Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction
Wed 15 Dec 2010 12.21 GMT
Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her, described by the Economist as "deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past has become our present. A summer read to be kept – and visited in the dark days of winter..." Last month, the novel followed authors including John Updike and Norman Mailer in winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award.
"Most adults are interested in sex. I am. My father was, and said as much to me when he was 92. I suspect that you are too. You're reading this after all. Being so central to much of our lives and indeed life itself, it is a valid and important topic for fiction.
"The challenge of writing about sex is to evoke the physicality, the yearning, the counterpoint between magnificent operatic grandiosity and ludicrous bestial grunting – without resorting to cliché. As the American author Elizabeth Benedict wrote: 'A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.' As an enthusiastic reader and a writer too, my opinion is that it doesn't matter how weird things get as long as it remains original and feels authentic.
"Some of the sex in the books below works as a device for revealing the state of society, some is a device for characterisation; a way of revealing truths about characters that they themselves may not be able to see – but most of it is just about desire, lust and sex itself."
10. Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003)
Strange perhaps to begin this list with a book I really dislike – but churlish I feel to leave it out when it is such a reflection of contemporary views. Bleak, cold and mechanical, it's sex in a world without spirit with a faint possibility of redemption through heartless shagging.
9. The Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
A male fantasy of total female submission. It was hugely popular but also despised for its objectification of woman – the protagonist is called "O" – no more than a letter, a zero, an orifice. Half a century later it is discovered to be the work of a woman, Anne Desclos, who wrote not for publication but for the pleasure of her lover. It's fascinating: erotic, intense, in parts repellent, frequently pornographic and ultimately self-annihilating.
8. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982)
Aficionados the world over will laugh at my tentative and no doubt outdated steps into fiction about gay sex, but as a (so far) straight man this was my introduction. Beautiful language, powerful story; saucy too if you can let yourself go.
7. Thongs by Alexander Trocchi (1955)
I bought this because it was meant to be disgusting and then found it to be much more than that. I was disappointed and later inspired – although it is pretty grubby. It was published by the Olympia Press – a Parisian publishing company specialising in erotica and the avant-garde. Five of the 10 books on this list were first published by this extraordinary house along with a host of classics such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer and The Ginger Man .
6. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.
5. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928)
4. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
Short stories retelling traditional tales and uncovering the sexual politics within. Her sentences reclaim and radicalise patriarchal language: "her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks". Funny, original, and brilliant.
3. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)
Unnerving, delicious, completely wrong, provocative, unbridled, surreal, graphically erotic, boundless and imaginative, indulgent and beautiful. What more can I say?
2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
A work of art by our greatest living writer. The 19th century seen through a fiercely modern cinematic lens. Faber tears the gauze and the drawers off Victorian England with his skilful prose and virtuoso structure. Behold the wonderful heroine Sugar – complex, flaky of skin, keen of mind – ready to do what no one else will. A big book in every sense. Essential.
1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that is an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.
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