Oh Jilly Cooper, don’t give up the sex

Novelist threatens to abandon the sex-near-horses genre to write a proper book Jilly Cooper says she now finds it “difficult” to write sex scenes , even though she used to bash them out with the joyous snuffling of a Laura-Ashley-yellow Labrador finding a chocolate button under a sofa. In fact, Cooper may abandon the sex-near-horses genre entirely, and try to impersonate Margaret Drabble instead. “I’d like to write a good book, a proper good book,” she says, being entirely ignorant of my opinion that her murder-mystery Score! is a masterpiece. What is this? How can a woman who once compared an orgasm to the machinations of a washing machine abandon us to the sexless wastelands of more literary writers, when the experience of reading them is like watching Ian McEwan doing a handstand? Could the memory of a passage from Riders , Cooper’s other masterpiece, remind her of what she has lost and what may come again? This scene features the psychotic show-jumper Rupert Campbell-Black, who is based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, copulating with Amanda Hamilton, the wife of the foreign secretary. So, if you are very literal, you are about to imagine Andrew Parker Bowles and Ffion Hague in bed. “Fascinated, she watched his long fingers stroking her belly, then sliding into the dark bush . . . ” I have to cut the sentence, because there will be complaints from readers who think that sex is evil, particularly when it involves fictional characters who vote Conservative. But this next bit should be OK. “Now he was lifting her right leg, holding back the inside of her thigh . . . it was like an express train going into a tunnel.” Why does this scene work? Rupert may be a wife-beating anti-intellectual with Boarding School Syndrome, but in what posh women call bed it is all about making a woman feel like a washing machine. Rupert has the shell of an alpha male but the heart of a subscriber to the Save the Badger campaign. Another element is the inclusion of a simile that people who live in the middle-class badlands can relate to, in this case a train. A train that works. This is the key to the psychology of Cooper’s sex scenes, as she strokes the British love of pornography that features plumbers, electricians and purveyors of utilities generally, while soothing our snobbery by giving the lovers acreage and pig farms. This is your formula, Mrs Cooper. Long may you write. Jilly Cooper Tanya Gold guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 25, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.