The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine by Krissy Kneen, book review

This sexual bildungsroman reads more like a bedtime story than a tale of erotic awakening

Limp erotica: Author Krissy Kneen (Anthony Mullins)

Telephone booths, we know from the supermost of superheroes, can assist in transformations from ordinary mortal to Caped Crusader. So here is Holly White, Australian virgin, suburban princess and abstinence queen, whose tortured voice of sexual desire echoes teen virgins we know already from mass market fiction; she is part-Bella Swan, part-Anastasia Steele (before Grey) when we meet her in Brisbane, squeezing her knees shut tight with every sexual tingle and chanting her abstinence mantra with a little too much frequency. So far, the ordinary, if irritating, mortal of YA fiction.

Until she is invited to a book club reached though the nether regions of a phone box, which plunges her into a new world of sexy literature. So begins Holly's transformation into a crusader of the flesh. One lesbian encounter later, her lover is pressing a copy of Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman into her hands and she has taken a plane to Paris to kickstart her re-enactments of stories from the canon of sexual literature, from Anaïs Nin's The Delta of Venus ("wanton" female adventuring), to Marquis de Sade's orgies, Erica Jong's ziplessness, and many more. The problem with this sexual bildungsroman, in which the classics are rebooted chapter by chapter, is that they are pale, prosaic imitations if you have encountered the exquisite originals. Perhaps this is because our 21st-century sexual thresholds are themselves transformed; perhaps it is just because the writing here is nowhere near as fine, screaming and howling, gushing and bucking, in too much monotone. Recast in today's vernacular, these ravishings and ravishments read like bedtime stories in the wrong sense of the term, lulling rather than awakening.

Krissy Kneen, described as Australia's "genre-bending queen of erotica", makes a brave attempt at originality by fusing sex with science fiction. It is certainly novel, but also, ultimately, ridiculous – reminiscent of, and not entirely disconnected to, Woody Allen's funny "orgasmatron" in Sleeper (1973).

Holly meets her romantic match in Nick who is on a journey to find Orgone, the "single most powerful force in the universe" emanated from an orgasm and to discover the existence of the superhero "Orgone Man", who can deliver the goods in formidable quantities. If harnessed, could Orgone become an alternative form of power, like wind or solar, we wonder. Is Kneen's an environmental message? And could Orgone have anything to do with Holly's "glow in the dark vulva" that emits a luminescent blue light (and streams blue gunge) every time she becomes aroused?

More importantly, have comic masters, Marvel, missed a trick? No, although it is amusing to think of how this superhero might be conjured in graphic form. This week, Morrissey became the latest recipient of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award. His "bulbous salutations" do not stand alone. Holly's strangely numbing story makes the reader wonder what good sex writing might look like. Maybe, like all prospective lovers, you only know it when you see it. And this isn't it.

Text Publishing, £10.99. Order at £9.89 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop