, domination and subjugation. So I’m told, by, ummm, people who do extensive research into this sort of thing.

Well, I was never tempted to buy one. Somehow the thought of the whips and the slavery cut across any spicy erotic stuff and cancelled it out. Why, I thought, aren’t erotic books just about people having sex and enjoying it?

Like I said, it’s interesting that Fifty Shades is just the sort of book I didn’t want to read, but it’s what everyone else is grabbing by the million.

But let’s come back to the covers, and the sexy undies. If a writer is going to dress a female character for sex, then there’s a whole panoply of stockings, suspenders, hold-ups, basques, scanties, thongs, and filmy nothings to play with. All the male needs is a zipper that can be caressingly or desperately undone.

So what happens when erotica collides with modern fashion horrors? One of the latest crazes is the “onesie”: effectively a baby-gro for adults. The thought of having to integrate this into an erotica-themed book is too dismal for words. The author would just have to give up in disgust and change the plot. Wrestling out of one of the bloody things to go to the loo takes long enough, sex is completely out of the question.

"Come here", she breathed. "I need you now."

"Don't be stupid", he replied. "I'm in a onesie, you're in a onesie, and we have an early start in the morning."

Colouring up

I was listening to the radio a few weekends ago, and a listener had written in to Terry Wogan (one of the world's best hosts) to ask if Fifty Shades of Grey came with a colour chart. Tee hee. The response was that it will certainly make you colour up!

I wonder if E. L. James blushed her way through any of the writing. I've been going quite well on Chapter 1 of our book, though it's become a bit convoluted and probably needs to be split up. The are things I need to have in place before Chapter 2 that mean it's starting to look overly long.

But the main problem is I'm having to write my first sex scene, and it's a bit of an embarrassment. I keep looking over my shoulder to check that no-one's watching me type. I skip ahead to write bits of Chapter 2. Anything but carry on. There's been kissing, and hands have wandered, and clothing is severely disheveled, but I'm shying away from the next bit.

There wasn't even going to be sex in Chapter 1, but the plot has run away with me a bit. "You created us," say the characters, "We're not hanging around not getting any until it's convenient for you."

Right, I'd better get back to it. Enough of this, even writing for the blog is a distraction activity; but it's been cathartic and made me reflect. I need to man up and face what has to be written. It's crystallized things in my mind, and I know just what the next words have to be.

"The phone rang."

It was a dark and stormy night....in bed

Yep, it’s that time of the year again. Literary Review has just announced the 2012 nominees for their Bad Sex in Fiction Award. While more of a dubious distinction than a coveted commendation, this award is bestowed annually upon an author for truly awful fictional sex scenes in novels. 

Besides good fun, the purpose of the prize is, according to Literary Review, 

“ …to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel and to discourage it."

Overall, the chosen ones seem to take the award in good spirits. Said David Guterson, an American novelist who won the 2011 award for Ed King, a 20^th century adaptation of the Oedipus myth:  

“Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I'm not in the least bit surprised.”  

Similarly, Canongate, who published author Nick Cave’s 2009 nominated novel, remarked, 

“Frankly we would have been offended if he wasn't shortlisted.”

So here’s this year’s shortlist of eight, in no particular order, which includes three females and two non-Brits:

The Yips by English author Nicola Barker: Interestingly, this book also made the longlist for the 2012 Booker Prize. Apparently no one on that panel read this passage:

“She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of warm custard. She steams. He applauds, his tongue hanging out (like a bloodhound espying a raw chop in a cartoon).”

The Adventuress by Condé Nast’s managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, a Cambridge grad who studied theology and art history. Stay tuned for the 28 May 2013 release date, where you’ll find this:

“In seconds, the duke had lowered his trousers and boxers and positioned himself across a leather steamer trunk, emblazoned with the royal arms of Hohenzollern Castle. ‘Give me no quarter,’ he commanded. ‘Lay it on with all your might.’ Cath did as she was told, swishing the twigs hard onto the royal bottom. ‘More, more,’ he cried out. ‘Next time you will discipline me dressed as a nun."

