BackBook Review: El James’ Grey
The follow-up to 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a painfully tedious, gratuitous exercise
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When I was 21, a friend bestowed on me a sage bit of writerly advice—“Telling is breaking the spell". My memory is hazy, but his aphorism had something to do with the question of seduction. Later, when I read Alain de Botton’s Essays In Love, another dictum leaped from the page—“We charm by coincidence rather than by design". As I made my way through the painfully tedious Grey, E.L. James’ spin-off of the infamous first instalment of her Fifty Shades Trilogy, both these diktats came to mind. Some points of view, I realized, are better left imagined.
While it was possible to be generous in reviewing Fifty Shades Of Grey, the tempestuous story as told by Anastasia Steele of her tragically uncertain attempts at being a submissive to the seemingly enigmatic though domineering millionaire, Christian Grey, my critical philanthropy, I found, couldn’t extend to this old-new story being repackaged as told by “Sir" himself. The 1972 film Divorce His, Divorce Hers, featuring the real-life star-crossed couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, had proven then how the same story could be told separately through the prism of both its characters to offer the viewer two different narratives of the same series of events. Unfortunately, this trompe d’oeil does little to either redeem, exonerate, or illuminate our conception of the megalomaniacal Grey. What was clearly intended as a possible defence of his sadistic predisposition devolves into a disastrous portrait of a potentially likeable psychopath, a contemporary, tactless reimagining of the timeless trope of the Beauty and the Beast.
The book opens with a nightmare Grey has the morning before his fated encounter with Ana, of playing under the inattentive gaze of his crack-whore mother during his twisted formative years. It concludes predictably with his telling of the end, when he resolves to win back Ana, who left him after, with her consent, he’d whipped her ass six times with a belt, leading her to finally see him for who he really was beneath his charming veneer—“a fucked-up son of a bitch". The tedious journey from page 1-560 is a literal illustration of the kind of mindless torture Grey is fixated upon; the consequence of his warped obsession with power and a symptom of his misunderstanding of his own abuse at the hand of Mrs Lincoln when he was 15. Reading this excruciating saga is like being a submissive in Grey’s Red Room of Pain without the privilege of a safe-word.
Which is not to deny the small mercies afforded by this masculine rendition of Christian and Ana’s psychotic romance. We have been spared the overdose of fluffy exclamations, like Oh My and Holy Shit or Ana’s vacuous descriptions of her “subconscious" and “inner goddess" that pervaded the trilogy’s introduction. However, what we must contend with instead is Grey’s penchant for overstatement and the cringe-inducing fact that his nightmares are narrated by his four-year-old self, for example—“I like it when Mommy plays with the cars and me". The dialogue is a facsimile of the original, except Ana’s observations are replaced by those of Grey, who comes across as an obsessive stalker and tyrant who refuses to be pitied, is oblivious about his own feelings, and is so dogged about his desire to spank Ana, he cannot conceive of the possibility of an alternative arrangement (or a “vanilla relationship") until his shrink disguises the revelation as a breakthrough. The occasional moments of self-doubt and insecurity are one of few plot points that could motivate the reader to turn the page, combined with perhaps a weak desire to relive the now tired, probably tried-and-tested bondage scenes and their litany of firsts.
Though packaged as “a fresh perspective", Grey offers none. James’ attempts at explaining the roots of Christian’s perversions and intimacy issues are predictable enough, ranging from childhood horrors, mommy issues, child abuse, and recurring nightmares.
Grey is an unnecessary book, a gratuitous exercise in flogging a sick horse that ought to have been euthanized. The mystery that was Christian Grey should have remained just that, a mystery. By making us privy to his innermost thoughts, James has effectively emasculated him for her readers. The Darcy-like aura that he came across as possessing in Ana’s telling is destroyed in his own narration. Until this neo-liberal decade can offer us a more compelling story of the sadomasochistic enterprise, this reviewer will continue to feast on antecedents like Roman Polanski’s film Venus In Fur, a meta-fictional theatrical adaptation of the original by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or Pauline Réage’s 1965 classic Story Of O, both of which take the BDSM narrative into the twisted domain of sexual politics and even play at its appetite for sexual transcendence.
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