After weeks of dire PR, Newsnight finally has something to celebrate. Its economics editor Paul Mason has been officially shortlisted for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards, for his debut novel Rare Earth.
Mason has put his specialist knowledge to good use in the climactic scene, where an overweight businessman tries out “tantric position 103” while explaining a financial transaction: “He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum but missing, his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down. ‘The cartel, sells, to the global market,’ he panted... He switched to some ancient steppe language as he ejaculated, blubbering and incoherent.”
Other shortlisted passages this year include Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe, a Bad Sex veteran who scooped the prize in 2004; aristocratic spanking scenes in The Adventuress by Nicholas Coleridge and graphically described genitalia in Craig Raine’s The Divine Comedy.
Will Self’s impenetrable sex scene in Umbrella did not make the cut — but Sam Mills’s bizarre homage to the author, The Quiddity of Will Self, got in with spectacular lines such as “My cock soared Selfwards … her climax shuddering up, up, up to Will”.
One much-fancied children’s author did not make the shortlist. The Literary Review explained that: “As a result of a flood of recommendations, the judges considered at length the merits of J K Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, but concluded that the book’s sins were venal compared with the competition.”
