Sexing up the classics - should we care?

OK, I admit it: I'm one of the 15 people in the English-speaking world who hasn't read 50 Shades of Grey. I wasn't averse to the idea - I'm actually quite partial to the odd bit of well-written erotica. But as even its staunchest defenders would probably admit that ‘well-written' isn't a phrase that's often attached to Ms James' series, I was inevitably disappointed: the clunky prose and grating style felled me long before I could make it to any of the rude (or ideologically questionable) bits. 

The subsequent flooding of the bestseller lists with so called 'mummy porn' has left me unmoved but also un-outraged - most of it looks utter rubbish, true, but then the bestseller lists are often rubbish, and frankly I'd rather see some jobbing writer coin it in than some reality TV star who sees fit to write a biography at the grand old age of 24. In fact, the author in me is actually quite chuffed for all those erotic novelists who have spent years churning out titles to little appreciation and now find their backlist given a 50 Shades makeover and being promoted on the shelves of WH Smith.

Spicing up the classics

So I was amused rather than outraged when publisher Clandestine Classics announced it planned to release digital versions of sexed up classic (and, importantly, out of copyright) titles such as Wuthering Heights – and they weren’t the only ones with that idea. Cue inevitable backlash on debasing the originals, the dumbing down / sexing up of society, the death of creativity and dearth of original ideas... But, honestly, why get your bloomers in such a twist? It's not exactly new: authors have been writing sequels for years, and recently there has been a whole trend for supernatural takes on familiar titles, whether you want to see Elizabeth Bennett go all Twilight in Mr Darcy, Vampyre (only one of several Darcy-as-vampire books) or all Walking Dead in Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (surely even if you hate the trend, you can admire the idea of Jane Slayre? No? Come on!). Nor is it the first time that someone has sexed them up: the P & P sequel Mr Darcy Takes A Wife is, I am reliably informed, a Jilly Cooper style bonkbuster in which Mr Darcy, ahem, takes his wife. Repeatedly. 

Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska steamed up the screen as Jane and Rochester

In the spirit of pure research - honest, officer - I decided to download a couple of these titles and see what the fuss was about. Pan’s Jane Eyre Laid Bare was choice number 1: swayed by its elegant cover and the fact that, yes, it was only 99p. (I haven't read it yet, but will report back. Am I good to you, or what?) The second was the slightly more questionable looking Hemlock Bones: A Stud in Scarlet. No, seriously - presumably due to the restrictions of the Conan Doyle estate, the publishers didn't use the characters' names, so instead you have the puntastic Hemlock Bones and his trusty (and, it turns out, lusty) assistant Doctor Hotson in their nice little flat on Laker Street. Having whetted my appetite for some Holmesian fun with the enormously entertaining Robert Downey Jr film Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows on Saturday night, on Sunday I decided to give it a try. And it... wasn't actually bad. I mean, the prose quality of the added bits wouldn't give Ian McEwan sleepless nights, but... it wasn't that bad.

I'm not such an aficionado that I could tell if they'd just tweaked the original text and added bits, or just rewritten it in the style of Conan Doyle (it's decades since I read A Study in Scarlet), but it certainly felt authentic - and despite the rather Carry On feeling of the title, it was played straight (so to speak) as a crime thriller meets romance, even including the lengthy flashback to the killer's history which I vaguely remember finding tedious the first time round.   Obviously, if one man swooning over another isn't your cup of Earl Grey (and be warned, there's quite a lot of swooning) or (fairly graphic) gay sex offends you or leaves you cold, this isn't a book you should be buying, but I found it actually quite charming and sweet, no more offensive to the characters than I did the RDJ film - which, let's face it, slathers the homoeroticism on with a trowel. Frankly, the often shonky formatting was the most offensive thing in the book. 

Classics become classics because they have a high degree of robustness; in the same way Shakespeare can take pretty much anything we throw at him, so can these stories and characters. Sure, you could argue it's just fan fiction with an editor and a marketing budget - but so what? Nobody is stealing the originals and locking them away - this isn't the Chapman Brothers defacing Goya paintings and ruining them from future generations. This is writers putting their own spin on stories that will outlive us all. I, for one, have no problem with that.

Guest Blog - The Secret Life of Sex Writing - by Anne Brooke

Let’s get the biggie out of the way first (as it were): I love writing sex. Yes, I admit it. It’s one of the high points of my writing life. Even when I’m not writing about sex, I’m thinking about writing it. It’s part of all my novels, and some of my poems and short stories. Even when no sex takes place.

To my mind this is simply part of being human. We’re all physical and sexual (or at least with the capacity for being sexual) people, and including that aspect of our lives within literature is a celebration of being alive and of being who we are.

Not that you’ll find sex on every single one of the pages of my novels. You won’t. Not by a long way, though I do like to think that my darker writing nonetheless remains erotic in nature. My characters are, after all, physical beings within their world. In fact, one reviewer mentioned the lack of described regular sexual activity in A Dangerous Man (Flame Books, 2007) as a negative point, bearing in mind that my main character has been a part-time prostitute.

And it’s here that the essential balance of sex writing must be considered. Above all else, sex is character. It’s not there (primarily) to titillate. It’s there to reveal. If sex is doing its job properly, it should reveal character in a way that nothing else can. TIP: If something else at that point can reveal your character better than a sex scene, then DON’T WRITE THE SEX SCENE – write the “something else”. It should also reveal the relationships of the characters involved in the sex scene to each other in a deeper way. (NB The previous tip also applies here). Not just physically, but emotionally and mentally – where it counts. Good sex writing shows the people you’re writing about being themselves most clearly and most closely – and that kind of intimacy with a character is what the reader – and the writer – wants.

A case in point is this: in my upcoming mystery novel, The Bones of Summer (Dreamspinner Press, late 2009), my main character Craig starts a relationship with Paul from Maloney’s Law (PD Publishing, 2008). In the midst of everything else that happens to them, it’s natural for them to have sex – it’s new and exciting for them and a way of getting to know each other, as well as being a way for the reader to understand them and something about their pasts more fully. I hope it works, and I’m reassured that my first editor, Sara Maitland from The Literary Consultancy, noted that: you handle the sex so well – open and realistic without being excessively “in your face.” That said, however, when I was going through it again prior to submission to my publisher, I removed one section of erotic writing as it neither deepened the sense of character nor moved the story forward. Nice sex, maybe, but verging on the pornographic and I therefore didn’t need it. The scene is more true to itself without it: more balanced, more human, more real. If you ever read it, I hope you’ll think so too.

Because good sex writing isn’t porn. It’s not about what the bits look like and where they go. It’s about the people to whom those bits belong and how they feel and think and change. Recently, a colleague at work joked with me about how she “couldn’t write porn like you do” and I was very much taken aback and really rather hurt by her assumption. I know for a fact that she’s never read any of my published novels (nor any of the drafts either!) and I hope that, if she ever does, that assumption will be changed. I’m not even sure that what I write can be classed as erotic fiction in its truest form. It’s fiction about people who have sex only where it fits their character and the story. Much like life really. Enjoy.

An Essex girl at heart, Anne now lives in Surrey and is a successful author of novels, short stories and poetry - do visit her website and blog at:
http://www.annebrooke.com/
http://annebrooke.blogspot.com/