Brandon Robshaw: Teenagers are already Doing It. It isn't helpful to stop them reading about it

Calls to ban explicit teen novels are misguided

"I sucked Miss's tits and know what colour her pubes are," boasts a character in Melvyn Burgess's new teen novel, Doing It. The same character also describes "me lying down staring up Miss Young's minge while she give me a blow job." Though not published for another two months, the novel has already attracted the ire of the respected children's writer Anne Fine. Last weekend she denounced it, urging that the book be pulped, and only published – if at all – under an adult imprint. She made a trenchant argument. But she is wrong.

Now, Anne Fine has the advantage of me in that she has read Burgess's novel and I have not. Certainly, judging by the extracts she has chosen to quote, it seems a tacky piece of work. But judging by Burgess's previous novels – Junk, Lady, Bloodtide – I'd say it's most unlikely to be a tacky piece of work. Burgess is a writer who hits the spot every time for teenagers, a brilliant storyteller who never moralises. His characters make choices, it seems, free of the author's guiding hand. They're not always good choices. They may be disastrous or contemptible choices. But that's for the reader to decide.

My own view is that Doing It shouldn't be censured – let alone censored, as Fine proposes – just because it's rude. Our culture is liberalising itself at a pace that makes the permissive Sixties look cautious; four-letter words are commonplace even in broadsheet newspapers now and sexually explicit references are the stock-in-trade of sitcoms and soap operas, not to mention advertisements. It's neither possible nor desirable to shield teenagers from all this. Many teenagers are sexually active and those who are not are constantly thinking about it (unless teenagers have changed a lot since my day). Aha, Fine counters, but even if Doing It is realistic, that's no defence. As she says, realistic descriptions of the activities of racists or serial killers wouldn't be acceptable in teenage fiction. Well, granted. Realism per se is no defence. But realism about sex, which is not the vice of a twisted few but an overwhelmingly important part of everyone's life, and an intrinsically good thing – well, as far as I'm concerned: that's OK.

But, runs the case for the prosecution, impressionable teenagers – who are after all still children in some ways – need our protection. Books like this may shock, and even cause a distaste for sex. The argument isn't without force. I have two young daughters and as they grow older there are certain things I won't want them to read. I won't want them reading about murderous sexual atrocities, à la Brett Easton Ellis. This would be seriously distressing and I don't imagine any teen publisher would touch it. But Burgess's book doesn't contain that kind of nastiness. Kids won't suffer traumas through reading about the bragging and cynicism and bad sexual manners of teenage boys. It may even put teenage girls on their guard against lads' irresponsible sexual adventuring.

Teenage fiction is a relatively new genre. In my youth, one went straight from reading children's books to reading adult fiction. But the adult fiction we passed around at school in the 1970s was considerably more disturbing than anything Melvyn Burgess has come up with: the "Skinhead" series or Sven Hassell's tales of nasty Nazis, for example.

Burgess is writing frankly and entertainingly on a subject teenagers want and need to learn about. And this novel will appeal to that notoriously difficult-to-catch section of the reading public, teenage boys. He isn't the only writer to push the envelope; one might also cite Lian Hearne's Across the Nightingale Floor. That's the way the trend is going and anyone who objects is soon going to sound as quaintly old-fashioned as the prosecuting counsel at the Lady Chatterley trial.

Brandon Robshaw reviews teen fiction for 'The Independent on Sunday'