As teenagers, most of us stumbled upon romance and desire in the pages of zippy Mills & Boons novels. They came usefully graded by classmates as hot, hotter and tame-as-sawdust, and were more daring than our mothers’ libraries of sappy Barbara Cartlands and Denise Robins.
Into this mix, mild even after the injection of Harold Robbins and the sexier Silhouette offerings, came Ms. James with Fifty Shades. She whipped up (pun intended of course) sales of 150 million copies or so worldwide. So one imagined that the much-hyped author’s latest novel would, at the very least, up the ante on the unexpected. “A thrilling new romance,” said the blurb. “A roller-coaster ride of danger and desire.”
Beaten hollow
What we get instead is a book so bad it can be beaten (yeah, yeah) hollow by any M&B ever. James might pride herself on being
the queen of soft porn but her latest effort of 512 pages of unadulterated bilge left me feeling blue in entirely different ways. One of the first reactions was a sort of disbelief that any self-respecting publisher would put this kind of drivel on sale and follow it up with serious marketing effort. Remember, M&Bs are not marketed — they’re just formulaic assembly-line churn-outs. But for some inexplicable reason we’re expected to take James seriously. But I forget. 150 million copies. Ka-ching. Money is a strong reason.
If you come to this book expecting S&M, forget it. If you expect erotica, forget it. Yes, there’s lots of sex, but of a sickly, swooning kind. And even that happens only after some 200 pages of unbearable banality. She: “He is so attractive!” He: “I’m enthralled.” That level of banal.
And what’s the story such as it is? It really doesn’t warrant a spoiler alert, but skip this para if you’re dying to read the book. Maxim Trevelyan is a rich and handsome man (of course) who’s just inherited an Earldom. Alessia Demachi is a penniless and pretty (of course) Albanian woman who escapes sex traffickers and ends up in London as Trevelyan’s housekeeper. He is a playboy. She is a virgin. Of course. Because playboys who don’t remember the name of the woman they slept with last night must always get a virgin as gift. The two fall in love and after she is kidnapped many times and runs away many times and after they avoid exchanging basic information till the very end, they finally live happily ever after.
One might have forgiven James the terrible plot if it hadn’t been for the miserable dullness of her prose. James writes like a somnambulist on Nembutal, ticking every cliché ever created — her heart slams against her ribs; he drowns in her dark gaze; his groin responds steadily to everything; she blushes; he groans. The reader definitely groans.
Then James remembers that she must be profound, so she bungs in dreary Wiki entries about Albania. But beyond that, well, the English are stoic and sympathetic while the Albanians are primitive and violent.
Alessia is made into a munchkin who sets your teeth on edge. She might watch Netflix and know about Tumblr, but she gawks at shop shelves and calls credit cards “magic”. In trying to show Trevelyan’s wealth through Alessia’s eyes, James reveals her own bourgeois obsessions — the way her writing lingers on petrol prices and apartment fittings, showerheads and Jo Malone bubble bath is seriously uncool.
Mail-order bride
More damning though is James’ uneasy relationship with women’s empowerment. There may not be 50 shades of bondage here, but there’s much emphasis on stereotypes of extreme femininity and masculinity. The fact that Alessia is a foreigner and a housekeeper, trembling and shy and horrified that Trevelyan should do the dishes, while Trevelyan is fascinated by her limpid innocence and helplessness harks back uncomfortably to the mail-order bride phenomenon when men from developed countries sought biddable wives while Asian and Eastern European women sought rich husbands.
More ghastly than the book, though, is the thought that this is what millions of readers might want. If so, it is disturbing to think what socially programmed fantasies the book fulfils.
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
The Mister; E.L. James, Penguin Random House, ₹499
