With the Bad sex in fiction award cancelled this year, we celebrate authors from Jeanette Winterson to Jane Austen who can charge the dryest scenes with sensuality
Writing about sex is notoriously difficult: it is irrefutable that anatomical details combined with straining prose will always produce absurdity. But with this year’s Bad sex in fiction award cancelled, let’s make 2020 the year we celebrate the sexiest moments in literature – with absolutely no sex in them. The best authors use meaningful glances and heavy implications to do the work for them; the wisest know that less is more, more, more. Here are some simmering examples.
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
Patrick Lewis first meets the radio actress Clara Dickens in her dressing room. “When she spoke to him she had been bending to one side as she attached an earring, gazing into the hall mirror, dismissing him, their eyes catching in the reflection,” writes Ondaatje. Does Patrick fancy her, we wonder? “He was dazzled by her – her long white arms, the faint hair on the back of her neck – as if she without turning had fired a gun over her shoulder and mortally wounded him.” That would be a yes.