Infrared by Canadian author Nancy Huston, who wrote her Master’s thesis (in French) on swear words, which are oddly missing in the following excerpt:

“He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water…”

Rare Earth by English author (and economics editor of the BBC's Newsnight) Paul Mason:

“She breathed hot into his neck and he plunged three rough fingers down the front of her jeans, making her squeak. She had never tried wu-wei in this situation before and Khünbish, hairy and slightly paunchy, she noticed now that he had his shirt off, was generating slightly more karmic energy than she had anticipated.”

Naughties by twenty-five year old Ben Masters, who studied English at Oxford University and is currently working on his PhD at Cambridge University:

“We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amongst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other’s bodies for every inch of history. I dug after what I had always imagined and came up with even more. She stroked my outlines in perfect synchrony until I was febrile in her hands, willingly guided elsewhere.”

Quiddity of Will Self by British author and former chess journalist Sam Mills, who also studied English at Oxford University:

“Down, down, on to the eschatological bed. Pages chafed me; my blood wept onto them. My cheek nestled against the scratch of paper. My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic.”

The Divine Comedy by (yet another Oxford grad with a degree in English) English poet Craig Raine:

“And he came. Like a wubbering springboard. His ejaculate jumped the length of her arm. Eight diminishing gouts. The first too high for her to lick. Right on the shoulder.” 

Back to Blood by token-American-on-the-list Tom Wolfe, who apparently has a Ph-freaking-D in “American studies” from Yale University - so much for mocking the Oxford grads for studying English:

“Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw — all this without a word.”

Interestingly, since the award began in 1993, the winners have been overwhelmingly British and male. In fact, of the 19 winners, only two have been female and only five from outside of Britain. Which makes one wonder, are women naturally more gifted in describing intimate acts? Or is the pool of applicants just larger across the pond, with hordes of randy British men peppering their books with awkward sex? 

Said the 2010 winner, British novelist Rowan Somerville, upon receiving his award:

“There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you."

Luckily for me, Nik’s not English.

I is for Inappropriate reading material

Jay's post "A is for Anal" on what's appropriate (or, more to the point, not) in children's fiction set me thinking. Firstly about why, with the subject of the post, she felt the need to start off with that quotation. Do I detect a fixation here? Does she, do you think?

So, one cold shower later, back to the point. When I was at junior school there was a travelling library that came around once a week. I was a voracious reader, and the library struggled to supply me with new material. Three things stick in my memory. 

One was being ridiculed by the teacher in front of the class for not knowing the meaning of the word "anteroom" in a Doctor Who book that I'd borrowed. I was aged seven, I think. And no, she didn't take the trouble to explain afterwards. I'm just wondering now whether she actually knew...

Secondly was discovering the f-word used in a sci-fi novel. Wow, did that do the rounds of the class like wildfire. Look! There it is! In a book!!!!!!!!!

Thirdly, coming across wholly inappropriate sex. At the time there was an action/adventure/fantasy series on TV called The New Avengers. Perfectly safe for kids to watch, in fact by pure coincidence we've been watching it on DVD with our kids recently. Good fun. Back in the past, I found a New Avengers novel in the library van. The woman let me have it rather doubtfully, after consulting her colleague; and the only thing I can recall, from the entire book (and indeed from almost all the books I borrowed over those years), is a scene where a bad guy rapes a woman: after he's just murdered her. 

Now let me be clear, the TV series is entirely squeaky clean, with humorous flirting as far as anything gets. So what twit of an author thought that it was OK to write something so far removed from the format? Was he just a frustrated writer of gritty thrillers glad to get the crumbs of a TV-spin-off commission?

Using sex in a book has to be right, and not just in books for kids. It shouldn't jar or detract from the story. Coming back to Doctor Who books, another TV-spin-off range, they moved from straight novelisations of the TV shows, aimed very much at young readers, to more "adult" books when the TV show was taken off-air and its former audience began to grow up. I kept reading them. Some were good, some really quite poor. One that I love, as being a wonderful science fiction novel, is Transit, by Ben Aaronovitch: and guess what? It has sex in it! People go to bed and have sex!

Fu grinned when he saw Ming coming and ran down the external stairwell to meet her. The same bounding steps as he'd used on their wedding day forty years ago, he and his friends forcing the door to her parents' house in Bradford. ... That night she tangled with [his] body and crisp cotton sheets in the Hotel Metropole's bridal suite. They'd fallen out of the bed and the impact of her buttocks on the floor triggered her climax, the first in her life. 

