So wtf was I missing in Ian McDonald’s River of Gods? I don’t think I’ve seen anything approaching a negative opinion of this novel, going by a quick look on google, except a few reviews on Amazon. Nearly everyone seems to agree that it’s literary or almost literary. Nearly everyone seems to think it paints an authentic portrait of India.
I don’t know about authentic portrait, never having been to India, but I thought the entire time that this is a novel written by a very British, very white, very male author. As for its literary value, I’ll let the scarf-up-the-ass sex scene speak for itself.
Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the size of Vishram’s penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the gentleman’s way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a thugee… He tries to push into her vagina, she rolls away saying no no no, I’m not letting that thing in there. She let him get three fingers in both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot up inside her and she straddles him… handing him until he comes and after he’s come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out, each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and a full-body thrash.
The novel’s crammed with hilariously written sex: everyone is an enthusiastic contortionist (“yoga plough” position while thrashing and having a scarf “lovingly pulled” out of your colon, hanging from your lover’s waist upside down and all) and everyone practices Tantric sex (including or even particularly the western characters. One character’s French boyfriend ties a string or a rubber band around his cock and shoves it up her vagina while chanting–apparently this keeps the thing erect for an entire hour or something). I mean, hell, some of them could have been interesting, but instead you have a nute–a non-gendered–who acts like a weepy uke: lower lip trembling at the slightest social embarrassment, physically fragile and effeminate. What the hell is up with that? Apparently, all the nutes in McDonald’s futuristic India are girly, work in the fashion/media industry, are walking fashion plates and are every single one unironically faaaabulous.
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