BAD SEX

chance for small talk and poetry alike. But nothing is exactly perfect in this life, and for Annie Doultry the delicate but firm pressure on his rear parts was in perfect harmony with the eruption of his cock. He came and he came – we are dealing with a hero here. At one point his lover backed away to inspect the unaltered gush of it, like a plumber saying to a customer, ‘Don’t blame me. This water supply will stop when the dam’s empty.’ In Giles Coren’s Winkler (Jonathan Cape), we are not dealing with a hero but with Winkler, the novel’s eponymous anti-hero; however, this frustrated, unpleasant murderer does manage his own moment of swashbuckling glory: And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro. Big names that look like they’ll miss out this year include Sebastian Faulks, for Human Traces, and Michel Houellebecq for The Possibility of an Island. Faulks will be disappointed to learn he has not won it for a second time, as the long passage of dialogue/foreplay at the end of his novel is utterly harmless; Houellebecq, although ostensibly over-qualified for the prize, in fact writes filth too effectively to be considered. A passage from Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown(Jonathan Cape)was more promising: ‘Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.’ In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. ‘Don’t you treat me like a child,’ she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. ‘You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?’ In Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (reviewed on page 68), sex with a fourteen-yearold virgin is in the nonagenarian narrator’s mind but never comes to fruition: As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded with new vibrations along every inch of her skin, and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique

taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and flowered without being touched. But there’s nothing kiddie-style about perennial Bad Sex favourite Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light (Hamish Hamilton), whose protagonist is writing an erotic novel, from which comes this: Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising – knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried ‘No’ – because she had let go – she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth. Entries are still coming in at this point. The winner will be announced on 1 December at the Bad Sex Party. Other writers under consideration are J M Coetzee, André Brink, David Grossman, and Ben Elton, from whose The First Casualty(Bantam Press) comes this last passage: Murray was a nurse and used to undressing men; it was not long before she had found what she was looking for and liberated his straining manhood, and then he gasped out loud. The warmth of her mouth on him was almost too much to bear. ‘Oh Jesus. Yes!’ he gasped as her lips and teeth closed savagely around him and he felt the tip of her tongue poking and probing. Then, just when he was beginning to think that he must explode, her mouth was gone and in its place he felt her hands once more and he smelt the unmistakable smell of oiled rubber. ‘Glad this wasn’t hanging on the line to dry when you saw my room,’ he heard her say. ‘I think even I would have been embarrassed.’ She slipped the big thick rubber sheath over him and then pulled him down to her. Kingsley soon discovered that beneath her skirt she was wearing nothing. He felt the thick, luxuriant bush of soft wet hair between her legs and in a moment he was buried inside it. ‘Ooh-la-la!’ she breathed as he smelt the clean aroma of her short bobbed hair and the rain-sodden grass around it. ‘Oooh-la-jolly well-la!’ And so they made love together in the pouring rain, with Nurse Murray emitting a stream of girlish exclamations which seemed to indicate that she was enjoying herself. ‘Gosh’, ‘Golly’ and, as things moved towards a conclusion, even ‘Tally ho!’

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 FICTION

J OHN D UGDALE The First American Liberator

T HE M ARCH

★By E L Doctorow (Little, Brown 384pp £10.99)

E VIDENCECONTINUES TO accumulate that America’s senior novelists have got their hands on some literary equivalent of Viagra. It’s not just that Messrs Wolfe (b 1931), Updike (b 1932), Roth (b 1933), McCarthy (b 1933) and the late Saul Bellow (b 1915) remain or remained productive as septuagenarians; but also that instead of producing the kind of fiction – either pareddown and wintry, or self-parodically rarefied or woolly – normally associated with a late phase, they create exacting structures and write vigorous, surging prose. Their role models are the raging later Yeats, source of the titles of recent works by Roth and McCarthy, and T S Eliot, who wrote that old men ought to be explorers. The phenomenon is illustrated again by this splendid novel by E L Doctorow (b 1931), which follows the march to the sea through Georgia of General Sherman’s Union army after the fall of Atlanta; and then his northward thrust from Savannah through the Carolinas, concluding with the Confederate surrender and Lincoln’s assassination in the spring of 1865. Other historical figures besides Sherman, including Lincoln and Grant, are also depicted. But the bulk of the teeming novel’s fifty-odd characters are imagined – soldiers on both sides, assorted camp-followers, freed slaves, and dispossessed southern gentry. Among the most memorable are Pearl, the sassy pale-skinned daughter of a landowner and a slave, who becomes a drummer and later nurse in the Union army (and who can be seen as the author’s answer to Scarlett O’Hara – bi-racial and admirably altruistic, but similarly embodying southern resilience); Arly and Will, rogues first seen in Confederate uniform who switch sides several times; and Wrede Sartorius, a pioneering army surgeon. Doctorow, whose oeuvre includes works set in the 1870s, 1910s, 1930s and 1950s, favours historical fiction with multiple narrative centres. As in his best-known novel, Ragtime, the individual stories criss-cross here like the musical themes of a fugue, though the size of the cast makes the patterning far more elaborate. He delights too in making connections between his characters, no matter how disparate: Sherman, for example, notices Pearl when the teenager shouts a greeting to the passing

general; he is nearly murdered by Arly; and he asks Sartorius to accompany him to a meeting with Lincoln. The name Sartorius looks like a nod to Faulkner’s Sartoris family, and other influences are discernible. The tear-jerking set-piece scenes, as when Pearl witnesses her white father’s death, seem to be modelled on Uncle Tom’s Cabin; while the device of giving the main characters soliloquy-like interior monologues is taken from MobyDick. That’s not the only borrowing from Melville, as Doctorow depicts the March (just as the earlier author depicted his whaling-ship) as a self-contained world, exhibiting an almost complete spectrum of human activity and experience. There are parallels too between Ahab and Sherman, with the vengeful ferocity of the hunt for the white whale mirrored in the campaign’s cruelty. Doctorow offers a complex portrait of his troubled, restless central character, focusing on two paradoxes: that the man who waged vicious war on the South’s civilian population, burning their cities and looting their food and possessions, was also capable of writing a letter sympathising with a Confederate general whose son had died in battle; and that the great freer of black people was capable of racism, as when, vexed that thousands of freed slaves had encumbered his army by following it, he told his officers: ‘we must divest ourselves of surplus horses, mules, and Negroes’. While The Marchmimics nineteenth-century fiction, its military resonances are modern. After capturing Savannah, for instance, a relaxed Sherman is described as ‘humming “The Ride of the Valkyries”’. This is surely an anachronism – Wagner’s composition did not receive its US premiere until 1872 – but the reference invites the reader to link 1860s Georgia with 1960s Vietnam, via the famous helicopter-raid scene in Apocalypse Now. And it’s not too far a stretch to see the March to the Sea as also prefiguring the recent US invasion of Iraq, presumably unfolding while the novel was being written. Tellingly, what Doctorow zeroes in on in Sherman is his frustration when the army is neither marching nor fighting, and he is reluctantly responsible for the welfare of former slaves and the administration of captured cities. He becomes the prototype of the American liberator: expert at destruction, inept at reconstruction. As politically and psychologically shrewd as Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, The March would be a remarkable achievement if it consisted only of this historical portrait and a vivid evocation of warfare. But it also recounts, with unflagging energy, a host of other stories, and hence fills a glaring gap in the American canon. There are fine fictional studies of the Civil War, notably Stephen Crane’s novella The Red Badge of Courage; but no one before has risen to the challenge of producing a polyphonic novel of almost Tolstoyan ambition. To order this book at £8.79, see order form on page 78

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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