In the context of the book, it works, it's not needlessly explicit, and when I re-read the book recently, I still loved it. 

At the time, many fans of the series were up in arms at the soiling of the image of the TV show. Well, things had moved on, is my view. Now Doctor Who is back on TV, the books are back for a younger audience, my kids love them, and there's no sex in sight. 

Which is how it should be. 

On the many layers of communication in Fifty Shades of Grey

Dear Loyal Readers (or Reader, as the case may be),

Please accept my utmost apology for my slipshod review of Fifty Shades of Grey. If you haven’t read it, swing by now and take a peek. Click here. I’ll wait.

OK, back? Great.

As you’ve seen, in this early review, I mocked Ms James outright for her gross overuse of certain phrases: “cocked his head” (24 times), “Holy ___” (153 times), etc. While I stand by these statistics and the accompanying bar chart, I realized this morning over a cup of subpar coffee that I was grossly amiss in alerting you, Dear Reader(s), of the real horror that lies await ‘twixt the pages of Fifty Shades. 

I’m so sorry. Let’s delve deeper.

1. Nonverbal communication:  Referring to Figure 1 below (did I mention I minored in mathematics?), we see that the Fifty Shades crew seems to have an entire secret language made up of frowns, smirks, shrugs, scowls, groans, glares, and gasps. With a blanch and a whisper here and there to mix things up. 

Statistically, this equates to about 7 nonverbal messages for every 5 pages throughout the almost 400-page book, or on average, about 1.4 transmissions per page. 

Figure 1: Nonverbal methods of communication in Fifty Shades

Looking at the pie chart in Figure 2, which breaks down this grunt-speak (pause while I check if anyone actually grunts in Fifty Shades. Nope, nary a one), by percentage, we see that frowning is a clear leader, coming in 25% of the time, followed by snapping and groaning that together make up the next 30%. 

Figure 2: Nonverbal communication (by percentage) in Fifty Shades

2. Undertone communication: With so much groaning and smirking going on, it’s something of a wonder that the characters need to verbalize their thoughts at all. But in those rare instances where, for reasons unbeknownst characters can’t simply talk with a normal speaking voice, Ms James has created yet another layer of communication, this one made up of whispers, mumbles, and mutterings (see Figure 3 below). 

Figure 3: Methods of undertone communication in Fifty Shades

Similarly to the usage of nonverbal communication, this undertone dialogue is used about 7 times across every 5 pages. However, this language of whispers isn’t nearly as diverse as the bodily quirks and jerks (see Figure 4), with murmuring and whispering making up 2/3 of all occurrences. Breathing their words, which I’m not really sure how one doesn’t do this, is used 17% of the time, muttering is at 9%, and mumbling and grumbling together make up the bottom 3%.

Figure 4: Distribution (by percentage) of undertone comm in Fifty Shades

3. Scatological communication: We know from my last Fifty Shades review that Ana uses the expression “holy crap” 39 times throughout the narrative and “holy shit” 59 times. But if we account for the 90 additional secular scatological references (Figure 5), we see that mentions of feces occur so often (about once every other page), they’re practically another character!

Figure 5: Poopy-talk in Fifty Shades of Grey

Also interesting (I’ll restrain myself from charting this), is that while 61% of the time “shit” is elevated to Holy status, “crap” doesn’t seem to share the same prestige  - only 43% of the craps are deemed worthy of holiness. Who knew?

4. The big picture: Combining these keen observations with their accompanying statistics gives us a holistic view (backed by sound mathematical analysis) of the deep and intricate layers of communication in Fifty Shades. Here’s the bottom line:

On the average, nonverbal gestures, spoken undertones, and poop-talk appear three times on every page. Three times. Per page. For almost 400 pages. 

Egads.

Nice tits, love

It's a while since I've re-read one cover to cover, but I grew up on Isaac Asimov's science-fiction writings. Asimov's later books built on his early novels and began to knit together the different sagas he initiated. His style changed also and became more openly racy. As an aside, Asimov collected and wrote dirty limericks, and you can still find copies of his anthologies.

"The Minister sat there, with a look of proud disdain on her face, and bare from the waist up. Her breasts were a smaller version of the woman herself – massive, firm, and overpoweringly impressive. 'Well?' she said. Trevize said, in all honesty, 'Magnificent!'"

