Erotic fiction has been languishing on the top shelf for years, but a new generation of women writers is moving it from the fringes to the literary mainstream, with candid bestsellers such as The Sexual Life of Catherine M blazing a trail.
We meet five authors whose explicit prose is unleashing 'posh porn' on an ever-increasing market.
As a publishing trend it might best be summed up thus - from big knickers to no knickers. Ten years ago the bestseller lists were topped by the frustrated Bridget Jones, a fictional creation less interested in sex than in the cigarette she could smoke afterwards.
Part of her popularity - and that of the clones that followed - was that she was far too neurotic to be good in bed. It was romance, not lust, which made her pulse beat faster.
A decade on and chick lit now seems curiously chaste, as lascivious as a warm mug of Horlicks. But a new kind of explicit bedside reading, both fictional and autobiographical, means the three-for-two counter in Waterstone's now displays the kind of X-rated material more traditionally found in a cornershop in Soho.
Recent publications have included, among others, a memoir by a winsome-looking ballet dancer with a predilection for sodomy; a semi autobiographical novel by an anonymous Muslim woman about her sexual coming of age; a confessional account of teenage proclivities in Catholic Italy; a candid career guide to life as a Manhattan prostitute; and a novel centred on a single act of fellatio.
For months, newspaper columnists feverishly debated the identity of Belle de Jour, a hooker whose eloquent internet blog, sold to a publisher for a six-figure sum, might or might not have been a fraud.
True, some of these books have been risible, a publisher's idea of a quick buck. Others have seemed absurdly opportunistic. Want to complain about your husband's poor performance in bed? Write a book!
But the best of the titles means that a new kind of graphic literature, written from a woman's point of view, is reaching a mainstream readership. Whereas previous generations might have been uneasy about the distinctions between erotica and pornography, for many of these authors the debate is redundant.
They argue that good erotic fiction explores women's fantasies and shows them to be acceptable - what's so wrong with that?
The book jackets, usually demure black and white pictures of a naked back or a tantalising glimpse of a shadowy upper thigh, mean that these are publications that can be brandished on the bus.
However, the softly softly packaging belies the content. Here is sex usually written about in the kind of language Hollywood executives would blanch at, about women who seem to like getting down to it and see no reason to justify their behaviour.
For all their liberal credentials, literary editors are usually queasy about this whole genre. Generally, these books are not seriously reviewed.
Yet a growing number of fans argue that the best current sex writing can be a showcase for polished, evocative prose that is the antithesis of pulp pornography.
There is nothing coy or apologetic about the style; the narrative has tension and pace; the characters are believable. Crucially, there is none of the ridiculous pretension that trips up nominees for the Bad Sex award.
Maxim Jakubowski compiles the annual Mammoth Book of Erotica, which has included writers as diverse as Martin Amis and Anne Rice. He has plans to launch an erotic list called Neon, with mainstream publisher Orion.
It will include reprints of classic erotic writing, plus 14 new titles. 'Erotic fiction has traditionally had connotations of Page 3, Butlins and spanking. The presumption is that the writers are all old hacks,' he says. 'But in my view there is a new generation of younger writers, under 40, who find it much more acceptable.'
Emily Maguire, a first-time Australian author whose rights in the novel Taming the Beast were sold worldwide last year, wrote her book at night as a way to combat insomnia.
We're only two pages in when Mr Carr, a teacher, and Sarah, his 14-year-old pupil, have their first sexual encounter: some extracurricular mutual masturbation in the English classroom. It's the first of many descriptions of sex.
Maguire puts some of the title's explicitness down to the fact that she was writing in the dark. 'I don't think I censored myself as much as I might have done if I had written it in daylight. It was a bit like being drunk.'
The affair between the teacher and his student continues - illegal, erotic, passionate and dangerous - until Carr's wife finds out. Seven years later the couple meet again. Sarah has become a woman defined by her craving for promiscuous and often violent sex:
'Sarah had a near perfect academic record, she was beautiful, and she fucked like a porn star. If the occasional arsehole thought "easy" meant "indiscriminate", or that enjoying sex was the equivalent of "asking for it" then that was something she had to live with.'
