EL James's erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest selling book of the year, but is it actually any good? Una Brankin and her friends slip between the cover...
Forget Mills & Boon, this is one book you won’t read in public
Before I know it, he’s got both my hands in one of his in a viselike (sic) grip above my head, and he’s pinning me to the wall using his hips. His other hand grabs my hair and yanks it down, bringing my face up, and his lips are on
mine. It’s only just not painful. I moan into his mouth, giving his tongue an opening ... I’ve never been kissed like this ... I’m helpless, my hands pinned, my face held, and his hips restraining me... Oh my ... He wants me. Christian Grey, Greek god, wants me, and I want him, here ... now, in the elevator.’
No, it’s not Mills and Boon, although you’d be forgiven for thinking so. It’s the first kiss shared by virginal undergraduate Anastasia and her kinky billionaire admirer in Fifty Shades of Grey, the latest publishing phenomenon to be adapted for the big screen — and it’s the only part of the passionate sections I can quote before it gets wildly explicit. The genre is being tagged Mommy Porn, due to its popularity among women of a certain age, but it’s really quite pedestrian chick-lit, albeit X-rated chick-lit.
Hollywood star Ryan Gosling (The Notebook; Crazy Stupid Love) is rumoured to be playing the dark and damaged S&M fan Christian. His Crazy Stupid Love co-star Emma Stone would make a good dorky Anastasia but the role hasn’t been cast yet.
Author EL James, aka Erika Mitchell (49), signed the $5m (£3m) film contract with Universal last month and now has a six-book publishing deal with Random House, having sold 250,000 e-book and print copies.
The first of a trilogy, Fifty Shades Of Grey, is top of the American, UK and Irish bestseller lists and is dominating titillated reading groups all over the world.
It’s quickly catching on here too: when I went into Easons to ask for it, the salesgirl said that lots of women had been ringing to see if it was in, and warned, conspiratorially, that it’s supposed to be “really raunchy”.
That’s an understatement — the vast majority of the narrative is taken up with hair-raising sado-masochistic antics featuring spanking, riding crops and cable-ties and various unmentionable sex toys, mostly in Christian’s ‘red room of pain’, the naughty ante-chamber in his Seattle mansion.
In short, naive literature student Anastasia meets the charismatic sadist when she interviews him for the college magazine. He wines and dines her, and woos her with extravagant gifts, then gets her to sign a contract to become the ‘submissive’ to his ‘dominant’ in his racy games. She has a sexual awakening and falls hard, but there’s something mysterious from his past which keeps him from committing to her.
This leaves the London-based author plenty of scope for two follow-up novels, Twilight-style. She has admitted that she loved the Stephanie Meyer vampire trilogy; she even wrote fan-fiction yarns about Twilight’s Bella Swann and Edward Cullen, and Meyer’s influence is plain to be seen in Fifty Shades.
However, control freak Christian is potentially far more dangerous than sappy vegetarian vampire Edward, and when he goes too far with his ‘discipline’, there’s sore buttocks and trouble in paradise for Anastasia.
Of course, from Heathcliff to Mr Big, most women love a bit of danger and darkness in their romantic heroes but this Christian creature — although intriguing in the beginning — eventually gave this reader the creeps.
This aversion could be linked though to a friend’s tales of an S&M follower she went out with in England, who persuaded her once to act out the dominant role to his submissive, using her nursing training (I’ll spare you the gross details.) Once was enough and the last straw came when she upset his alphabetically arranged cereals, sauces and foodstuffs in his OCD designed cupboards and fridge.
The fictional Christian also has control issues but Fifty Shades seems to imply that women secretly want domineering men.
Former TV producer and mother-of-two Erika James claims she has grown women screaming at her “as though I was Brad Pitt” at book signings, and both sexes thanking her for spicing up their relationships.
She has been happily married for 25 years to scriptwriter Niall Leonard (Hornblower; Silent Witness), who takes her saucy narrative in his stride. She claims her mother and her 82-year-old aunt “really enjoyed it”, while her teenage sons are apparently mortified.
“Fifty Shades is a romantic fantasy story which offers women a holiday from their husbands,” she said in a recent interview. “When you fall in love, you have a lot of sex, at least from what I can remember! My book is a guilty pleasure.
“I’ve had very funny letters and sweet and moving ones from people saying such things as: ‘you’ve put me in touch with myself.’ But I never set out to do that.”
‘It’s all panting mouths and raging hormones’
What Una Brankin thought:
Erica James read 800 risque novels before posting her first erotic story on the internet, and seems to have poured every eye-popping drop of content she came across into Fifty Shades of |Grey, both in scenes involving ‘vanilla sex’ (Christian’s memo|rable term for the straight stuff) and the steamier passages in his scary romper-room.
Written in the present tense, the pace is brisk. The author has never set foot in Seattle, where the action takes place, and as result there is no sense of place at all.
She’s far too busy describing bodily interiors than rain-swept skylines, and coming up with classic lines such as, “I’d really like to claim your ass” for her anti-hero. Half-way through I was fed up hearing about what was going on in the excitable Anastasia’s quivering insides and over-stimulated brain, and near the end, frankly nauseated by one particular, shall we say, messy bit.
Prudish objections to the side, the real problem here is the irritating, oddly coy heroine Anastasia and the cliche–ridden, clunky story-telling. It’s all predictable “clenching jaws and thighs, raging hormones, chewed lips and panting mouths” and so much blushing and flushing the heroine must be permanently beetroot.
Annoying Anastasia goes on far too much about her ‘inner goddess’ and disapproving subconscious, and the narrative is hideously over-written, with exaggerated mannerisms at every turn and some of the hammiest dialogue. Hopefully the Hollywood scriptwriters do a ruthless editing job in the adaptation, as properly handled this could make an entertaining enough film.
Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, Arrow, £7.99
‘So, is Gosling the man to play evil anti-hero?’
What our panel thought:
So did Fifty Shades Of Grey put our sample reading group in touch with themselves?
“Well it was quite an entertaining read but you wouldn’t take it that seriously,” said a PA from the Royal Victoria Hospital, who’s afraid to be named for fear of her father’s disapproval over her choice of reading.
“I can imagine a certain type of American reader getting a bit carried away by it.
“I actually found parts of it hilarious, though I don’t think it was meant to be.
“There’s an awful lot of panting and grinding and so on, far too over-the-top.”
Her colleagues are mostly in agreement although some were more taken with the enigmatic, handsome Christian Grey.
“I found him fascinating and I kept imagining him as the Batman actor Christian Bale — he’d be brilliant at playing him,” said one woman, who was also shy of revealing her name.
“I liked the way the writer kept you guessing about what happened in his past to make him the way he is and I can’t wait to find out more about him in the next two books.
“Ryan Gosling seems tailor-made for the role of Christian Grey.”
Another reader described Anastasia as “a disgrace to feminism”.
“She reinforces all the stereotypes about the submissive little woman who adores being dominated by her big Alpha male,” she said.
“All this stuff about this sort of book being liberating for women is rubbish. And all this ‘Holy cow!’ and ‘Holy shit!’ she comes out with every time it gets intimate — I could’ve strangled her!
“I definitely won’t be reading the other two but I can see why others will. Sex sells, doesn’t it?”
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