Erotic ‘bonkbusters’ do not exist in France - but they should

When Jilly Cooper died in October, French newspapers duly reported on the passing of Britain’s reine de la romance épicée. The obituaries noted her astonishing sales, that former PM Rishi Sunak had been a fan, and coyly referred to her raunchy output as saupoudrés d’érotisme (sprinkled with eroticism). 

These tributes were short, perfunctory, and crucially devoid of any attempt to translate ‘bonkbuster’ - the specific sub-genre of romance fiction that Cooper made almost entirely her own.

In France’s fine tradition of sex-heavy writing (from the Marquis de Sade and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos to Anaïs Nin and Catherine Millet), the ‘bonkbuster’ is its blindspot.

The term was coined in the 1980s by British writer Sue Limb to describe a book that delivered both commercial success (‘blockbuster’) and chronic shagging (the bonk bit).

Rather than the simplistic ‘girl-meets-boy, has it off, has a happy ending’ arc of conventional romance novels, bonkbusters are more expansive. Expect melodrama, multiple characters, a liberal dash of madness. 

Many commentators have suggested they share much in common with soap operas, and it is telling that France had no tradition of this phenomenon either until fairly recently.

In many ways it makes perfect sense that bonkbusters haven’t made the cross-Channel leap. Largely it’s to do with subtlety - or lack of. Consider the “criminally handsome” Rupert Campbell-Black, who appears in 11 Cooper novels and boasts a “cock like a baseball bat. Used to bat bread rolls across the room with it when we were at school.” 

“It's just not French to treat such things that way,” a (French) colleague expounded. “Sex is more sophisticated. There’s no Dolly Parton in France for a reason.”

Then there’s the genre’s obsession with excess, not just sexual but fame and wealth, which also feels culturally jarring. This brashness is highlighted on the book covers themselves, all gold lettering and gusto. 

An article in the New Statesman pointed out that Jilly Cooper had not written a title without an exclamation mark “since 1996”. In a country whose national characteristic is the shrug, you can see why this might be problematic for booksellers.

But there are just as many reasons why Cooper should strike a chord. Her attitude to sex has much more in common with Gallic permissiveness than buttoned-up British stereotypes. We should be less uptight and just enjoy it more, is the message most readers take from her novels. 

And then there’s the complicated relationship with feminism. While Cooper’s books championed a woman’s right to pleasure, her view of the #MeToo movement appeared to echo that of the 100 high-profile French women who, in 2018, penned an open letter to Le Monde rejecting the "puritanism" of it.

Finally, far from being a barrier to non-natives, Cooper’s exhaustive interest in the bed-hopping of Britain’s upper classes is, you would think, catnip to the same tranche of the French population who proved suckers for such recent series as The Crown and Downton Abbey. 

There’s still time for Jilly Cooper to catch on. And the country is not entirely short of home-grown promise in the meantime – often from unlikely sources. 

“A real bosom is round, it’s comfortable, it’s welcoming and you have to be able to put your nose in the middle with jubilation,” wrote one Edouard Philippe in a 2011 novel satirising French politics. 

Not quite baseball bats and bread rolls, but perhaps here’s another former PM who will one day admit to being a Cooper fan.