It's a bleak, uneasy book, albeit powerfully written. It is also shockingly compelling. Or as the one critic who did review it put it, 'horribly readable'. The claustrophobic atmosphere reflects the intensity of an obsessive relationship.
'I wanted to get away from that Bridget Jones idea that there's a nice boy and a bad guy and you can choose which one to take home to your mum. That you can choose a man like you choose a career. I don't think that's real for most people; that's not how it happens.'
Sarah's voraciousness is by turns liberating and self-destructive, yet Maguire is careful not to turn her heroine into a casualty.
'She enjoys her sexuality. On the whole, women who sleep around are seen as being damaged in some way; they're described in the same language as you'd use for an alcoholic. I wanted to confuse that a bit. Sometimes she's a victim, sometimes she is confident and enviably without guilt.'
There's little about Emily Maguire which, on the surface at least, would make one suspect that she'd write a book which covers all bases, from trysts in the changing rooms to autoerotica. She radiates Australian wholesomeness: polite, earnest, straightforward.
She had a dull job working for a telecommunications company when she began writing the novel in secret. Aged 28, she's married to her teenage sweetheart (she's quick to point out that he's the same age as she is).
She's more likely to go to bed with the Brontes than Black Lace. Her father is a local newspaper editor, her mother is a teacher. 'I think it has been hard on them in a way. They probably can't boast that their daughter has written a book. It's not the kind of thing they can pass around the church group.'
Did she set out to write an erotic novel?
She claims she didn't. 'But I can understand that people do have that reaction to some parts of the book,' she says carefully.
'In the early scenes it was a fine line: I didn't want to write a paedophile's guide to how to pick up a teenager. At the same time, Sarah, at 14, doesn't feel like she's being abused. For her the sex is the best thing ever. I needed readers to realise that she was having a good time.'
Emily Maguire is adamant that Taming the Beast 'is not a poster book for S&M'. To a degree she has a point. Not all the explicit sex is erotic.
But whether she likes it or not, the book's sexual content has been integral to the promotion. 'Dark, sexual, brutally honest' says the tag line on the cover, beside a picture of a tastefully cropped naked woman holding... an apple.
The publisher of Taming the Beast is Pete Ayrton at Serpent's Tail. He is the man who also bought up The Sexual Life of Catherine M, a French art critic's account of sleeping with half of Paris:
'Today I can account for 49 men whose sexual organs have penetrated me. But I can not put a number on those that blur into anonymity.'
Some critics complained that the book had all the erotic allure of an Ikea catalogue, but it still sold more than 200,000 copies (and was one of the censorious Daily Mail's most popular book offers).
Ayrton breezily calls this current fashion for sex fiction 'posh porn'. Although there are no exact figures for who buys these kinds of books, Ayrton does know who queues up for publicity readings: young women, under 30.
This demographic is the holy grail of any publisher for the simple reason that they buy a lot of books. Here are stories that seem to speak to them. Ayrton:
'They recognise Catherine M, for instance, as some kind of mother figure of sexual liberation. They understand the separation between love and sex that she writes about. Chick lit doesn't correspond to their lives. Here are writers who, like them, have casual sex which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their emotions.'
Ayrton is the first to admit that 'posh porn' is a financial lifeline - 'Commercially, Catherine M has been to Serpent's Tail what Harry Potter is to Bloomsbury - all publishers need books that support the rest of the list.'
Now it seems that other, more mainstream, companies are keen to follow suit. There's industry rumour that Penguin, the company who went to court to defend its right to sell Lady Chatterley's Lover 45 years ago, is researching the idea of an erotica imprint.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, the anonymous author of Britain's fifth most popular blog, Girl With a One-track Mind, was bought up by Ebury. There's little doubt that by this summer, 'Abigail', a single thirtysomething woman who most definitely prefers sex to shopping, will be a media obsession.
According to Jake Lingwood, deputy publisher of Ebury, the book's message is to 'reclaim sex for women'. He says:
'It's the first in this genre to take a more universal, commercial approach. It's not cloaked under a literary veneer. On the other hand, it is very well written and in places it's plainly erotic.'
It's also witty, which is unusual in most sex writing, where a joke is as rare as a night in washing your hair.
