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’. Indeed, throughout the five stories on offer, Byatt is able to find the right words for the not-quite-right, unblinkingly capturing a sense of the jarring, the startling and the not entirely pleasant. It is a welcome departure for the author, an erstwhile chronicler of folk tales and legends, who this time appears to have her eye on something more edgily modern, more relevant and, therefore, far more intriguing than expected.

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