THE LATEST SPIN ON FIFTY SHADES OF GREY IS, APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, PANTS
Condolences to all the people who rushed out to buy EL James’s Grey in the first few days after its publication. All you got was a rehash of Fifty Shades of Grey, the first grand-slam effort by the same author (word used advisedly) to turn soft-core bondage porn into an e-book bonanza.
As a book (word also used advisedly) and a movie adaptation, Fifty Shades of Grey featured two main characters: the virginal, fragrant, adorably lip-biting Anastasia Steele and the steely, handsome Christian Grey. Christian is incredibly young, rich and powerful, even if the name of his business, “Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc,” sounds a little silly.
Fifty Shades was narrated by Ana, and not with a light touch. “Holy crap” was a favorite phrase, and she fell on all fours on meeting Christian, hinting at the sadomasochistic relationship the book had in store. English literature majors like Ana would recognise this as foreshadowing.
Although Christian had all the power when they first met, and even tried to coax Ana into signing a written agreement to let him spank, whip, handcuff and gag her, she turned out to be too smart to be so easily enslaved. She sensed the lonely soul within the control freak. Thus the first book became yet another sexually graphic starcrossed romance, newly accessible to e-reading women. It went on to inflict more pain through bad writing than through any of the elegant floggers and ropes and cuffs lined up in Christian’s “playroom”.
James, a former writer of Twilight fan fiction who is nothing if not shrewd, has managed to outshine the many authors who write similar, better or crazier material than her own. But on the evidence of Grey, she’s going to milk the Fifty Shades franchise until it’s bone dry. So we now get the same story from Christian’s point of view, and there are two new elements: his insecurity and his Greek chorus. The chorus, which has a lot of opinions, is in Christian’s pants.
That’s right: James’s own imagination is limited, and she has already taken it about as far as it’ll go. The story doesn’t have much action, and all of it has already been described in intimate detail by Ana. We know how she felt when she fell into Christian’s office on her hands and knees; what did he feel? Well, he felt that a pretty blue-eyed girl had landed on the floor, and saw she blushed like an innocent rose. And, “I wonder briefly if all her skin is like that – flawless – and what it would look like pink and warmed from the bite of a cane.”
Damn! (This is Christian’s favorite inner thought, followed by, “Get a grip, Grey!”) It turns out that the
guy whose minimal magnetism was based on his aloofness is tormented by lust and sensitive to Ana’s every twitch. He has such intense feelings that his pants keep getting tight, and James has him mention that fact repeatedly. Since she has very limited ways of hitting the hyperbole jackpot, she must actually say that when Christian has a hot thought, his penis concurs, as if the two were ever in disagreement about Ana. Christian and his childhood traumas radiate so much misery that a lot of the story’s heat is gone. The whole appeal of this character had to do with his combination of a wounded psyche and an unstoppable ardour that could only be satisfied by Ms Right.
James leaves herself badly exposed by this book’s flagrant air of desperation. Her own fans write better stories about Christian Grey than she does. The fact that hers is the hidebound, trademarked and much-copied version doesn’t make it the important one. She has let time stand still in order to capitalise on one big hit, but she’s working in such a fast-moving medium that her failure of imagination is dangerous. She didn’t exactly invent these characters in the first place: She was a Twilight fan who appropriated them, tweaked them and made them hugely saleable for a while. But a Grey who’s skittish, insecure and nervous as a kitten isn’t what she started out selling. So it remains to be seen how much blind faith she commands.