You'd never guess that Canadian author Tamara Faith Berger has based her writing career on sex. She appears shy, introverted. Her regular income comes from teaching yoga in Toronto and she rarely speaks publicly about her books.
'Writing is the kind of thing you do in a locked room... On a day-to-day basis I'm very private.' Yet during her early twenties she replied to an advert calling for 'people to write dirty stories' and for three years she churned out tales about doctors and nurses, cops and housewives for low-grade porn magazines with names like Buttime Stories and Bump & Grind.
'Writing the porn came surprisingly easily,' she remembers. 'I was drawn to it - these three-page pieces, describing every permutation of sex, as porn does. As a young person I was always fascinated by sex, but I was amazed at how easy it was to imagine all these bodies, all these scenarios.
'I discovered ways I could make it work, that I could make the reader's body get involved in the story. I could make my own body get involved, too.'
So writing the stories turned her on as well?
She laughs. 'I don't feel bad about confessing that that's part of it, too. After all, if it doesn't work on me, who else is it going to work on?'
There are early plans to publish her novella, Lie With Me, in the Neon series next year. She began writing the story when she grew bored of the formula her employers always insisted upon.
'In porn there has to be a satisfying consensual ending. It could never conclude in a devastating sort of way. I wanted to go as far as I could and they'd never let me. But I always thought, "If you've got the reader this far, why can't you really dislodge their world view?"'
She is one of a growing number of writers who believe that sex is as legitimate a subject matter as anything else and that turning readers on is as skilled a job as making them laugh or cry.
The thrill is in manipulating the audience. The story, described by her Canadian publishers as 'One part Jean Genet, one part Molly Bloom, one part Penthouse Forum', centres on a young woman who trawls bars looking for sex and the seven different men she picks up.
It begins: 'If I told you everything you'd probably think I was a slut and I can't deal with that so I'm not going to tell you absolutely everything.'
The irony is that, 100 pages later, it's difficult to imagine a sexual scenario she hasn't told us about. Her heroine is defiant, confident, insatiable. Unlike most female characters in pornography, she is articulate and talkative.
However, there is little in the sparse, fragmented narrative that isn't connected to sex. The central character is nameless. We know nothing about her background. There is barely any physical description.
The story emerges only through the sexual encounters she experiences. 'I didn't want the sex scenes to be there for the sake of it. I wanted the sex to be an integral part of everything that is happening in the book. You learn about the characters through the kind of sex they have.'
While playing with the conventions of pornography, Faith Berger also tries to subvert them. The language is purposefully crude. 'I might not say those words in conversation but I like the power of them being read, seeing them on the page. I like the sound of them. I don't use them to shock, but because they seem natural.'
According to Matthew Firth, an American writer and editor of an anthology about work and sex, modern sex fiction is very different from erotica (such as Black Lace) or romance (such as Mills & Boon).
True, it can be arousing. Yes, it describes fairly standard sex scenarios. But where it differs, he says, is 'with respect to fantasy versus reality.
Sex fiction is not about embellishing sexual activity, about depicting sexual situations most of us can only dream of. Sex fiction is writing about sex by accurately portraying how people fuck. The goal is authenticity.'
The French writer Christine Jordis's novel Rapture, published last autumn by Harvill, is an absorbing example of what Firth means.
Her story is about a reserved, middle-aged woman who has a passionate, all-consuming affair with a balding, double-chinned ladies' man. Her fascination is with what happens to a demure, closeted sort of woman - imagine an Anita Brookner heroine - who is awakened by a sexual relationship.
The book includes intricate descriptions of sex, mostly ecstatic, sometimes pedestrian. It also describes the couple eating, walking, shopping, talking on the telephone, writing letters to one another, falling in love and then out again.
The tone is at times rarefied and academic but it also seems to reflect the universal experience of an intense, forbidden and ultimately doomed love affair.
However, anyone expecting increasingly explicit sex scenes casually knitted together with flimsy narrative will be disappointed. The book is not formulaic. The protagonists are not especially attractive.
Neither are they particularly sexually adventurous. There are no orgies or acrobatics. The book manages to be candid and erotic without being graphic.
