Bad Passion Between The Pages

There are some books, like Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Tolstoy's War and Peace and almost anything Sarat Chandra ever wrote, that are not so much read as tackled. You approach them with reverence knowing in advance that the experience will be far more pleasurable in hindsight.

Anthony Powell's 12-novel saga, A Dance to the Music of Time, falls into that august category, reason enough for it to be pushed guiltily aside. Then Powell upped and died last month, forcing me to open the tomes or be accused of disrespecting the newly dead.

Being a closet Philistine, what struck me most about Powell's style after ploughing through the volumes is not so much his flair for understated humour and pointed social comment as a stylistic kink.

 

Through the stately progress of A Dance To The Music of Time, several of its 300-odd characters have affairs, divorce spouses, undergo abortions, romp naked through the hallway. And yet Powell gives us every single detail of their intimate lives without ever taking recourse to anatomical description. It is an astounding tour de force, matched only by Edith Wharton.

Sex is one of the two constants in human affairs that every writer comes up against, death being the other. Death is easier to handle_it's a question of figuring out what the literary trend of your time is and sticking to it. Thus, when Dickens penned his three-handkerchief deathbed scenes, he was merely following Victorian custom. In our times, death seems to be utilised either as a convenient plot device, or as the springboard for usually tedious philosophising, or as a fount of the kind of black humour that MagnusMills does so well.

Sex is far more complicated, and has caused writers of acknowledged talent such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis or Arundhati Roy to come to grief _ all three have been the recipients of well-deserved nominations for the Bad Sex awards. Tom Robbins narrowly escapes the label, though in his novels it's the language that makes wild and passionate love to itself, far more interestingly than the characters.

The problem with the act of love is that describing it is almost as funny as being a non-participating viewer. One way to beat this is to be studiously detailed, approaching the contortions of two (or more) protagonists from a strictly biological perspective.

It worked well for the pulp Hindi porn industry, and it seems to work just as splendidly for Khushwant Singh, Shobha De, Judith Krantz and Shirley Conran. They all broadly belong to the Elinor Glyn school of writing _ be detailed, add lots of phrases like "heaving passion", "the throes of desire" et al, and put in just enough quasi-literary description to avoid being mistaken for one of the more explicit Mills and Boons. Too much quasi-literary description and you have yet another nominee for the Bad Sex awards.

A time-honoured variation on this, favoured usually by young, brooding, male novelists, is to do precisely the same thing _ but intersperse it with passages of dense philosophy and descriptions of peeling plaster on the wall, until every vestige of titillation is exfoliated. This is often received well by admiring critics, who prefer to call it high art rather than third-rate pornography.

The Barbara Cartland school of writing contains less pitfalls for the aspiring writer. Cartland ducked the issue by putting hero and heroine together in states of semi-undress and allowing the heroine's dialogue to consist entirely of expostulations broken up by those three famous dots. Graduates from this school lead upto the act and then move adroitly away to the bit where they're putting their clothes back on. It is a device nicely exploited by David Lean in the scene from Gone With The Wind where Rhett carries Scarlett masterfully upstairs, and Lean cuts to a sleepy Scarlett, smiling what was surely the most voluptuous morning-after smile in history. Helen Fielding does a respectable job of this in the Bridget Jones books _ the trick is to leave the reader's imagination to fill in just the right gaps.

Perhaps the wisest are the novelists who eschew the subject entirely, as did R K Narayan, bless his soul. Unlike Jane Austen, who hinted tactfully at the possibility of sin rearing its ugly head, usually with disastrous consequences for the protagonists, Narayan obviates the need for sex all together. I like my titillation just as much as the next pervert, but over the last week I've suffered through the following: tedious description of marriage bed by moribund Sri Lankan novelist, and tedious description of two-generational incest by bright Indian novelist. An asexual Malgudi wins over bad passion any day!