Bloggers have already published sequels to EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey online, so it’s understandable that James herself should want to share in the exploitation. She knows her 125 million customers well, and doesn’t underestimate their gullibility. She is therefore selling them all over again the same item they’ve already bought, though in a new package. The principle works well enough with detergents, so why not apply it to soft, squishy BDSM porn?
The Fifty Shades trilogy offered Anastasia Steele’s gushing account of her enslavement to the masterful tycoon Christian Grey. After 1,500 pages the series ended with Christian’s version of their first meeting – not an embrace but a credit card transaction, as Ana charged $43 to Christian’s Amex card in the hardware store where he stocked up on bondage tackle. Now, in the absence of other ideas, James plods through the whole tawdry, teary saga again from this point on. Grey is not a continuation; instead, it lazily recycles the previous books, with Christian replacing Ana as narrator. Their inert dialogue and goofy email exchanges are cut and pasted verbatim, which lightens James’s workload. As added extras, we are promised access to Christian’s “thoughts, reflections and dreams”.
Those thoughts, however, turn out to be mostly memos about WebEx video conferences or taking over “a company that’s an innovative, dynamic player in fibre optics”, while his reflections include a yawningly trite sermon on global poverty, actually written by his “VP for publicity”. Lacking an internal life, Christian is the sum of his product placements: he wears Brioni ties and Ralph Lauren boxers, signs cheques with a Mont Blanc pen, and drinks only Sancerre. The owner of the phallic popsicle that famously melted in Ana’s mouth is himself, as she says, “the ultimate consumer”.
As for Christian’s dreams, one of which is wet, they rudely deflate Ana’s high-pitched, ecstatic narrative in the previous books. She at least possesses a frisky clitoral alter ego, the “inner goddess” who when aroused does the salsa or merengue and, in the buildup to orgasm, jubilantly shakes her pom-poms like a manic cheerleader at a football game. Christian’s penis, by contrast, is a dull dog – a Pavlovian pooch, responding predictably whenever prompted. “My cock agrees,” he notes after incubating a lewd idea. Later, he confides that “my cock stirs with approval”. What he has down there is less a sexual organ than an obsequious PA, a yes man always ready to oblige.
In Fifty Shades, Ana rhapsodises about their coital bouts. Described by Christian, the same encounters are brutish and gruffly monosyllabic. “I’m going to fuck you,” he tells her. As he does so, he shouts “F.U.C.K.”, presumably without voicing all those full stops. Fellated, he mutters, “Ow! Fuck” when her teeth graze him. Afterwards, he pants “Fuck. Ana” as a kind of QED. Then, next morning, he shrugs: “It was just sex, for fuck’s sake.” With his floggers, plugs and clamps, Christian enlarges the range of erotic play, but his vocabulary can’t quite keep up.
The book’s experiment in reversing the viewpoint recalls one of Christian’s sessions with Elena, an older dominatrix who deflowers him anally while wearing a dildo. James, sad to say, switches genders less efficiently than this feisty matron. Of course she wouldn’t need a strap-on prosthesis if she had imagination, empathy or rudimentary talent as a novelist. But a franchise operation makes its profits without such frippery. In Grey, the inner goddess gives way to the outer piston pump, with results that are crass, mechanistic and – I’d surmise – about as much fun as sex with a robot.
Grey is published by Arrow. Click here to order it for £5.99
