Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James: Audiobook review

Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James: Audiobook review The audio version of E L James’s bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey pushes Tanya Gold to the edge. SOURCE: THE TELEGRAPG

Fifty Shades of Grey, the audio book, is read by Becca Battoe, an American actress who sounds like an anxious computer reading out pornography as punishment. The plot? Innocent Ana meets Troubled Christian, a wounded (guess what?) billionaire. But, as with all love stories – and this is a love story – there is an impediment, and it is not Christian’s pride nor Ana’s prejudice. It is that Christian only likes sex if he is beating Ana with a stick. The psychodrama can be paraphrased as follows – Can I spank you? (Christian) Ooh, I’m only a [college] senior! (Ana) I really need to spank you, Ana, because I am very damaged. (Christian) OK. But only because I really love you. Can we get married? (Ana) This is a nice girl’s nasty book; imagine a low-budget porn film involving a plumber – well, at the end the bog gets fixed and the plumber stops fiddling his tax. So despite the continual filth hum – “his long finger presses the button summoning the elevator…” – the effect is strangely innocent, like Bambi wandering into de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, begging for an engagement ring. If this all sounds preposterous, Battoe’s monotonous, whiny, joyless voice throws it down a hole. You feel she should be talking about unicorns, or maybe kittens with mittens, not dry humping; sometimes you wonder if she is even old enough to know about such terrible things. It is obviously a monologue, which is problematic because Battoe has to do all the voices. When she does Christian – “I am funding some research on crop rotation and soil science” – she simply lowers her voice and slows down, so she sounds like Christian Bale doing Batman, but doing things to Robin that Batman never would. The book and its two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, can be read in a day. The audio book is 20 hours long and the review copies come with free moisturiser which, if you get bored, you can rub into your toes, and yearn for a sex life of your own, rather than a sex life everyone is reading about in the Telegraph. You may not need this diversion, but I do. I am glad that people who are too scared to watch real porn can now listen to literary-phenomenon porn on the bus, but it doesn’t stop the experience being incredibly boring. This, I think, is implicit in the title. Fifty shades could easily mean fifty lampshades, and it probably does. The whole book stinks of John Lewis clawing his eyes out.

The prose style isn’t there; it ran out of bed seeking Horlicks, and even if Battoe didn’t sound like a Valley Girl wandering into the wrong sex scene, she has nothing to work with. E L James, who developed the story out of Twilight fan faction (vampire shagging), does terrible things to clichés, and can’t do dialogue; real people do not say “I see” and “very well”, even if they are about to bonk each other stupid on a copy of “Jane Eyre Made Easy” or “If I Stick Fifty Romance Clichés on a Word Document With Butt Plugs, Does That Make a Novel?” Christian is a cartoon character with a cartoon whip and Ana – “Damn my hair!” – is a phoney, never really admitting how much she loves the dirty sex. She is a female superhero with boobs and a soul, here to save Christian from the wreckage of himself: “it’s the whips that put me off!” (Really? Are you sure?) About six hours in, I suddenly wonder how it would sound in the hands of a truly gifted actress, such as Dame Judi Dench, and then I stop, because I have thought something wrong. The main plot device is the master/slave contract that Christian wants Ana to sign. He is that needy and they spend pages bickering over it: “Genital clamps? You have got to be kidding me! I’m sure this is in breach of clauses two to five!” If this is a control fantasy, they are both at it, even if Ana is so stupid she doesn’t know this contract is not legally enforceable, except perhaps in Saudi Arabia. The book is morally dodgy because although one-dimensional Ana apparently falls for one-dimensional Christian because of his grey eyes, or chunky sweaters, or whatever, she can’t stop describing his three-dimensional stuff. We have been here a thousand times: Christian is Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal, Mr Rochester with degenerative brain disease, even Mr Uppity from the Mr Men – it’s all houses, cars, lobsters, orgasms, lobsters, blah. When Christian tells Ana: “Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control things,” for some reason I think of Jeffrey Archer, and by then it’s over anyway.