Giant sculpture of Gandalf riding an eagle to be removed from Wellington Airport
Their tenure was eventful – one became unmoored from its fixings during a severe earthquake in 2016 and plummeted onto the terminal floor below. No one was hurt.
But this month the majestic creatures, which underscore the capital city's connection to Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit films, will depart the terminal for good, Wellington Airport announced on Monday.
'It's been quite a Lord Of The Rings-heavy storytelling theme in here,' said airport chief executive Matt Clarke. 'Now we're looking to change that to something new.'
'It breaks my heart,' said one traveller, Verity Johnson, who sat beneath a grasping eagle claw in the food court on Monday. The sculptures had impressed her since she was young. 'Please, please reconsider.'
'Taking them away is un-New Zealand,' joked another airport visitor, Michael Parks.
The eagles were crafted by the film props and effects company Weta Workshop, which created tens of thousands of props for the Oscar-winning fantasy films directed by Jackson – one of Wellington's best-known residents, who lives near the airport.
The movies based on JRR Tolkien's beloved novels, generated billions of dollars in tourism revenue for New Zealand and employed thousands of people in Wellington over the 15 years of their production.
But during the years the eagles have hovered in the terminal, Tolkien tourism has waned in Wellington — although the city will perhaps always be synonymous with Jackson's films.
Guided tours still convey fans to the settings of famous scenes from the films and to visit production companies such as Weta, which will create a new display for the airport, to be unveiled later this year, Mr Clarke said.
Travellers have until Friday to admire the birds, which will then be put into storage, Mr Clarke said. He hopes the creatures – which each feature 1,000 3D printed feathers – will find a home at a museum.
'It's a spectacular thing for little kids to see,' Mr Clarke said. 'Even your old, grizzled businessmen, they still pull out their phones and take a quick cheeky photo too.'
Wellington Airport is not losing its quirky side. An enormous sculpture of The Hobbit's gold-hoarding dragon, Smaug, will remain overlooking the check-in counters.
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Daily Record
44 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Gail Porter: 'I've been at rock bottom, slept on a bench, it's proof we get through'
Presenter Gail Porter shared how she has overcome depression, alopecia and homelessness to find new purpose and joy in life At 54, Gail Porter is reflecting on a life that has taken her from the heights of TV fame to the depths of homelessness and back again. Now, she says, she is finally in a good place. 'I'm 100% happy,' she tells the Mirror. 'I've got my cat. My daughter's doing brilliantly, she's 22 now, finished uni and is working. I'm working, too, mostly charity stuff, and often for free, but I still worry about the next paid job. After being sectioned and homeless, I feel very lucky. I have great friends.' The presenter and mental health advocate has never shied away from speaking about her struggles, including the moment in 2011 when she was sectioned under a 28-day order at a psychiatric unit in North London. 'It was terrifying,' she recalls. 'I was drugged up to my eyeballs, sharing a ward with men convinced they were Jesus, and violent patients. 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If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Now, she's embracing a new chapter with the launch of her own wig, 'The Gail', part of Amber Jean Rowan's ethical collection. 'People say, 'Gail, you said you'd never wear a wig,' and I went 20 years without one, but now there's a choice. The first time I put on The Gail, my custom wig, I fell in love. It's not about covering anything up, it's self-expression.' With stand-up gigs, cruise ship Q&As, a new memoir in the works, and backing Prince William's Homewards homelessness campaign, Porter's life is full once again. 'I've been at rock bottom, from sleeping on a bench to standing on a cruise stage, it's proof we get through,' she says. 'You don't need therapy if you find your therapy. Mine is a spin class. When I was at my worst, I paid £100 for unlimited classes for two weeks and did two rides a day. My friends say I look so fit and happy. It's my lifeline.' She adds simply: 'I'm not brave. I wake up, put one foot in front of the other, and here I am. That's all anyone can do.'
