Books 2014 - Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

[byslantedlight]

So - this was my book this weekend, though it felt a bit like going from the sublime (of Maurice) to... well, to something completely different. *g* I was never ever going to read this book, because who has time to read popular smut derived from fanfic when if nothing else you could be reading really good smut about characters you love that is fanfic? But I seemed to be in one of those spaces where every time I turned around it was on someone's shelves, and the other day there it was in front of me on the library shelf, so... I took the plunge.

It wasn't actually what I'd expected at all - I thought the whole point of it was that it was seriously erotic porn for women, but to be honest I read far raunchier books when I was fifteen. Definitely raunchier fanfic. *g* And there's not even really that much sex in it! Of the 514 pages in this copy... well, I'm not counting, but I bet there's not 50 pages worth. I didn't wince at what there was (which I thought I might) and I actually found the book a fairly easy read, and if the second book happened to be on the library shelf when I went back (it wasn't last time) then I might even pick it up to see what happens next, but...

...but to be honest the vast majority of it was a teenage girl's first-boyfriend angsting. And she was a teenage girl, even though she was 20-something, who was graduating from university, who hadn't had sex yet, who "didn't drink" (though she seemed to get through extraordinary amounts of wine and champagne for someone who "didn't drink") and had never been drunk, and didn't seem to have any vices at all. She was both ordinary and good - most people have grown out of being one or the other by the time they finish uni, so I must admit I rolled my eyes about her a bit. I don't think we really found out much else about her, except that her favourite books were "British literature" and that she wanted to work in publishing (she was, of course, offered a job at the small quirky publishing company that she'd preferred...) Basically there wasn't much there to her there, although I didn't dislike her either, even though her life was all rather pat and every man she knew was actually in love with her (she was so modest that she barely realised...) (*headdesk*)

There were a few things I wasn't comfortable with at all, mind - and nothing to do with the bdsm, either. Quite early on, when Ana's going to go on her first date with Christian, she's taken in hand by her best friend and cleaned and shaved and "buffed" all over, because "that's what men expect these days". So clearly that's what girls have to do... Of the men who are in love with Ana, it's Jose Rodriguez who gets a bit too insistent with her when he makes a pass at her. I wasn't keen on Christian's backstory - that he was introduced to bdsm when he was 15 by a friend of his mother's, so that Ana can fret about child abuse when less than a year later it wouldn't have been. Did the author want both the tragedy of child abuse, and yet for it not to be actually dark? And the other reason Christian is so tragic (and yet worthy of Ana because despite it all he's become a multimillionaire supplying aid to Darfur before the age of 30!) is that his real mum was "a crack whore". I mean - I'm sure everyone's got their reasons for being into bdsm, but I'm not sure it's helpful to go with that kind of stereotype... Maybe the next books'll clear it up - Christian does at least protest that "it wasn't like that" about the older woman, though for someone who's a millionaire to describe his mother as a "crack whore" when he was four when she died seems a bit... again, uncomfortable-making.

And finally - the end... was a bit like the nearly-end of a piece of fanfic. They start to get things all worked out, and then... suddenly it's all going wrong, and the even though they love each other, they're just too incompatible and she has to leave him... *headdesk* Okay, there are two more books to go, but... it was just a bit too much like the nearly-end of a piece of fanfic - and a bit too much now go and buy my next book... and so much more like the end of a chapter, rather than the end of a book in a trilogy.

Oh and finally finally (and minor but niggly)! I was also a bit thrown by Ana being a student at WSU Vancouver - for ages I thought she and her roommate were at uni in Canada, which totally made sense if they were up and down to Seattle, though I did think they were skimming over the border controls! Then it turned out they lived in Portland, and I figured I must have misread, and I've just now paid attention to the WSU part and thought hang on, wouldn't that be... and looked it up - and of course it was - Washington State University. Gargh! Bad enough people mucking about with Cambridge - at least the two of them are in different countries a long way apart, no matter that they're both university towns etc... But two cities the same name, with universities, in the same area (albeit separate countries) - bad planning! *g*

I'd be interested to know what anyone else who's read it thought... *g*