The circus around the new Fifty Shades book is another level
Melanie McDonagh QUITE the most interesting thing about the new Fifty Shades book by E L James, called Grey, is the fact that a copy of it has been stolen. A series of alarmed emails from lawyers acting for Penguin Random House to newspapers this week declared not only that we must be on our guard against inadvertently using the stolen material — what, the adjectives? — but that we shouldn’t mention the fact of the theft at all. That might compromise the enquiry, see?
Nonetheless, the theft has come into the public domain and if the publicity generates that little bit more interest in the book, why, that’s something the publishers will have to live with. A few pages from one of the later Harry Potter volumes was similarly nicked before publication by a forklift driver who tried to flog it to The Sun but it did no harm to the eventual sales. And unlike Grey, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was worth reading.
Harry Potter is in fact the nearest we get to the E L James phenomenon: the embargos, the secrecy, the lawyers, the drama of the launch ( just so you know, Grey comes out on the 18th — the character’s birthday!). Mind you, there’s a bit of a gulf between the children with shining faces lining up in bookshops at midnight and the grown women waiting for Grey, on Kindle and in person.
The whole business of expectation and expectation management here depends on the underlying phenomenon of the multi-book deal. It’s not enough for a novel to stand alone; you’re not really worth your salt for a publisher if you can’t run to at least a trilogy, and Harry Potter came to seven volumes. Each book points us to the next: each film ditto. The only limit to the thing is the author’s imagination, and in the case of E L James it appears pretty well inexhaustible.
Grey is the Fifty Shades story seen from the point of view of the protagonist, viz, Christian, the spanker rather than the spankee, though I expect it throws in something about his troubled past. For a bit of, you know, depth. The trilogy to date has sold more than 125 million copies worldwide; terrifyingly, nearly all of them to women.
But for the UK publisher, Penguin Random House, which sells it under its Vintage imprint, there’s no such thing as a bad bestseller: in 2012, the year after the first publication, Fifty Shades apparently created a 76 per cent increase in Random House’s worldwide sales.
One is reminded of the late Mother Theresa, who serenely remarked about taking money from despots to feed the poor: “Give me your money and I will make it clean.” Well, for publishers the dilemma about making money from p o r n o g r a p hy d o e s n’ t e ve n a r i s e . Granted, the publishers in this case don’t rely on E L James for their prosperity but it’s funny to think that its high-brows such as Richard Flanagan and Ian McEwan are being paid from a pot to which E L James has contributed so much.
I doubt myself that the premise of the thing — presumably, that Christian Grey is a deeply vulnerable human being — will address the fundamental problem of Fifty Shades, viz, that modern women are turned on by S&M sex between a masterful billionaire and a young and inexperienced girl. It makes you blush for your sex. Feminists still haven’t got their heads around it. Perhaps the thief of the text is a fan who simply can’t wait to read it rather than someone seeking unlawful gain. I’m not sure which is more depressing.
For publishers the dilemma about making money from pornography doesn’t even arise