'I wanted to describe the love-making,' she explains, 'but I wasn't trying to shock or provoke or attract attention. I just wanted to talk about the experience of sex in a way that seemed to me real and felt. It is the intensity of feeling that is interesting, not the act itself.'
She believes that writing about love is actually more radical, these days, than writing about sex. 'There is some liberation in being able to sleep with as many men as you like. This is new territory for women, in a way.
Catherine Millet was all about the number of people she had sex with, but for me that was totally unrelated to pleasure. It was the richness of the experience that I wanted to describe, not the novelty.'
In France, there is a tradition of erotic publishing which is unheard of in this country. In 2004, the classic erotic novel The Story of O was even recognised with a literary award by the French government to mark the 50th anniversary of its first publication.
Three of the big-name publishing houses specialise in this kind of literature and Christine Jordis is, in fact, part of the French literary scene.
A senior commissioning editor at Gallimard press, she deals with British writers such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. We chat over tea in her 19th-century apartment, sitting in the same room where she used to meet up with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.
Thoughtful, articulate, but also tremendously good fun, she explains that Rapture is inspired by an extramarital affair she had in her forties and that the manuscript lay hidden in a drawer for over a decade before she decided to publish it.
While this is a fictionalised account of the illicit relationship - Christine Jordis has been married for more than 30 years and has two grown-up children - there is a strong sense that the publication marked some kind of 'coming out'.
'No one knew I had had the affair, and no one knew that I had written the book. Deciding to publish it was like walking naked through Paris. It was a hard decision and I have never been so terrified in my life.
'In comparison to other such books which are heavily pornographic, this might seem mild. But it's not only a question of sexual frankness. For me it was a question of showing people who I really was, in my deepest recesses. I thought I would be torn apart.'
Despite her fears, the book has been warmly reviewed and she's had a huge response from readers.
'Men were encouraged because the male character is short and not very handsome' - she laughs delightedly at this - 'and they thought they, too, could be Don Juans. The women identified with the heroine, Camille. Many had also suffered in the same way as she does.'
I wonder what her former lover thought about the book. 'I believe he bought it but he has never talked to me about it.' And her husband? She shrugs. 'He thought it was my right to write it.' Has she ever regretted the exposure it has brought? 'There came a time in my life when I needed to tell the truth. People may not like it, but I don't care. Take it or leave it, this is who I am.'
BETWEEN THE COVERS
Girl With a One-track Mind by Abby Lee (Ebury)
The sexploits of a north London thirtysomething, inspired by her explicit blog.
'I don't think I have ever had as many orgasms in one sitting as I had in the 12 hours I spent with SP a few nights ago. Truly amazing. I am still sore. And finding it a little difficult to walk. But a good price to pay for 20+ climaxes.'
The Almond by Nedjma (Doubleday)
Anonymous novel about the sexual awakening of an Arab woman.
'He turned me over, embraced my thighs, and made me arch my back. There you are, I said to myself. You are his play thing. He can do anything now, rip out your tongue, tear open your heart, make you the Queen of Sheba.'
Lofting by Alma Marceau (Neon)
Sex and the City - with even more sex.
'He washed me and loofah'd my back and shampooed my hair, telling me the whole time how great I looked, how sexy I was, how hot I constantly made him. Though I was sure most of this was premeditated - as a rule Nick wasn't the gratuitously complimentary sort - it was pleasant to hear all the same. Besides, I reflected, planning and sincerity weren't necessarily mutually exclusive.'
Three Kinds of Asking For It (Touchstone Press, available from Amazon)
Three short stories by American authors - including Jill Soloway, a scriptwriter for Six Feet Under. 'Perfect for intellectual sex freaks', according to the book cover.
'She loved being bent over. More than any fiddling that might precede it, more than any fumbling sex act that might follow. The moment of being bent over was like a sex act, like foreplay and climax blended into one swooning, too-short moment.'
Lie With Me by Tamara Faith Berger (Gutter Press, available from Amazon)
Erotic novella told from both female and male points of view.
'When we were sitting in the cab to her place I started feeling her up in the exact same place on her thighs. This time she spread her legs open a bit for me. I slid my hand under the bottom of her skirt...'
Louise France @ Observer
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