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Australia v British & Irish Lions live: score, commentary, updates
Will Kelleher, in Melbourne There we go, Joe Schmidt is asked on Sky Sports about how he's driving the week, and he says: 'Speaking of driving we're about 15 minutes late to the ground unfortunately because you couldn't drive very far in the traffic that's out there, which is indicative of the crowd that's gathering. It's a massive crowd, a huge venue and a massive night.' Gotta get that police escort, mate? Great Barrier Island sits in the South Pacific Ocean, a 4½-hour ferry ride out from Auckland, New Zealand. In summer there are daily crossings, cut down to three a week in winter. Named by Captain Cook, the volcanic island 62 miles away from the country's biggest city, out in the Hauraki Gulf, now hosts a touch more than 1,000 people, up a few hundred in the past decade, most of whom live off the national grid. It has only one informal rugby club — the Bushpigs — who play one proper match per year. With not enough players to form age-grade sides, if you are a kid of any shape or size, you get chucked into the mixer. This is where Jamison Gibson-Park's story begins. The end, for now, will have the Barrier-born Irishman in a British & Irish Lions team at scrum half for the second Test against Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of nearly 90,000 fans. It will be a little more high profile than the start of his journey. • Read more Will Kelleher, in Melbourne It is filling up here, and we have the now-customary sight of one end being completely filled with red. The travel companies have put their supporter groups behind one goal for these Tests, and for this game the Aussies seem to have responded by placing gold hats on the seats at the other end. We have finally had the rain that we were expecting — although it is more of a light mizzling than a downpour. More from Michael Fish, next… Stuart Barnes England's first innings. Came out hard and fast with the openers rattling up a meaty opening partnership at around five runs per over. Thereafter eased off and took control. Lions did part one but made a mess of part two in Brisbane. Expecting more from both these teams today. Thank the Lord for Jac Morgan's selection. Or thank Lord Farrell, at least. Morgan's selection can give you faith. Legions of British & Irish Lions fans will be relieved and delighted that Morgan has been promoted to the bench for the second Test against Australia in Melbourne on Saturday. And, yes, a majority of them may be Welsh, but what is crucial here is to remember the position held by Andy Farrell, the head coach: that he won't allow his selection process to be swayed by national interests or any desire to keep all four nations represented. Rightly so, of course. Yet Morgan's selection for the second Test is important for reasons far more weighty than any kind of PR. It is only a bench spot, but it is representative of far more. It proves that it has still been possible to play your way into the team. • Read more from Owen Slot Alex Lowe, in Melbourne Tim Horan, the great Wallaby centre, is not soft-soaping things tonight. 'I reckon this is the most important rugby Test match for the Wallabies since the 2015 World Cup final. So much at stake for our game. 90,000 at the MCG. Australian rugby is in grave danger. They cannot compete when it comes to signing the best schoolboys and that battle will only get harder with the NRL due to expand by three teams. The Wallaby Schoolboys No8 has signed for Toulouse. One of the newspapers over here ran a composite XV of Aussie 'footie' players. Six Wallabies made it — Max Jorgenson, Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii and Rob Valetini — plus the front row 'because it is such a specialist position'.They are lucky to get six because the XV did not include league stars Cameron Munster, Angus Chrichton or Latrell Mitchell. Stephen Jones, in Melbourne Wallaby hopes for a revival today centre around the great Will Skelton. The lock is one of the greatest in his position I have ever seen live. I would rank him very close to Martin Johnson and Simon Shaw, also to Eben Etzebeth, and Patricio Albacete. He may not get the trip but 50 minutes of him could do wonders Will Kelleher, in Melbourne The Australian bus was 20 minutes late to the ground, but they have arrived, and then lost the toss. As someone who sat dead still for 15 minutes earlier today trying to get to St Kilda in a taxi, I feel the Wallabies' pain. Joe Schmidt has a real thing about late buses. In 2017 Schmidt's Ireland were late into Murrayfield — behind pipers and all — and then lost 27-22, and he blamed their late arrival. Australia really needed everything to go perfectly for them. So not a great start. Owen Slot, in Melbourne This is the reason the Wallabies will win. At