Anastasia Steele and the Bondage of Bad Writing

I had heard about E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, a New York Times bestseller and perhaps, also a cultural phenomenon. But proponents and detractors lost me immediately at the tagline “Twilight fan fiction,” and I never felt a desire to read it. Then a good friend of mine bought me all three books for my birthday with the plea that she wanted someone to talk about them with.

So, I read Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. And I read them with an open mind, conscious of my friend’s desire to discuss them.

And I did not like them.

Perhaps it’s my own dark shadows from a past of emotional eating, but after I finished reading, I had the very same feeling of empty ickiness that always outweighs the fleeting satisfaction of pure consumption.

The writing and characters

For being main characters, you’d think 

the words "penis" and/or “vagina” would pop up 

at least once in any of the three books.

Nope.

The writing is bad. In fact, I would probably use terms like atrocious, cringe-worthy, and god-awful to describe it, which would be three synonyms more than the author could come up with than the words she used to describe Christian Grey’s personality.


E.L. James has woven her tale in a two-dimensional world in which her characters are “mercurial” and “infuriating” with smiles that “don’t reach [their] eyes” and pants that “hang on [their] hips” in a way that creates amazing sensations “…there.”  The descriptions are insipid, the dialogue is uninspired, and the prose is clunky. It all makes for very poor character creations.

Insisting your characters are intelligent and attractive is not the same as describing them thusly. Either the reader is lazy and just takes the author at her word, ignoring later events that might call that assertion into question, or the reader is continually frustrated by the inherent contradictions.

For example, we’re told that the female protagonist Anastasia Steele is self-assured, confident, and taking control of her sexual relationships, but her constant need for reassurance belies her complete insecurity about this sexual relationship and her value to her partner. You cannot paint your character as a duck and then set it to barking dismissing the contradiction as a merely “mercurial” trait. Contradiction alone does not make a character “complex” or “multi-faceted;” it makes the character malformed and exposes the writer as an amateur.

Also, I was left wondering if E.L. James has ever met a man. I say this only because it is painfully obvious that she cannot write men, and I often found myself picturing a bronze-haired butch lesbian when I was reading Christian's dialogue. Men and women do not inherently think alike or speak alike. Moreover, characters in a novel should each have a unique voice, so it was very distracting to re-read passages to determine who was speaking during those "emotional" discussions.

The relationship and the sex

Anastasia has a super-human ability to orgasm every time, 

on command, often after a jack-hammering. 

College would have been a lot more fun 

had I been blessed with her wünder-snatch.

I’ll preface this by saying everyone has their kinks, and God bless ‘em. I have nothing against sexual relations between knowledgeable, consenting adults. I do internally wrestle with the psychology of what might be considered the harder side of BDSM – namely the sexual gratification got by inflicting serious pain or injury (e.g. semi-permanent to permanent marking, scarring and blood-letting) and subjugation based on embarrassment and humiliation – because I can’t seem to wrap my brain around how those acts stemming from purely negative emotion and motivation can be considered mentally or physically healthy. Aside: If you want to open a dialogue about this with me, I’m more than happy to listen and discuss. But, I’m not going to wag a finger at anyone for his or her selection of 31 flavours.

My revulsion to the relationship between Anastasia and Christian Grey is borne of the horror I have to Anastasia shrugging her shoulders at Christian’s darker side outside the bedroom, continually excusing his bad behaviour because she’d rather have a stalker now hoping he turns into a boyfriend later.

And lucky for her…oh yeah, he never really changes. At least, not in the way that would make this relationship an equal partnership in love. Christian is still very much the control freak, monitoring her comings and goings, her interactions with friends, and by the end of the third book, the reader is expected to relinquish their own autonomy along with the protagonist with a collective dreamy sigh of, “That’s my Fifty.”

More than anything, this is what made me stabby.

This is classic abused-woman syndrome, and it doesn’t touch any of the physical violence that happens in the playroom. The sexual sadism is gray, like the main character, and only goes truly black in one catalyzing moment. There, Anastasia accurately declares that it is “fucked up” and disappears from Christian’s life for a millisecond to rationalize his behaviour on her own before going back to him after he vaguely promises to “try” to give her “more.”

Thanks for that. Girl power fist pump.

