Sex talk

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
EL James

There are erotic novels and there are the more blatant versions, the straight-out porn books. And then there is smut. Walking a fine line between the two is the Fifty Shades Trilogy, of which the second and third parts – Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, the latter making little sense as a title, if ‘meaning’ is what is relevant – are expected to feature in bestseller lists, though they may not climb as high as this one, Fifty Shades of Grey. Nicely gender indiscernible in the writer’s name, the book has done phenomenally well already, hitting top of the mass market fiction charts and fourth in the official top 50 list across all genres in the UK. And it has managed to be first on the e-book downloads roster determined by the New York Times Bestseller list. So there must be something special about it, right?

Well, maybe not. The books tell the steamy story of the ‘romance’ – for lack of any other suitable word – between Christian Grey, a successful young entrepreneur with a taste for S&M (BDSM, really), and a literature student, still a virgin, Anastasia Steele. It all begins when the girl takes her friend’s place to interview Grey. And things develop fairly fast, escalating from a formal interview in an office to a rather less than formal exploration of possibilities in Grey’s bedroom, his bathtub and elsewhere, with the dominant-subservient relationship established early on. After a point the action, if one may call it that, gets repetitive and predictable, with the heroine breathing heavily and calling upon the Divine in various ways (“Holy crap”, “Holy s***” and “Holy F***” being some) to save her…from what? Herself? Her newly discovered sexual synapses? Or the man who shows her the way to carnal bliss? Or perhaps that devilish contract she wonders why she signed, even as she learns to enjoy all the minor clauses and fine print it covers.

Of course, this is not literature, far from it. The tone wavers from being modern and street-smart-ish to outright juvenile and inane, with instances like “Our fingers brush very briefly, and the current is there again, zapping through me” our heroine gasps. “I feel it all the way down to somewhere dark and unexplored, deep in my belly.” She “desperately” does the expected, “scrabble around for my equilibrium”. And even as Anastasia is doing her scrabble thing, Christian is saying “Please”, his tongue caressing her name just before he “strides with renewed purpose” out of the store, leaving her a “quivering mass of raging female hormones”. Through the book, things progress and that same tongue does a lot more than just caress her name, while those raging hormones…err…rage on through endless chapters of graphically and anatomically descriptive prose.

This one does not have any of the class of the erotica or Anais Nin, or even Henry Miller, and what is perhaps the most sensual writing ever in the Song of Songs from Genesis is like a top quality diamond next to a pebble from under a road repairman’s boots. The author admits to being inspired by the lead characters from the Twilight series, sexed up and served with a huge helping of fantasy. And even as Anastasia exclaims, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle” an uncountable number of times in the first few pages of the book, you, as reader, start wondering how she will manage to keep monkeying around for another two volumes in the series. And, honestly, why you would bother to read them to find out!