least according to an Aussie I had a coffee with this morning. He explained that because the MCG is an oval, the touchlines aren't hemmed in by the sightlines that the Lions kickers will be accustomed to: the crowd and the advertising hoardings. The Wallabies, meanwhile, will have played in these ovals more often. It's a decent point and it will definitely take some adjusting to, though I'd imagine the Lions kickers will have been practicing with this in mind. I can't believe that my new Aussie chum is the only one to have thought about it, Anyway, I've just found my seat in the media tribune and the news is that one touchline does have an advertising hoarding all the way down the side of the pitch. So that's half the disadvantage removed immediately. I'm not sure if that's still enough. I'll go and find my Aussie friend… Whenever you talk about Will Skelton, you have to start with the bare facts. Height: 6ft 8in. Weight: anywhere between 135-150kg (21-23st). Shoe size: 19 (he gets his boots custom made in Japan, and they look like white tugboats). The British & Irish Lions forwards coach John Fogarty called him a 'menace', and 'destructive', his opposite lock Ollie Chessum — 6ft 7in himself — said he was 'a huge human being' while Maro Itoje, the captain and a former team-mate of Skelton's from Saracens called him a 'talisman' thanks to his 'dynamism, size and power'. Meanwhile the other Australian players joked about how the nutritionists sighed when he came back into camp, as the food bill took a battering. Skelton, 33, is a giant in a big man's game. Then you have to mention the medals. Skelton has been part of four Champions Cup-winning teams — two Saracens, two La Rochelle — and has one Super Rugby and two Premiership titles in his large back-pockets. This is why Joe Schmidt — who is not quite a card-carrying Skelton fan — has picked Big Will for the big one at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Saturday, the second Test of the Lions series. This pedigree that Skelton brings is alien to many of the other Wallabies. • Read more Will Kelleher, in Melbourne I've been telling anyone and everyone all week that the last time I watched sport here was when England bowled out Australia for 98 on Boxing Day 2010, and then piled on 500 and retained the Ashes. On Boxing Day there were 91,000 in, but more like 40,000 by tea when the writing was on the wall, and Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook were settled. Do we get another shellacking tonight? Despite all reports of rain, thunder, lightning, storms and all, it is dry as a bone tonight in Melbourne. So all that stuff about a heavy night suiting Will Skelton may not come to fruition. The ground is slowly filling up. I'm fascinated to see how many we get in — it won't be the full 100,024 capacity, but anything over 84,188 makes it the record crowd for an Australia v Lions match, beating the attendance for the third Test in 2001. At the moment there are more seagulls than people up in the gods by our awesome press-bench seats. They're floating about looking for chips. Maybe we need a few of those shooting flames to clear them off! Just imagine how hard that confession must have been. Garry Ringrose's family have flown to Melbourne in anticipation of watching him on the grandest stage. The second Lions Test against Australia at the MCG, with an opportunity to win the series in front of 90,000 people, would be the biggest game of his career. Revealing the concussion symptoms would be likely to end his tour and he will be 34 by the next one. This may well have been his one chance to emulate Brian O'Driscoll and wear the Test No13 jersey. Ringrose spoke up anyway. In prioritising his own welfare, he also put the team first. Farrell said his first thought was that Ringrose had been 'unbelievably selfless' in coming forward. 'It's very easy to keep it to yourself and lie and not be honest and open. It was very big of him and the right thing to do, 100 per cent. For the team as well, not just for Garry,' Farrell said. • Read more from Alex Lowe Stephen Jones, in Melbourne Hello from the massive Melbourne Cricket Ground and our coverage will be coming to you from on high. Aircraft are circling lower than the media seats. There is a body of opinion in the city that an Aussie win will set up a fantastic last Test in Sydney next week. The hell with that. The Lions have messed up so many series over the decades, their followers should want a definitive performance and win this week, and a luxurious lap of honour next week. Let's see. The stirring midweek performance came in Melbourne on Tuesday from the First Nations & Pasifika (FNP) XV, whose pride and passion made this the best game of the tour. The result was in the balance to the final play. 