Making it a just so story

This new collection is, surprisingly for a little black book, decidedly unsexy. In fact, A. S. Byatt — unsurprisingly, perhaps, for those readers who persisted through the Victorian mumblings and fumblings of Possession — does bad, awkward sex rather well. Here is a gynaecologist and an art student getting together (note especially the prophylactic double negative of the last sentence):

She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple … She began, not inexpertly, to caress him.

Elsewhere, a wartime couple fiercely go ‘at it … tooth and claw, feather and velvet, blood and honey’; a woman who is turning into stone allows a sculptor ‘to study her ridges and her clefts’, if nothing else; and a writer, pondering sex with his partner, cannot ‘find the right words to describe her orgasms — prolonged events with staccato and shivering rhythms alternating oddly — and this teased and pleased him’.