The National Book Award was fun, but I’m more interested in the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which will be handed out on Wednesday.

We were not entirely surprised to see the great Tim Willocks there, with his novel of the Crusades, The Religion, “a book that never lets the beacon of the hero’s gigantic todger slip below the horizon for more than a few pages,” according to our reviewer, Tim Martin. “That’s the Bad Sex Award in the bag,” he concluded, after quoting passages involving “fast-engorging privities” and “the folds of her matrix.” In the bit that wowed the Literary Review, the hero “bent her across the the cold steel face of the anvil … she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge …”

But Willocks faces a tough challenge from Thomas Pynchon, with a sex scene between a man and a spaniel (“Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate ‘French’ caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress … Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. ‘Here Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here …’”).

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Water imagery is to the Bad Sex prize what post-colonialism is to the Man Booker. This year, Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother qualified handsomely. “And it swept over her like surf sweeping over sand then falling back and sweeping up over the sand again and falling back. Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs.” Genius!

But lest you think the big boys … have it sewn up, the little-known Julia Glass mounts a strong challenge in The Whole World Over: “all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly train, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release in something deep in the core of her altered brain …” And so on, on, yes, on!