'We've given ourselves a bit of a fright,' Andy Farrell, the Lions head coach, said after the game. The error-strewn Lions held out to win but they had been rattled by the FNP XV, who played with greater fire and physicality than Australia had mustered in the first Test. The Wallabies watching on from a corporate box at Marvel Stadium should have felt sheepish at the comparative lack of bite and brimstone they brought to the game in Brisbane. 'You need to take it to them head on,' FNP XV captain Kurtley Beale said. 'Playing rugby, you need physicality to lay the platform for your backs to play off. Hopefully we have inspired the Wallabies. • Read more Matt Cotton, in Melbourne We've been in the pub since 3.30pm local today. That's largely because it was the latest booking we could get in a bar anywhere near the east of the stadium. The power of the Lions again. We went to watch the AFL at the MCG on Thursday (no idea what was happening, and hopefully Alex Mitchell, sat several rows behind me, had a better understanding) and managed to snag the only free table (a tiny two-seater) at 4pm at Corner Hotel because, you guessed it, Lions fans were everywhere again. It's generating a wonderful atmosphere, though, and hopefully it can make Melbourne fall in love with Union again. It's a travesty that this great sporting city (which has the MCG, AAMI Park, and the Australian Open arenas such as Rod Laver, just to name a few, within a toddler's stone throw of one another) does not have an elite rugby union team after the Melbourne Rebels went bust. They love their sport here but they call everything 'footie'. AFL? Footie. Rugby league? Footie. Rugby union? Footie. Football? Soccer… Please enable cookies and other technologies to view this content. You can update your cookies preferences any time using privacy manager. Matt Cotton, in Melbourne This is my first Lions tour. I've been wanting to do this for years. All it took was my best friend (and basically only mate who likes rugby) moving his life to Melbourne and me marrying a woman addicted to going on holiday to make it happen. Easy really. I knew about the 'sea of red' beforehand. But even so, my mind has been blown by the amount of Lions merch and red about. I've been in Melbourne a week and it's genuinely about one in three people wearing Lions gear when you're out and about. We watched the first Test in a bar in St Kilda (which, to be fair, is like inverse Clapham in terms given the amount of Irish, English and Scots that live there) and, in the room we watched in, my other mate, a born and bred Aussie, was the only Wallaby fan in the area. It's beautiful. Which has me wondering: how badly do these fans smell? Do they have all the merch? Are they washing the same bit of kit every day? Either way, that stench is of rugger heritage, and I can't get enough of it. Joe Schmidt has prepared the Wallabies for a physical assault on the British & Irish Lions by picking Will Skelton and Rob Valetini, and opting for a 6-2 bench for Saturday's second Test. Schmidt criticised the Australians last weekend for being too 'submissive' when they lost the first Test at Suncorp Stadium 27-19, so has picked a beefed-up pack for the do-or-die game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Skelton, the 22st, 6ft 8in lock, starts in the second row with the 6ft 4in, 17st 11lb back-row forward Valetini returning from injury too. Both had calf issues last week but trained fully before the first Test in Brisbane, although neither were selected. 'We don't want to be nice, and we don't want to be submissive. We don't have the intention this week of being submissive,' Schmidt, the Wallabies head coach, said. Andy Farrell's plan to field an all-Ireland midfield for the second British & Irish Lions Test against Australia was scuppered at the last moment when Garry Ringrose declared concussion symptoms at the end of training on Thursday. The head coach's starting team for the second Test in Melbourne includes nine Irishmen, with Ellis Genge dropping to a bench that includes Owen Farrell and the Welshman Jac Morgan. But it is the 11th-hour absence of Ringrose that forced the head coach into a rethink. Ringrose missed the first Test because he was going through concussion protocols, but he came through 65 minutes of Tuesday's game against a First Nations & Pasifika XV without any ill effects. But Ringrose informed Farrell and the team doctor that he had developed symptoms just minutes before the team was named. Hello and welcome to our coverage of the second Test between Australia and the British & Irish Lions in Melbourne. After victory in the first Test in Brisbane last weekend, Andy Farrell's side will be hoping to seal a series win at the MCG today, while the Wallabies will want to force a decider next week. Our writers will be bringing you commentary and analysis throughout the game.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
