First things first; some may question the rhetoric involved in the title, namely the last two words, "literary" and "phenomenon." For better or worse, whether you like it or not, the book is literature by default, so we can get that bit out of the way and not worry ourselves with wiffle waffle about high art and this, that and the other. As for the latter, the sales speak for themselves. It is undeniable that this book and the franchise/brand it spawned stand as a cultural milestone to some degree, in that, like other such popular texts in this century as The Da Vinci Code, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Twilight and Gone Girl, it has inspired a dialogue and become a talking point in general conversation outside the spheres more commonly associated with literature. Unlike cinema or music, there are still a lot of people who do not engage with words on a given page and find it to be a dull, taxing, time-consuming, and rather tedious activity. But say the four words 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' and folks will automatically make the necessary connections and associations, and more often than not share and vocalise their opinions.
Which brings me to my next point. It has long been a practice of mine, not just from my ten-year tenure as a film reviewer but from my own personal enjoyment of art, that I withhold my opinion on something until I have personally engaged with it. Not that I withdraw from reviews or whatever, I just find that I prefer not to speak about something unless I have a fair idea of what it is about.
My initial encounters with this book were, like many others, through exposure by way of word of mouth. At first, it was the kind of thing that was spoken of in whispers, as though uttering the title would have a similar effect to the naming of Voldemort in the Harry Potter books. There was an air of the forbidden about the text. Developing from the seeds of the Twilight fan fiction Master Of The Universe, Fifty Shades Of Grey was initially published as an e-book and in print on demand by The Writers' Coffee Shop in May of 2011, followed by the Fifty Shades Darker in September, and Fifty Shades Freed the following January. By this stage, the buzz circulating around the series led to interest from several publishers, before being picked up by Vintage Books in April 2012. By August had Amazon UK announced that Fifty Shades Of Grey had sold more copies than the Harry Potter series combined, making the author EL James its best-selling author.
During this time and in the years since, with the series' continued prominence due to the film adaptations starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, I have heard a lot about Fifty Shades Of Grey, but always held out on reading it, for no real reason at all other than I was reading and doing other things. However, as I recently touched on a particular milestone of my own, I felt myself inclined to pick it up and see what the fuss was about, figuring I may as well give it a try, and because why the hell not?
The first thing I noticed about the book is that it is not a small text by any stretch of the imagination. At 514 pages in the UK Arrow Books 2012 paperback edition I'm holding, it's a hefty enough text. Okay, it's not Gravity's Rainbow or The Brothers Karamazov, but these days with the amount of creative work I'm doing I have to mentally prep and adjust myself for anything over the 300-page mark. For instance, I've been reading a collection of Edgar Allan Poe tales and poems published by Penguin (Spirits Of The Dead) for over a week now, and it sits at 278 pages. So although I went in with the most open of minds (I mean that seriously. Anyone who goes into something wanting to dislike something is a masochist or a scoffer. Or both.), sitting down I had to mentally psyche myself up and get to it.
To my surprise, and perhaps yours, I read the thing in four days. That is not a glowing recommendation though. Fairly early on I recognised what a sub-par work it is. I just wanted to finish and be done with the thing ASAP. I could chalk my rapid reading rate down to the fact that it's easy to read, but that's merely because it's written in such a rudimentary fashion that, at risk of sounding patronising, despite it being marketed towards adults, it could quite easily be read by a child. Now, don't freak out, this is not children's literature, no way jose, it's just that I could quite easily have seen twelve-year old me reading this if I had bothered my arse or had been exposed to it. There's some books which, upon re-reading, time has done wonders to, and I know for a fact I couldn't have read when I was younger. I read Crime And Punishment at around fifteen or sixteen and found it very challenging, and have reread it a few times since and am convinced of it's greatness. Equally, there are books I read at a young age, like the Harry Potter and Darren Shan series' which stand up through my transition into adulthood. I read the first two Twilight books as a teenager, and with the second felt like a teacher wanting to score through half the thing with a red pen. I fear that if I had read this in youth it would have suffered a similar fate.
But I suppose you want me to talk about the book and stop rambling on, so let's go, shall we? From a linguistic standpoint, looking at language and rhetoric, it's incredibly unstudied, lacing in nuance and full of tried and tested murder-by-numbers cliches. This simplistic aspect does nothing to engage or make accessible a niche, but instead turns it into something frothy and cheap. Another thing that didn't do it for me was the multimodality. It's alright to do it a bit, but I really don't need there to be reams and reams of nauseating email exchanges, text messages, memorandums, et al (106 pages with these features. Lord knows, I counted!) to get the point, and to be frank I don't think it's necessary to establish what we already know. It's like using a sledgehammer to bash in a nail. Also, several times I had to go back on myself to make sure I hadn't lost my train of thought, but rather it was that the writer had made such an unwarranted and unconnected leap from one thing to the next. Furthermore, as someone who has recently recovered from a head injury I was in serious danger of giving myself another with the amount of times I slapped my forehead at the oft-repeated utterances of Anastasia Steele going "Oh my!" or yapping on about her "inner goddess." It's like, right okay, we get it already, the law of diminishing returns, etc...
