50 shades of potential
You’d have to be tied up in a velvet-lined dungeon not to have heard the publishing buzz over FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and its two sequels. Initially published online as ‘fan-fic’ – fan fiction – the author got picked up by Random House, and the books have been squatting at the top of the bestseller list for a few weeks now.
To be able to talk with authority about what’s selling, I have to keep on top of the latest hot titles. This means I read books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up.
I am not the target market for the FIFTY SHADES trilogy. I am a woman in my forties but although I read the TWILIGHT books (the basis for E.L. James’ novels), I didn’t get bitten by the glittery vampire bug.
Before I started reading, the only description of the book’s contents I’d noticed was when a rather defiant Newsnight presenter announced that there were acts they couldn’t discuss on the BBC at 11pm, but that they included fisting. It’s not often you hear about fisting on Newsnight.
Initially I was intensely irritated, not least because the quality of the writing didn’t seem good enough to me. The heroine bites her lip about every seven pages, and the hero announces how erotic he finds the biting about every – ooh – seven pages or so.
By the end of the novel however, I was feeling slightly – well – better than I thought I would. It was a little like accidentally eating a Heston Blumenthal Little Chef meal. The packaging and the content look familiar, but have an element of quality that surprises you.
So what’s good about FIFTY SHADES?
The writing is fairly straightfoward, but she has managed to pull off (no kinky pun intended) the difficult feat of writing about sex without making herself a contender for the Bad Sex Writing Awards.
As in PRETTY WOMAN, the aphrodisiac of shopping entices the reader in to a world where platinum cards are thrown around with careless abandon, and the sheets are always high thread count.
The hero is ‘damaged’ and the heroine is the first woman that has ever managed to uncover his hidden hurt. Predictable, but also appealing for the audience.
Pacing is sharp, and the ups and downs of the central relationship are nicely judged. The author has also left the reader on a little cliff-hanger at the end of book one – and if my friend hadn’t heroically read all three volumes, I would have had to read to the end, if only to prove myself right about the hero’s background.
So what about the issue of using someone else’s ideas as the source for your writing? The rules of copyright are fairly clear, you can’t steal someone else’s actual text, but ideas can’t be copyrighted. What you can’t do is attempt to deceive the reader, so anyone is free to write S&M sex based on Twilight, but they can’t pretend to be Stephanie Meyers while they do it.
Have you read FIFTY SHADES? Come on now, don’t be shy – there’s a lot of you out there. Let me know what you think. (And who DOES clean the Red Room? I’ve been wondering…)
May 19, 2012
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