Fifty Shades of Grey
By E.L. James
It's the book everyone is reading right now. To not read the book, at this point, has become a deliberate rejection of the zeitgeist or a sure sign of pure contrarianism and not wanting to get on the bandwagon. On a recent vacation I saw six women in the space of three hours with that book cover clutched between their fingers.
You know the one by now - a bit cheap looking, just the grey tie on a black-to-grey fade cover. For those of you emerging now from the forest, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is the newest sensation in truly adult reading. It's the story of a nave young woman engaging in a very unique sexual relationship. The not-so-broad demographic currently devouring the book, and driving up grocery store book sales has garnered the industry nickname 'mommy porn'. The book is the first in a trilogy, all three of which are currently out and doing well.
This week, the E.L. James book and its sequels, "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed" are on the brink of crossing the 20 million mark in U.S. sales. The Wall Street Journal reported that, by comparison, "Stieg Larsson's best-selling "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy took more than three years to reach the 20-million sales mark in the U.S.".
The L.A. Times reported this the biggest book juggernaut since "Harry Potter". So I read it, and caution, dear reader, "Harry Potter" it is not.
Anastasia is the young woman at the center of the story and Christian Grey is her billionaire entrepreneur lover. The story starts in the standard way that many romances do - with pure happenstance and a woman just 'falling into' a situation (or someone's arms) that quickly escalates through a passion-turmoil-passion set of cookie-cutter plot devices.
What's driving this story, keeping readers involved and sales hot are the details of their submissive-dominant relationship. The biblical adage states that "there is nothing new under the sun", and while there's not much biblical in the nature of this book much of the subject matter may be new to most. The bondage and domination scenes may not be typical to every household, certainly more of us have basements than dungeons, but these scenes work to introduce the reader just as Christian Grey does so with Anastasia.
In a culture bombarded with sexual imagery and content directed towards men, with images of women in pop cultural so blatantly pat and inaccessible -this book does offer erotica in a form women may admire. Females have power in this book, but this power is conflicted and tempered with other desires and hopes - as it so frequently is in women's lives. The writing isn't great, but the plot moves quickly and is peppered with enough of what Monty Python called "the naughty bits" to keep casual readers gripped with expectation.
Common complaints women have with most erotic content is the focus on the physical form and the lack of female sexual power in a principal sense. This book is all about power - its role and its interchange in sexual choices, situations and relationships. Notions of power and release, here described perhaps too plainly, without the figurative frameworks of more literary erotica like Pauline Reage's "The Story of O" and Anais Nin's "Delta of Venus", are nonetheless exciting. Problems with the story centre, for me, around Anastasia's principal need for romance and love that just don't seem to jive with her sexual awakening. This is dime store romance trussed up (I couldn't avoid puns the whole time, could I?) as subculture tourism. There's better erotica than this out there - and there's certainly much worse.
Giving an audience, especially one primarily female, a new way to explore sexuality and writing is positive, I just wish the writing itself was less like Dan Brown with sexy bits. But he did pretty well too, didn't he?
You can find this book, and many more with 'naughty bits' at the Prince George Public Library. Andrea Palmer is the library's communications coordinator.