That's from Foundation and Earth. I think it opens a can of worms. What does Trevize, the lucky dog, find to be "magnificent" in this context? Particularly proud nipples? (Mind, you'll have your eye out on that.) Perfectly proportioned? (A friend at college, when asked by his girlfriend if her breasts were suitably sized replied yes (the only right answer), as they were more than a mouthful but not more than a handful... Sounds like the Minister might qualify only if you have big hands.) Perhaps it's just the fact that he's about to get laid and knows it? 

For me this highlights a critical problem for the writer of erotica, in that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One lover's massive may be another's flat-chested; one man's 'magnificent!' may be another man's 'Crumbs! I hope you sued the plastic surgeon'; though only one of those responses gets the Minister to take off her knickers as well. 

In this age of digital printing, surely the solution is for the phrase "magnificent breasts" to be accompanied by an image clarifying what the author means? 

  
But then that brings us to a fundamental problem with communicating about sex on pieces of paper. Use all the words you want, illustrate them with pencil sketches and watercolours, and you're producing erotica. Put a photo in, and it's pornography.

I hope he washed his hands before cooking

Her sex had already opened for the fingers which would soon be there.

That's from page 3 of 'The Snowman'...

So, I was kicking around in the local library this afternoon, as one does, and decided to see what the fuss was about over this book, before Jay and my aunt have to come to blows.

I read the first four pages, where the female protagonist leaves her son in the car to have an adulterous "shag" with her lover before he goes off somewhere for good. For forty minutes. Stretching my incredulity already, no way would my kids sit around for that long. They'd have been on the doorbell and banging on the windows by the time I'd reached the bedroom...

It's straight in with the sex, that's for sure. It's not particularly good sex, she doesn't have the decency to enjoy it that much, and he gets distracted by a spooky snowman at the window. Aha! I smell the onset of a plot...

So whilst I'm all for adulterous sex in principle (though my wife has not yet given permission), I would rather hope that it would be more fun than this. The sex really came across as sordid and seedy, and whilst that was probably the author's intention, it didn't pull me in. I didn't feel inclined to bring the book home.

Sorry, Mr Nesbø.

I know it when I see it

In his “Books with s*x in” post, Nik likens Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman to pornography (according to his “aunt,” he says, an allusion only slightly more credible than referencing a “friend”…).

Oooh, pornography, I thought as I rushed to the local library to grab a copy, I’ve got to check it out for myself. Strictly in the interest of literary research, of course. 

All-in-all, it’s a great read – creepy snowmen, mysterious disappearances, characters teeming with fatal flaws, twists and turns in every chapter. A real page-turner that I thoroughly enjoyed.

But  pornography? My first thought was that Nik’s “aunt” had perhaps had one too many pints in the pub the night she cracked open The Snowman. I mean, there’s not a single really graphic description of the sex act anywhere in almost 400 pages. When the characters do get it on, it goes something like this:

“He was going to say something, wanted to say something. But he had already thrust out his arm, caught her, pulled her to him, hear her gasp as he held her tight, saw her mouth opening and her tongue moving toward his, taunting and red. And basically there was nothing to say.

She snuggled up to him…”

And that’s about as graphic as it gets. For the most part, Nesbø moves from pre-coital kissing to post-coital snuggling with nary a detail between.  

But….characters in The Snowman do have sex a lot. A whole lot. Harry Hill screws his ex at every opportunity, with her claiming it’s the last time, every time, then always coming back for more. And almost every married female character has a lover (well, at least until she gets offed…). The phrase “whoring around” is tossed around liberally. In fact, the basic theme of the book is sex.

Still for me, lots and lots of sex isn’t enough to constitute pornography; I need lurid descriptions of anatomy and insertion techniques and maybe a bodily fluid or two before I’ll start blushing.

But The Snowman is a sex story, albeit more gruesome than graphic. So it’s understandable that some readers, such as Nik’s “aunt,” in reaching for a good mystery and finding instead sex, sex, sex, and more sex, might think The Snowman more appropriately sold next to Penthouse or Playboy than displayed openly on the shelves of libraries and bookstores.

To each her own, right?

These differences in perception raise a question for authors, though. Do we need to consider reader response when using sex in our non-erotic writing? Or is it better to let the characters do what they do and see how it all comes out (no pun intended…) in the end?