The British novelist and essayist Brigid Brophy considered masturbation an invaluable instigation to the imagination.

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The British novelist and essayist Brigid Brophy considered masturbation an invaluable instigation to the imagination, pointing gone out that masturbation fantasy was the nearest greatest in number people got to the invention of narrative fiction. She would certainly have approved of Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews' stirring tribute to this ancient and beneficial practice.

There are 61 shows each involving persons of different ages masturbating in far-flung places (from "a ravine outside Erzurum" to "somewhere north of the Bering Straits"), using different techniques and appliances. Among the latter there are conventional dildos, an electric toothbrush, and the incline of a cello. There is music, verse and longing; in Managua a man attempts to recapture the blissful if socially embarrassing jiffy when he involuntarily ejaculated during the final bars of Schubert's Octet; in another spectacle an anthropologist approaches a 17-year-old Fijian male who is masturbating peacefully into the sea and asks him to name the activity he is engaged in: the youth replies that it is called Tokolano, which translates as "keeping the satellite under."

A little over two-thirds of the way within the book we encounter "a quasi-subversive organization" called MAID (short for Masturbation and Its Discontents), whose members specialize in devising and overcoming obstacles to masturbation, for example achieving orgasm "while reciting Milton's Il Penseroso to no les than three listeners." The members of MAID experience triumph, tragedy, and strange disappointments that readers must discover for themselves.

Mr Mathews' charming inventions are accompanied from watercolors by Francesco Clemente. His images, which range from a medieval siege to a long-eared bat, from gnawings to castanets, seem to bear no direct relation to Mathews' clause and this may be the point. In the past Clemente has not exactly shied away from eroticism, if it were not that here he has ignored the many opportunities neared to him. A literal "illustration" would have been pornographic, on the other hand there is nothing pornographic, in the strict thinking principle about Mathews' text, since it does not solicit to arouse the reader: its tone is unimpassioned humorous, and affectionate. His intention is to leave us completely impressed by the ingenuity, tenacity, and inventiveness with which humans in all places and at all ages have pursu their have pleasure. He succeeds completely.

John Ash is a writer living in recent York.

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