You can’t say that I didn’t try. Gamely, I struggled through the first atrocious Fifty Shades book and skimmed its sequels, just to get up to date with what passes for modern culture.
Like it or not, the seeker for knowledge needs to ask why an ill-written pornographic rom-com brought British author E. L. James nine million global sales, and an improbable posse of women followers with daydreams about being dressed up and dominated by stern-jawed spankers.
Then I heard that the fourth book — released after Harry Potterish secrecy yesterday — would be told in the voice of the man who dominates the Fifty Shades trilogy. Ms James, we learned, would imagine the words of zillionaire Christian Grey, the pervy flogger who wins the heart (and numerous other bits) of the deeply stupid heroine Anastasia.
Well! My heart leapt with hope that, rather than being a worryingly odd bondage-obsessive, Ms James might be a magnificent joker. Maybe it was a plan to spoof herself and take the mickey out of her deluded readers?
Imagine what fun that would be. Mr Grey could begin: ‘Markets looking dodgy again and I have to fly to Brussels, Greece bombing out of the euro could be a real problem with my supply lines. Oh, and I’m really worried about this dim girl Ana. I should never have asked her out. It was a mistake deciding to pick up Uncle Bob’s DIY stuff and buy cable ties and masking tape in that scruffy hardware shop she works in.
‘Why did I ever ask the mad child to come for a ride in my helicopter? Felt sorry for her, I suppose. Then we swung by the apartment and she spotted my collection of antique saddles and riding kit in the back room, and it set something off. The crazy kid started scribbling some really disgusting fantasies in that diary of hers, and emailing them to me.
‘I’ve tried to shake her off politely (I’ve got a company to run) but she keeps getting past the secretaries just as I’m on a conference call, licking her lips, splaying her legs over my desk and waving a weird “contract” she found on a porn site on the web.
‘She keeps panting like a goldfish and asking if I want to spank her. Talk about fantasists! Enough’s enough. I’ve decided to get an injunction, before she publishes her dirty diaries . . .’
Then the rest of the book could be about his export business.
No such luck. With crafty economy of effort, Ms James has simply shadowed the whole plot of Book One, reproducing the clunky polystyrene dialogue word for word, and inserting italicised thoughts by Christian himself. ‘Let’s make her squirm . . . she’s an alluring little piece,’ etc.
James also reproduces all the tediously samey sexual encounters, from the couple’s first tryst, in which Grey refrains from hitting Anastasia, to the final flogging which makes her — very temporarily — leave him, on the bizarre pretext that she cannot be ‘what he really wants’.
We also, inevitably, get his version of the final really elaborate bondage sex interlude, which he conducts to the sound of Thomas Tallis’s Spem In Alium: the greatest of 16th-century religious motets, calling on the God of Israel to forgive sin. So that neatly adds some really offensive blasphemy to the gruesome sticky mix.
Ana’s account of the Tallis-flogging occasion says it was ‘agony beyond exquisite, raw and debasing’. Grey’s version in the new book — which was published at midnight on Wednesday night — shows him equally pleased at the manoeuvre, especially when her hips ‘wriggle in time’ to the music and she appreciates his cat o’nine tails every bit as much as his rabbit-skin glove (no rabbits were harmed in the writing of this review. I’d just like you to know that).
This is an author who cottoned on early to the eternal truth that a lot of people will buy any old tosh, however badly written, provided it’s filthy and detailed enough, and that they’ll even buy the same sex scenes over again with a different narrator, thus saving you the job of inventing any new things to do with thongs.
All you need is to be able to spell thrust, moist, lick, tender, savage, gasp, and all the duller anatomical words (this idle pornographer rarely even bothers with cheery Jilly Cooperish metaphors about otters and skyscrapers).
So Grey runs through the dreary gamut again, all topped and tailed, as it were, with pointless passages in which he meets other cardboard characters.
And, worst of all, embarrassing pop psychology in which the disturbed industrialist gets a stream-of-consciousness memory of his first Christmas as a deprived toddler.
‘I have a stocking. It has a picture of a man with a big white beard and red hat . . .’ Aaggh . . .
The commercial appeal of the original books, in Anastasia’s voice, is that they fed the most unwholesome kind of female dreams. They offer a man who is rich (lots of shopping opportunities) and worships your body (the contract she signs is not only about beatings, but also undertakings to work out and eat only prescribed healthy foods).
He takes control, thus removing a girl’s onerous post-feminist responsibility to get a life of her own and make some choices. The man is dominant, masterful, demanding submission, yet deep down (bless!) he is just a lost little boy who plays mournful Bach on the piano and needs to be shown true love.
And he can be reformed, that very old rom-com trick pandering to our vanity: think Rochester, Darcy, Beauty and the Beast. In real life, we know there’s not much chance of he-leopards changing their spots.
On top of all that, admit it, there is female masochism as per any cheap sexology book, in which any lass who has enjoyed a bit of giggly slap and tickle may wonder, safe in her onesie on the couch at home, what it might be like if it went all the way to ‘red weals across pale flesh’ and designer leatherwear.
So in this new book what do we learn of Grey, the creepy, damaged, control-freak flogger of whom so many women inexplicably dream while their husbands get on with mowing the lawn or earning a living?
Well, we get some truly nasty admissions: that the first time he sees the virginal student Anastasia’s ‘small, sweet face blushing an innocent pale rose’, he imagines that flawless skin ‘pink and warmed from the bite of a cane’.
He dreams of her ‘trussed and suspended from the ceiling’, ‘shackled on the cross, splayed over the whipping bench’. He is excited at her defiance and yearns to ‘punish’ her with an unusual combination of strategically placed ginger-root and a leather strap.
We do get some cod-psych insights into why the humourless, dreary jerk likes ’em tied up — it’s because otherwise they might touch him and join in the fun — and are reassured that when Ana temporarily legs it at the end of Book One he really is upset. He stares at his pictures of Madonnas and nerdily makes a balsa-wood model glider from a kit.
The book’s final words, ‘Today, I win her back’, carry a horrid warning that E.L. James may be preparing more lumbering, clunking, lip-smackingly sadistic and cloyingly sentimental episodes in the whining voice of Christian Grey.Heaven help us.
Daily Mail