Fifty Shades of Grey

Author: E.L. James

Genre: Erotic Fiction

Rating: F

I don’t know how Fifty Shades of Grey became a bestseller.  I don’t even know how Fifty Shades of Grey became a published novel.  There is much that can be said about the novel, little of it that is good.  In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I very rarely read full out romance novels, almost never read erotica, and am not into BDSM.  None of that is what made me dislike this novel, however.  The reason why I disliked Fifty Shades of Grey is because it’s a bad novel.

To sum up the plot: Anastasia Steele is an innocent, virginal soon-to-be university graduate who, at the start of the novel, has to interview billionaire, CEO, and late twenty to early thirty-something Christian Grey.  Grey is a domineering, controlling douche who essentially takes to stalking Ana, despite the fact that he repeatedly tells her that he’s bad news and a danger to her.  Despite all the signs that pursuing a relationship with Grey might be a bad thing, Ana lets Mr. Grey sweep her off her feet, all while protesting against his actions.  It turns out that Grey is a dominant looking for a new submissive and despite the fact that Ana resists him on everything, he thinks she’d be the perfect one.  For reasons that I can’t really figure out, Ana decides that, despite the fact that she has no desire to be controlled and is afraid of what Christian might do to her, he is the man for her.  Because, of course, stalker tendencies, anger issues, and an inability to take no for an answer, are no match for beauty.  I kid you not – Christian’s only redeeming quality is his physical attraction (his money is redeeming as well, but as Ana gets upset every time Christian tries to buy her anything, I’m fairly certain that’s not why she’s attracted to him).

This novel started out as Twilight fan fiction and really should have stayed there.  I have to give James points for attempting to write in first person, present tense, only because doing so successfully is extremely difficult.  However, she doesn’t successfully do so.  Her attempt at creating a plot is ludicrous.  Ana provides her readers the most mundane details about absolutely everything, even treating the reader to scenes that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot.  Entire characters are created with no purpose to the story – Ana is given not one, but two secondary love interests, just to establish that she is attractive to the male population.  One of them serves a point in pushing forward the plot, the other just makes you question how our protagonist made it to almost twenty-two without ever having so much as a kiss. 

Sadly, the flaws with the characters do not stop at pointless secondary characters.  James seems to think that by adding melodrama elements to her characters she makes them deeper, but this isn’t true.  There is no real depth to Ana or Christian, and the details that she adds just makes them more and more ridiculous.  Ana is written as if James has no clue what a twenty-something university student is like – which is entirely possible, given as it has been a while since she was a twenty-something anything.

I have a hard time buying that there are attractive twenty-two year old students who have never had sex or gotten drunk (without having some specific reason for having never done either), and don’t own their own computer.  I’m also a bit confused as to just how Ana has never gotten drunk prior to her graduation, given just how often she drinks alcohol and her obvious lightweight status.  I’m also not buying her overall innocence; sure she’s a virgin and never been kissed, but in the age of the internet (which as a twenty-something, she grew up in), the average person is at least aware of many of the sexual practices that come up in the novel.  They’re definitely aware of the concept of blow jobs, although Ana is blown away by the suggestion that Christian might enjoy one.  Every time she is shocked by something that he suggests I can’t help but feel the same way I do whenever Taylor Swift is surprised that she won another award.

Then of course, there’s Christian Grey.  While James has cast Ana in the role of the unbelievable innocent, she’s cast Grey in the role of the horribly damned – he’s the serpent to Ana’s Eve.  In addition to being a billionaire and the C.E.O. of his own company, Grey was adopted at the age of four by a ‘perfect’ family (his words, not mine), to which he never really fit in.  Grey’s birth mother was a crack whore who was unable to support her son and possibly burned him with cigarettes, consequently Grey has issues with people wasting food and doesn’t like to be touched.  As a teenager he entered into a sexual relationship with one of his mother’s friends; she was the dominant, he was the submissive.  Since then he’s become the dominant, having had fifteen significant partners and countless others.  Grey spends much of the book trying to convince Ana to trust him and saying that the submissive has all the power in the relationship because the submissive has the ability to say no – completely disregarding the fact that almost every time Ana says no he either completely disregards her wishes or gets angry with her and threatens physical harm – at one point he even threatens to tie her up in a crate and put her in the cargo hold of a plane.  It’s impossible to tell when Christian’s joking and when he’s serious because both his jokes and his behaviour cross the line.  He outright stalks Ana at points in the novel, having gone so far as to put a tracking device on her phone so that he can always know where she is.  But did I mention that he’s hot?  Because in the world of E.L. James, that’s really all that seems to matter.

When it comes down to it, this book is trash.  To call it “Mommy Porn” is to insult the intelligence of mother’s everywhere.  James should have stuck to writing fan fiction.