BIRDS, BUSHES AND BODICES

Sep 28, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, how many is a “bod” worth? I don’t mean “bod” as in “body” an abbreviation that is now in vogue as “He has a great bod otherwise I wouldn’t bodder wid him.” I also don’t mean “bud” as in “Nothing beats a Bud”, a classic example of a beer-faced lie.

Those of us who are older bud wiser know that any Carib, Red Stripe or Banks can beat a bud any day and any time. Both bods and Buds come in “six-packs” although one is abdominal and the other is abominable.

Just as abominable is the practice in Trinidad, Guyana and some other Caribbean countries of “mining bud” meaning keeping birds in cages. But I don’t mean those buds either although, like those who enjoy a good bod, I would prefer exploring the bush rather than my own hand.

For “bods” read “bodices”. When I was much younger, women wore bodices instead of blouses. A bodice covers the body from the neck to the waist. The term means a “pair of bodies” because bodices were originally made in two pieces that were fastened together. Initially the bodice was laced together like a pair of “yachtings” or “crepe soles” or held together but “hooks and eyes”.

This garment and its disintegration in a romantic context featuring a dominant male armed with a throbbing member led to the name given to a rapidly growing literary genre which originated with Jane Austen and Emily Bronte – the “bodice ripper”.

The term was first coined in the US by the New York Times in 1980. Since then, every sexually explicit romantic novel which takes place in a historical or exotic geographical setting, with a plot involving the seduction of the heroine, is a “bodice ripper”.

Now, according to Andrea Sachs in Time Magazine, despite or perhaps because of the global recession, bodice rippers are doing better than all other books: “Romance novels, an inexpensive escape for women, are helping some publishers hide from the worst of the recession. Frequently an impulse purchase, mass-market paperback romances, often bought on the run at drugstores and supermarkets; cost $4.75 to $5.99, a bargain when hardcover editions are typically $25 or more.

Trade romances, which cost up to $14, are still a relatively good buy. The bodice rippers piled up nearly $1.4 billion in sales last year, the largest share of the consumer book market. More than 1 out of 4 books sold is a romance.”

Bodice rippers, however, are not the first choice of literary critics. They are generally associated with “purple prose”. According to author Deb Stover, “Purple prose consists of words and phrases that sound stilted, overly descriptive or cliché.”

There is an award named after one of the more famous exponents of the art Edward Bulyer-Lytton who wrote, “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” Since then his “It was a dark and stormy night” has been the quintessential cliché for the opening sentence of a novel and an award is given in his name to the best writer of the worst opening sentence for an imaginary novel.

More appropriate to the bodice rippers is the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. While I can only dip judiciously into some of the entries and serve them up as appetisers instead of giving you the Full Monty as an entrée, I would recommend that if you’re interested you do your own research like so many of us did in the days before the Internet, combing the pages of Chaucer and even Shakespeare for the sex bits.

What is amazing is that the bodice ripper writers are not the prize winners. John Updike has been given a lifetime membership and last year’s winner was Norman Mailer. The more socially acceptable excerpts from short-listed entries include these lines from a book on Shakespeare (Will by Christopher Rush) in which the author describes an encounter between Will and Ann Hathaway, “The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise… I’d come close to it now, this sudden blush, this ancient avenue, the end of all odysseys and epic aim of life” and “Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey’s end, love’s end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail.” Enough to make anyone seasick.

The 2008 winner was Rachel Johnson for her book Shire Hell. She was singled out for her novel’s “slew of animal metaphors, including comparing her male protagonist’s ‘light fingers’ to ‘a moth caught inside a lampshade’, and his tongue to ‘a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop’.”

One of her more intriguing sentences was, “I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me.”

If, like me, this is not music to your ears and you’ve read so much purple prose that you’re seeing red, try this by Doug Powers, who once said that the way to get young people to read economics textbooks is to make the material sexy, “The British economist unbuttoned her blouse as he whispered the General Theory of Unemployment into her ear.

Keynes was his name, economics was his game. She laid back, quivering from his masterful evaluation of the recession. Her Supply Curves and healthy Assets gave him Hard Currency. His Demand Curve straightened.

As her Liquidity Preference became apparent, he began slowly, methodically, and gently explaining why the U.S. should go back on the Gold Standard.”

*Tony Deyal was last seen wondering why Sean Thomas would write in Kissing England, “Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou art more compact and more…She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa…Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh”

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