James can get away with the predictability of the central storyline, because I do think there's something about the central hook that is intrinsically interesting, but with the execution she cannot. Notwithstanding the language, the central characters are problematic. The titular Christian Grey is supposed to be this brooding enigmatic genius with a dark side and troubled past, but I was unable to generate any real sympathy for that character, which was clearly the point. You can cover him in this cloak of mystery all you want, but if you are unable to generate any legitimate justification above and beyond a tacked-on bit of backstory, you do nothing but highlight your inherent flaws as a writer. I couldn't look at Christian Grey as anything bar a caricatured depiction of the new male chauvinists, these self-styled gurus who are essentially predatorial losers with a sociopathic streak. As for Ana Steele, I know that a lot of criticism has been fired her way negative-wise, so I don't think there's a huge amount for me to say that hasn't already been said, but I will say this. From the standpoint of being the protagonist of the book, I get that she's meant to be this virginal trope and all, but I found it hard to believe that in this day and age someone could be so naive about some of the things involved in this book. That's not to say these people don't exist, maybe I just don't know them, but we are exposed to so much information and life and everything that it's nigh-on impossible to avoid these things.
Ah, yes, 'these things,' indeed. The sexuality is what brought it to the dance, so I suppose I should talk about, right? First off, I wasn't shocked by it. That was so much part and parcel to the conversation, the shock factor, and to be fair it does hold off on it initially, drawing out the tension. Unfortunately, once we get there it loses something of the allure it hinted at. As I said, I wasn't shocked, but ten or twenty odd pages at a time is just a bit overkill. The presentation of sexuality in art is something that, like that of violence, is close to my heart. Anything explicitly 'dramatic' is to be handled with care and not treated lightly. I think of texts such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (from In A Glass Darkly) and J.G. Ballard's Crash, among others, as key examples of eroticism well-executed. Instead of using sexuality as an extension of the characters, to elaborate on given themes, or simply to tell a story, here it merely exists as a source of surface-level titillation (and it's mundane titillation, not even the sexy kind!) through extended descriptive passages. Also, I would be very reluctant to classify the sexual relationship as that of a BDSM one, for many people are able to function healthily in such circumstances. For me, it seemed to be more that of a possessive and abusive relationship, the violence of which to some extent I found to be pernicious and a little disturbing in the normalisation of it's presentation.
I will say one thing in the book's favour. Although it is classed as an 'erotic romance' novel as far as genre is concerned, it is for me a thriller at it's core. As such, although it is more often than not muddled in the outcomes, there was at least an attempt to develop some degree of dramatic tension, leading to one instance that struck me as a/the standout moment. I'm not going to get into spoilers, as it occurs a fair way into the book, but it was in the middle of one of those tedious email exchanges that it occurred and I was quite taken aback. My reaction towards it was strong, and I couldn't help but thinking, for all of the teasing and cavorting that the book hints at, this is the kind of thing that the author has been aiming for all along. It's just a damn shame that you have to wait 417 pages to get there!
So what is it about this book that, for all the hype and negative press about it, has caught the attention of the public? I'm going to preface the following by saying I am going to approach it in a manner that is not judgemental towards others. For me, it has done so for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is, as I have mentioned, an air of the forbidden. The world that these characters inhabit is one which the vast majority of us will never encounter, be it in the gross wealth of Christian Grey or his sexual proclivities. Thus, our imagination is aflame and set to work, and the word-of-mouth aspect of the phenomenon spreads like wildfire. Secondly, from a market standpoint it taps into a gap. Most fiction with this explicit level of sexuality is relegated to cult status, or deemed pornographic and distasteful, so for something like this to even have a modicum of success in such a barren marketplace, never mind a bestseller, with no competition nearby, it's almost a foregone conclusion. Thirdly (and this is why I prefaced this paragraph), I feel that as a whole sexuality is something repressed, if not openly expressed, in contemporary society. Too much importance is being placed upon material goods and the pursuit of wealth, fuelled by greed, as opposed to our relationships with one another, an appreciation of the human body and respect for the natural world. As such, I feel it to be a 'natural' outcome in what I see as a perverse world lacking in moral values and decency that such a thing should be a hit. But maybe I'm digressing, no?
To bring this thing round, I want to relate some of my own personal story so you can get a hang on where I'm coming at with this. Having recently finished my first novel (which I first got the idea for in 2009) and working constantly on the thing for a year-and-a-half I know the pains and the efforts, how long and arduous the process can be (mine was a very difficult one, I'll tell you that much), so I can sympathise with James. I acknowledge the years-long journey she undertook to bring her debut novel to fruition. Maybe it's the writer in me as well as the critic and reader coming out, but I couldn't help but feel that this felt more like an over-explanatory manuscript with notes that weren't meant to see the light of day, or a (much) earlier draft of what could, and perhaps should be, a better book. Also, as a white heterosexual male who's fairly boring and conservative in my personal habits if not my opinions, there were times I was thinking that maybe I'm not the right audience for it. That said, when I read the works of Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, JK Rowling, among others in the mighty canon of great female writers, not once does such a notion ever enter my head. I simply read and appreciate a good story for what it is.
If you want to take an alternate of sorts, I'd recommend Mary Gaitskill's short story Secretary from her 1988 collection Bad Behavior. At less than twenty pages, it's a damn fine read and does everything Fifty Shades Of Grey hints at and so much more.
I am already telling you something which you've probably already concluded on your own, regardless of whether or not you place any credence in what I have to say or will ever sit down and read the book yourself. Make no mistake, this is not a recommendation. Fifty Shades Of Grey is a terrible book, but I would encourage you to ignore all of the hyperbole and figure out what you think of it for yourselves. That goes for all forms of art, and should be practised as a rule of thumb for life in general.
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