THE curious incident of the tart in the web-log asks interesting questions about what we call fiction and fact. Now that The Times is almost certain that Belle de Jour is not a prostitute on the game, but a writer on the make, her publishing deal looks set to collapse faster than one of her elderly clients without Viagra.

I am not sure that unmasking Belle, if indeed she has been unmasked, has done us any great service. Belle is a natural-born blogger; her style is witty and compact, with the right mixture of intimacy and disassociation. We feel we know her, yet we don’t know her at all — doubly so, if she turns out to be a fake.

Her entertainment value is huge, not just because she writes about sex, but because she writes about sex with a mind behind it. Saturated as we are with moronic, low-level porn — you can’t spend an afternoon at the gym without watching Britney or Justin undressing themselves — Belle has been a relief. She reminds us that sex is not about undressing but about dressing. What Belle puts on — from false eyelashes to her Wonderbra, from an expensive coat to a slutty top — is much more important than what she takes off.

Sex is about disguise. In the right hands, nakedness itself is a double-bluff. Who are we really, when we make love? Belle’s sexual disguises, her transformations, her reinterpretations, client by client, day by day, are a bold challenge to what we fondly call our “real lives”. Her internet persona is the perfect vehicle for this challenge, because the internet itself is a masked ball — impossible to say who is who, or what an identity conceals.

The shape-shifting possibilities of the internet are as exciting as a stranger in a dark alley. If Belle de Jour is a high-class call girl, she is one who must reinvent herself to please others, but also to keep her own sense of self intact. If she is Sarah Champion — apparently not a prostitute — then in what way are we being “deceived”? Deception — pretending to be something you are not — alters its meaning in cyberspace. Game playing is an essential ingredient of sex and the net, separately and together. Sex and the net combined seem to me to be the perfect playground.

So why do we have to know whether Belle is true or false, when she can only be both? If she is a call girl, deception and disguise are her game. If she is not a call girl, deception and disguise are her game.

Do we really believe that Belle the Blogger has given us unusual insights into the underworld of paid sex? What exactly have we learnt that we did not know before? Answer: nothing. We all know that expensive tarts work the rounds of expensive men. We know, too, that for the majority of prostitutes, life is a freezing doorway, a short skirt and a drug habit. Belle de Jour is quintessentially a theatre act, whether or not she is real. To read her as a documentary makes us naive or just stupid.

So don’t blame Belle if she has conned you. Conning you is her job, whether she’s Belle or Sarah Chambers, or the Vicar of Bray. Please don’t come the high-minded stuff about lies — no one reading a sex diary has any claim to the moral high ground. And after all, unless you are one of the men sleeping with Belle, which for all sorts of reasons is unlikely, she has not taken your money or sold you a dodgy car. All Belle has done is provide a lot of fun for free.

So now, the dull realists and the killjoy newspapers are having their fun at Belle’s expense, and perhaps we shall hear no more of her. This is a pity, because if more people read themselves as fictions and not as facts, the world might be a more creative place. Facts are always misleading. We are all of us made up of many lives, most of them unlived; the fascination of Belle’s blog is that she confronts us with our own fantasies. Only in the stories we invent can we be sure of getting closer to truth.

If Belle is somebody’s alter ego — like Dame Edna or Mrs Merton — then please can we keep her? Give her the publishing deal and a talk show. Let’s join in the game as adults instead of whining like disappointed children who have found out there is no Father Christmas.

Our obsession with “reality TV” and True-Life Crime and Tales of Ordinary Folk, is as flat and dead a hell as we make for ourselves. Here is somebody larger than life; why cut her down to size?

I say, let Belle pump up her oil-filled Wonderbra and get on with the party. And it is touching, anyway, in a society fixated on personal fame, that Belle is happy to keep us guessing.





The author’s new novel, Lighthousekeeping, is out next month

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