50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

I chose to read this book before I knew what a massive ‘hit’ it had become. I ordered this book just over a month ago as I had never read an erotic fiction book before and was curious as to what they were like. I also didn’t know that this book was based on an online Twilight fan fiction, if I had known this I probably wouldn’t have bought it as I do not rate the Twilight ‘saga’ in any way (even though the poor acting in the films amuses me). However, I decided to ignore this and went in to read 50 Shades of Grey with an open mind.

Warning: May contain SPOILERS!

The premise of 50 Shades of Grey is rather simple, Anastasia Steele, an English graduate, meets dashing high-up business man Christian Grey. They become infatuated with each other; however Grey tells her that she doesn’t want to get caught up in his world and to leave him, despite turning up at her place of work and taking her out for coffee. It is revealed that Grey is heavily into BDSM and has his own ‘playroom’ full of implements of that nature including whips, riding crops, floggers, chains and the like. Steele is of course shocked by this but her infatuation for Grey makes her stay. It is revealed that Steele is a virgin; this is shocking to Grey and seems quite taken aback that Steele still has her cherry intact. Then he does something which he states is out of character and has something called ‘vanilla sex’ with her, which to us normal people is just plain, ordinary, enjoyable sex. There is a heavy focus in the sex scenes on ‘foil packets’, which James uses to refer to condoms (can’t really argue with the promotion of safe sex). Things go on like this for a while, with the interruptions of arguments which end in intercourse wherever they happen to be at the time. I say they go on like this for a while; they go on like this for the remainder of the book until she leaves him at the end.

There isn’t much else to say about the overall plot really, they just have sex in different places, the kitchen, the bathroom, her bedroom, his bedroom, the ‘playroom’, various hotel bathrooms etc and to be honest it gets boring very quickly, in fact it was never really interesting to begin with. I feel this is something to do with James’ poor standard of writing. I find that she is very repetitive in her writing style. Common occurrences are, Steele saying “holy crap”, ‘foil packets’, the constant lip biting leading to sex and the sex scenes are very similar to each other, even the ones in the ‘playroom’ which you’d expect to be exciting and new but no, the worst it really gets (or the scene I found the least boring) is with Steele tied up and blindfolded on a bed with Grey doing various things to her.

The most irritating things about the way the sex scenes are written is that the ‘action’ is often interrupted by Steele’s sub conscious and inner goddess. James decides to personify these concepts and fails miserably. They appear on pretty much every page, with the inner goddess doing crazy acrobatics whenever things are about to get a bit kinky and the sub conscious seems to be the sensible side of Steele’s thoughts. Both are irritating and interrupt the mood when things have the opportunity to get a bit steamy.   I also feel that James only put them in the book as a device to show some sort of internal struggle Steele was having with herself, that also failed.

The BDSM aspect of the so called plot seems to only feature this contract that Grey gets all his submissives to sign. The contract includes items such as “15.22 The Submissive shall not look directly into the eyes of the Dominant except when specifically instructed to do so. The Submissive shall keep her yes cast down and maintain a quiet and respectful bearing in the presence of the Dominant.” As well as sticking to a strict food list, which is apparently a massive deal breaker for Steele even though we never get to understand why as we never get to see a copy of this food list and she never explains why it’s such a big deal to her. There is also seems to be some big debate in Steele’s mind if she should sign the contract or not even though we all no she will and it the contract even has a the get out clause having a trial period and she can ask to leave the contract at any point, so I didn’t see it as too much of a problem.

Despite all this, I found myself sitting for hours at a time reading 50 Shades of Grey I am unsure as to why though, it’s poorly written to the point of hilarity, you can’t relate to Steele in anyway shape or form, you relate more to Grey and find him a much more sensible person compared to Steele’s immature and argumentative attitude. I say that but I feel the whole idea of the book is for its readers to fall in love with Grey, I didn’t, I just felt pity for having to put up with Steele’s childishness and also slight annoyance at him for staying with her whilst she was being a moany bitch and the constant comparisons to Tess of the D’Ubervilles and other literature which have pretty much nothing to do with her situation (suppose it was James’ way of making Steele seem intelligent or something).

I’d say give it a read and see what you think, even if you don’t like it you can learn to laugh at it, my boyfriend and I spent a long time laughing at how poor it was (not sure that was James’ intention for the readers). I still enjoyed it as it was easy to read and kind of a guilty pleasure read, which by no means suggests that it’s a good book. I think that it may have done a bit better with me if it was a parody of erotic fiction, making it overly silly and comedic rather than trying and failing to make it serious. I am curious about 50 Shades Darker and 50 Shades Freed but not so much that I’d go and buy them after hearing roughly what happens in them. There are also rumours of the series being made into a film possibly starring Robert Pattinson . . . don’t think I’ll be going to see that somehow.