Title: Fifty Shades of Grey
Author: E.L. James
ISBN: 978-0099579939
Publisher: Arrow (26 April 2012)
I’ve procrastinated over whether to do a review for Fifty Shades of Grey because, frankly, there’s not a lot that I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. The coverage of – and the furore around – this book has been absolutely massive and you can’t seem to walk five paces without bumping into someone who’s reading it or having a conversation about it. It’s broken sales records set by J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard, Harry Potter, and is the first book ever to reach the one million sales mark on Amazon Kindle. If you’ve been living in a parallel universe and haven’t a clue what I’m going on about, here’s a brief run-down …
Fifty Shades of Grey is an erotic romance written by British author E.L. James (a pseudonym for London T.V. executive Erika Leonard). It started life as fanfiction based on the characters and stories from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which James later reworked to create Fifty Shades of Grey and the two subsequent books in the series, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. To boil it right down to basics:
- Edward Cullen (wealthy blood-sucking vampire) becomes Christian Grey (wealthy flogger-wielding sadist);
- Bella Swan (virginal high school student) becomes Anastasia Steele (virginal college graduate);
- Forks (small Pacific North West town) becomes Seattle (large Pacific North West city).
So what’s all the fuss about? Well, if the media – who have managed to whip themselves into a completely ridiculous frenzy over it – are to be believed, this book is porn for the fairer sex (it isn’t); it’s unbelievably racy (well, it is steamier than a standard Mills & Boon but on the raunch scale it’s hardly the Marquis de Sade); and feminism has been set back twenty years because women are reading about sexual submission and – cue sharp intake of breath – enjoying it (no consensual power exchange fantasies for you).
I’ll be blunt. I have a love-hate relationship with this book. On one hand, I think it’s terrific that erotica and erotic romance, written for and by women, has entered the mainstream consciousness and that people are talking openly about it; any book that manages to prompt frank dialogue around sex and sexuality gets a thumbs up as far as I’m concerned. All too often, women are made to feel ashamed of – or that that they’ll be judged for – their reading choices and desires. The brilliant Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books summed it up best in her Romance, Arousal and Condescension blogpost back in March of this year:
Romance is not porn for women.
Porn is porn for women.
Women have active sex lives and sexual desires.
All of these things are ok.
Here, here!
The thing I’m enjoying most about this book’s success? The fact that I’ve been able to talk much more frankly with people about erotica, romance and sex in general. The door was only cracked before (and in some cases closed and bolted); now it’s wide open and we’re much less concerned about who sees us walking through it.
On the flip side, the writing, characterisation and story development in Fifty (the things that make a decent book, basically) aren’t particularly good – in fact, they’re pretty awful – and, if I’m judging it against these things then it fails miserably.
If you’ve read Twilight, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the general storyline: Boy meets girl. Boy is obsessively attracted to girl (and vice versa). Boy tells her he’s bad for her (in the case of Fifty because he wants to handcuff her and whack her with a crop rather than suck every drop of blood from her body) and professes that they can’t be together because of his ‘issues’. 300+ pages of emotional angst ensues. Original it isn’t. The writing? It’s clunky and littered with the remnants of a journey through Roget’s Thesaurus (‘my unconscious has raised her somnambulant head’), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (‘I thought I was d’Urberville, not Angel’), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (‘I feel like Icarus flying too close to the sun’) – although I suspect there was a day trip to the Wikipedia BDSM page, too (‘‘Hard limits?’ I ask. ‘Yes. What you won’t do.’’) There’s some deep philosophical thinking about the liking of cheese, too. (Don’t ask.)
But … BUT … For all its flaws, Fifty Shades of Grey is undoubtedly speaking to readers. The phrase that seems to come up again and again when I ask them what they like about it is ‘Well, the writing’s terrible but I just can’t seem to put it down’.
Anaïs Nin once wrote:
‘Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore …. how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships which change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.’
- The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 3, 1939-1944
And I think this might be the crux of it; my guess is that readers are compelled by, and are accepting of, the so-called ‘raunchier’ sex in Fifty because it is supported by the characters’ deep emotional entanglement. It’s not porn, which we can loosely define as gratuitous sex without emotion; it’s a romance. Who doesn’t enjoy a story in which love overcomes all obstacles?
The issues I have with Fifty Shades? Well, I’ve been reading books in the BDSM erotic romance genre for quite some time and know what else is out there – and believe me, there’s some really amazing writing, both old and new, that I think presents BDSM relationships in a far more positive, balanced and exciting way than Fifty Shades of Grey does. Take Cherise Sinclair’s Masters of the Shadowlands series, for example. I’m also uncomfortable with Christian Grey, the hero of the series, being portrayed as having something wrong with him because he has sexual proclivities that aren’t considered ‘mainstream’. My personal view is that no matter what your sexual preferences are, as long as you’re not breaking any laws by indulging them and your involvement with others is safe, sane and consensual, no one has the right to call them ‘fucked up’. Heck, if having sex while dressed as a chicken turns you on, knock yourself out.
But, clearly, this book strikes a chord with many people and my issues with it won’t necessarily be yours.
If you read Fifty Shades of Grey and felt turned on, eager to talk about sex with your partner and explore something new sexually (and from everything I’ve seen and read this seems to be very much the case), or you just flat-out enjoyed the story and are now reading more erotic romance as a result, then I could kiss E.L. James for writing it. Personally, I felt like I should have been flogged for reading it – and I would likely have enjoyed that more.
Fifty Shades of Grey is available from: Amazon.co.uk (Kindle ; paperback), Amazon.com (Kindle ; paperback), Barnes & Noble (Nook ; paperback), Kobo (eBook).
