Fifty Shades of Grey is one of those books that you’ve just got to read. Whatever your pre-purchase views on its prospective merits (or otherwise), everyone seems to be talking about it, and not just with the dreary, uncontested awe that has been bestowed upon recent literary dominators the like of Harry Potter’s J K Rowling and The Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown. In fact, besides Bret Easton Ellis’s alluring avowal that he’d love to write the screenplay for the inevitable (adult?) movie adaptation of Fifty Shades, the main thing that drew me to the book was its apparently divisive nature – as I write this, there have been 1,172 five star reviews published on Amazon UK; 831 one star reviews; and comparatively few in between. A piece of work that’s so defiantly contentious has to be worth at least the once-over.
Borne of a provocative Twilight fan fiction serial, Master of the Universe, this erotic tale was quietly published as an e-book and humble print-on-demand paperback before going on to subdue the literary universe. This has led many to surmise that the growth of e-books, and the privacy that they afford their readers, has really opened up the “mummy porn” market, allowing millions of women worldwide to get their thrills from their e-readers in the same way that their male counterparts do from their laptops. After all, it’s no secret that sex sells – and now there needn’t be any stigma in its purchase as no-one has to see what you’re reading. Yet Fifty Shades of Grey can now claim to be the fastest-selling paperback of all time too, surpassing even the Harry Potter series’ seven instalments. This title isn’t one that’s whispered about in hushed tones or appreciated solely through self-conscious peeks at a Kindle any longer – it’s on the agenda, if not the table, at just about every housewives’ coffee morning.However, despite its world dominance, my initial impressions weren’t good. Whilst I’ve read far worse prose than E L James’s, I found it functional at best, and the first few chapters’ characterisation hardly set me alight either. I could still appreciate why it would appeal to a certain audience though; the dynamic between the eponymous tycoon, Christian Grey, and the diffident college student press-ganged into interviewing him, Anastasia Steele, put me in mind of the eminent protagonists in many a Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy or T S Eliot tale – works that James sporadically references throughout Fifty Shades. I struggled to suppress sighs as, in the spirit of the classics (classics that I have no love for, please bear in mind), James recreated the jaded truism of the well-to-do man about town and the decorous little thing that’s caught his eye.
But then, just a few chapters in, I began to get a sense for what James was really looking to do. Fifty Shades isn’t some classical homage, duly updated for a contemporary readership and enlivened with a few kinky, explicit thrills – it’s much more than that. The relationship between Christian and Ana takes the stereotype of the dominant male and submissive female and puts it in the proper context, publicly lifting the veil on a lifestyle that’s often looked upon with fear and disgust and exposing its true psychology. In giving herself over to Grey and becoming his submissive, Ana is the one who’s ultimately empowered - she chooses to acquiesce, and thus enjoy all the sensory extremes that follow that submission. If that’s not feminism in action, I don’t know what is.
I also have to applaud James for maintaining so narrow a focus over such a sizeable word count. Before I picked up Fifty Shades, I’d never read a novel that vested everything in just two central characters. Naturally, there are supporting players here, but they are little more than clichéd ciphers – the whole narrative is carried by Ana’s first person, present tense narration. This is, in many ways, the book’s greatest strength as it allows the reader to follow Ana’s horrifying and invigorating journey blow by blow, but it’s also its main weakness as Ana isn’t the world’s greatest storyteller, to say the least.
Indeed, James has offered critics a free shot with some of Ana’s stock phrases – “crap” and “double crap” immediately spring to mind - that might be turned into meta-textual slights on Fifty Shades’ intrinsic worth, and worse still Ana’s voice often sounds much more British than it does American – eagle-eyed readers (of the Kindle edition, at least) will spot a few greys (as in the colour, not the “Mr Fifty Shades of Fucked-Up”) that should have been grays, together with a flood of expressions that are far more redolent of the author’s native London than they are Miss Steele’s King County. However, if you can dispel such incongruities, then Ana maintains a bland believability that only seems to heighten the thrills that follow her rousing induction into the Dark Knight’s world of canes and hogties. Yes, Ana may rebelliously roll her eyes and nervously bite her lip whenever she’s in her master’s presence, but how many of us unveil unique idiosyncrasies in each and every sexual encounter? Let’s face it, our sexual reactions are samey – even within the Dark Knight’s Red Room of Pain.Fifty Shades of Grey is without a doubt the most blunt and truthful examination of human sexuality that I’ve read outside a Belle de Jour memoir. On the strength of Ana’s often arduous musings, James lacks the pseudonymous Dr Magnanti’s wry wit and sharp phraseology, but she more than makes up for this with her invigorating discourse on guilt, power and free will, and the pleasures and pitfalls that flow from the same. If good old J K hopes to outsell this dominatrix of a novel when The Casual Vacancy hits the shelves, she’d better have swapped the magic wands of Olivander’s for those manufactured by Hitachi.
