‘MOUTHFUL BY MOUTHFUL’
This year two authors received the Bad Sex Award — Britain’s most dreaded literary prize
In a magnificent troll of the calamity of the Booker this year — in which the award was given to two winners — the judges at the Literary Review awarded the prize for bad sex writing to two authors: Prix Goncourt winner Didier Decoin and British novelist John Harvey. (In the 26 years since the award was established in 1993, only three women have won.)
The award is given to “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or downright cringeworthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction, the prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.”
In a tongue-in-cheek statement that echoes that of the Booker judges, the judges said of this year’s winners: “We tried voting, but it didn’t work. We tried again. Ultimately there was no separating the winners.
“Faced with two unpalatable contenders, we found ourselves unable to choose between them. We believe the British public will recognise our plight.”
Decoin’s book The Office of Gardens and Ponds is a fishy fable set in Japan 1,000 years ago. The protagonist is Miyuki, who has stepped in for her dead husband to transport precious carp from her village to the
Imperial Palace.
This is the novel’s now infamous scene of Miyuki with her dead husband: “Miyuki took the opportunity when no-one was looking to place her lips for one last time on the long shaft of his penis, which had grown cold. The earthy taste surprised her. When he was alive, when it swelled inside Miyuki’s mouth, Katsuro’s penis had tasted of raw fish, of warm young bamboo shoots, and of fresh almonds when she finally released its juices …”
Harvey’s novel Pax is described as “an intimate portrait of sexual pain in two centuries” (snort). This is one of his overwrought passages: “Her long lean arms were spider arms, while her kisses roved and dug.
‘I see it’, he said. ‘You are the female praying mantis, devouring her mate’.
‘I am. You are. I shall eat every shred of you’.
‘Mouthful by mouthful’.
‘Exactly. Ah. But boy, you taste good’. She licked her lips, and pulled him close, but now he was clasping too. It was a kind of slow wrestling, they were knitting each other into a loose slipping knot. He was upside down over her, loving her bush and lick-kissing like eating her inner thighs. Till at last they loved fully and later lay back. She did not chatter. Their arms stirred in a luxurious desultory twining.”
The two authors had serious competition. Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls was there for this line: “I screamed as though I were being run over by a train”; Mary Costello’s The River Capture had “he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection”, and Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel contained the following: “For most of the proceedings he felt his own desire as if it were tethered to a wire, a bright red balloon floating in his peripheral vision, but eventually he burst through.”
Last year James Frey won for his novel Katerina, which included lines such as:
“God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum”, making this year’s winners seem almost rambling, lacklustre and mimsy.