The sex itself is not really that scandalous. It’s also not that titillating. The descriptions aim at artful, but land somewhere between technical and cheesy with the author’s limited vocabulary and her reliance on Shift+F7. There’s dominance, submission, bondage, spanking, flogging, and sensory deprivation, but they all get short shrift in way of detail. In fact, the reader either has to have an imagination already in high gear or must do a little Googling to build a fantasy around the sexual encounters, putting this book squarely into erotica-light, along with V.C. Andrews, according to my scale.

Bottom line

You want a quick and easy read heavily peppered with erections and panting? By all means, read Fifty Shades of Grey. If you want more from your summer reads – emotional power, rock-hard realism, whip-smart dialogue, intellectual tickling – find a new playroom.


Addendum: I just got a few texts from my friend that got me the books. I hope she knows I'm not angry about reading them. I like reading, and I love taking recommendations from friends, plowing through the pages even if I don't ultimately enjoy the story.

There is certainly a long list of reasons why Fifty Shades sucks as an attempt at literature, but I don't mean to convey that this trilogy is completely devoid of value. For some, this book can be a satisfying form of escapism: a non-threatening, imaginative foray into previously untested sexual waters; a conversation centerpiece for a greater discussion about sex and relationships; a quickie thrill.


It's not créme brulée. It's Jell-O. Jell-O can never be créme brulée. But sometimes you just want Jell-O. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

BOOK REVIEW: "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

I had an ambitious reading list for the winter break between semesters, and this one wasn't initially on it. But, I kept hearing my friend Irene's voice in my head urging me to read "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. In fact, she insisted that I read it before I saw the movie, which was my original intention.

I am now tremendously grateful for her advice.

That is not to say that the movie adaptation screwed the pooch -- it really didn't. In fact, the adaptation is one of the most faithful I've seen, with only very minor plot changes and worthy cuts to the length of certain sections of the story.

But, the voice of the narrator in the book is so much more powerful than in the movie. In the book, we are looking at the story solely from Kathy's perspective, a fact of which she reminds the reader frequently. And Kathy is a flawed character, not immune to bias and certainly not omniscient. The movie retains that lack of omniscience, but you get far more of a sense of being an observer outside the story than you do as if you were seeing the events from Kathy's eyes and ears. Changing from first- to third-person perspective is always a little jarring, though not necessarily detrimental to the story overall.

That being said, both the book and the movie affected me profoundly (as you may have guessed since I have now been spurred to write about it). It's been a long time since a fiction novel so moved me -- I think the last 15 pages of Ian McEwan's "Atonement" were the last to reward my rapt attention with such a gut punch.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, 1) shame on you, and 2) there be some potential spoilers ahead, but I've done my best to keep my observations vague.

This is an incredible novel for book clubs because it is rich with themes to explore. The first very obvious theme has to to with medical and technological ethics. Certainly, this novel provides a fertile field for countless lofty discussions in this arena, but they would all be conducted in the abstract. In fact, I would love to get into a comparison of what it means to be human between this novel and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

That's all well and great and tends to make people feel like cigar-smoking intellectuals, but this novel is also deeply personal and deserves some attention to the themes closer to the heart and hearth.

The one theme I keep coming across in discussion circles is that of nature vs. nurture. The children in the book are brought up in a very fatalist environment; their lives are set and there is no need, indeed no encouragement of deep philosophical reflection. Human history, though, is rife with radical individuals who buck the status quo and start asking those questions. Tommy is clearly the closest character to meet this description, but yet he succumbs quietly. And, it's entirely possible that Kathy was simply going along with Tommy's quest knowing full-well the outcome having already resigned herself to it.

Another point I considered is the cycle of a life. When your life is so short, what are the stages of growth and maturity? People today generally have 70-80 years to consider their own mortality, and most would put it off until those last few. The characters in the book get to this acceptance very early in their lives, or perhaps they just never question it (going back to a nature vs. nurture discussion), and it's so painfully tragic to experience through Kathy's observations and Tommy's reactions because their nature -- or their learned submission, depending on how you view it -- is so out of sync with our own.

That's all I really want to say about it because I really don't want to ruin anything for anyone who wants to read the book or see the movie. But I do have to close this note with my favourite passage. The words are Tommy's, as recalled by Kathy. The imagery is beautiful and succinct, and it breaks my heart.

"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, whit the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the ends it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how I think it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."

Who needs a tissue?