50 Shades of Grey, E. L. James; Chapter One

So, an introductory first chapter? We meet Anastasia Steele, she of the stereotypically bad-romance moniker, a college student who needlessly recounts a billion tiny little details in her opening scene.

She’s filling in for her friend Kate, who is allegedly a journalism student (I will explain later why I use the term “allegedly” in a moment) who has come down with a fluey thing and who is, for some reason, interviewing some dude for the student newspaper. Anastacia has no interest in the paper and is studying English Lit (and I wonder if she likes Jane Austen ala Bella Swann because several paragraphs in it’s painfully aware that she shares other traits of the Twilight antiheroine) and helping out a friend whom she seems to have a hell of a lot of resentment towards. Ana (and sheesh, I’m seriously over her name already: I’ve seen too many Mary Sue self-inserts in fanfiction who’ve been called “Ana,” not to mention fucked up pro-anorexia kids personifying their disordered eating with that name) has, like Bella Swann, crippling self-doubt. She hates her hair: it is brown and untamable. She hates her eyes: they’re huge and blue.  And she’s pale, and I’m sure there’s going to be a complaint about that, which probably won’t be about anything practical like being at a higher risk of skin cancer. Ana’s whinging at the start of the chapter had me feeling doubtful about finishing the chapter and hoping that Grey might at least have some redeeming factors.

Anyway, for reasons unknown, (really, it’s never indicated WHY it is SO IMPORTANT that Grey be interviewed for the student newspaper) she goes to interview Grey. Grey has a big important-looking, expensive-looking office. Grey has a lot of blonde secretarial people, and as even Ana notes, possibly some discriminatory hiring policies. But they’re just inconsequential background characters for her to dislike on account of their blondeness, so who really gives a shit, right?

Bella, I mean, Ana, stumbles through the door because clumsiness is the new black in writing heroines. By this stage, I’m bored, and already thinking about the dozens of far better written and way more interesting pieces of Phoenix Wright fanfiction I’ve read with a similar dynamic to the Grey-Steele one which I’m eagerly (or not) awaiting. But I persevere.

It seems that Grey is aloof and apparently a private man, though he likes being deliberately wanky and dropping seemingly deep, cryptic  statements about his intense privacy and his need to control and own things. Foreshadowing much? Nah, not at all. The suspense—I mean, the lack of—is killing me.

For the Phoenix Wright fans, Christian Grey is Kristoph Gavin, only more stupid, more arrogant, and more captain obvious in his creepiness, and a hell of a lot more boring than the “Coolest Defense in the West.” Ana is completely mesmerised by him and this creepiness. The interview sails along awkwardly, with an awkwardness which could have been prevented easily if Ana had done the one thing she’s presumably capable of, given her education: she could have read the damn interview questions. But nope: and her good friend, Kate the Journalism student, who doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the top of her game, has peppered the damn thing with hideously awkward questions: “So, you’re adopted, huh? How does that affect your business?” No, I’m not joking. (Am awaiting the subplot where Kate has a huge crying fit about how she’s failing her degree, because let’s face it, even when she’s doing it through a proxy, she’s a crap journallist. Then again, she could always come to Australia and write for the Herald-Sun and no one would care.)

These come after the guy’s revealed that he is both a financial backer of Ana’s university and that he’s intensely private. Nice going, Ana.

Then we get this: “Are you gay?”

Yeah: an interview with an intensely private man who is a financial contributor to your university, and you ask him that in an interview for the student newspaper. My disbelief just ain’t suspended. I’m actually laughing at this point because even a dippy Arts student isn’t going to be that dumb… right?

And no, apparently Mr. Grey isn’t gay. Perhaps this whole mess was included so the reader understood that from the get-go.

And, yanno, despite Ana being so painfully annoying, and so thoroughly stupid, and in spite of Grey’s pretty office and alleged philanthropy, he’s kind of a jerk. Already. He gives off that vibe of those creepy dudes who hang around goth clubs trying to convince girls half their age to be “their” submissives, who think the world revolves around them and who speak with airs which are meant to sound intelligent but just make them sound like they’ve stepped off the set of some sort of horrible mashup between obscure indie cinema and a Kenneth Branagh period drama. Buddy, you ain’t convincing anyone. You over compensate for your low self-esteem/small penis/miserable childhood/dead sibling by being insanely wealthy and a completely ruthless prick who can’t get close to anyone. YAWWWWWN. Scratch the surface a bit hard and you’re a helpless little boy who needs to be shown how to love. Or something. And annoyingly, he won’t just answer the questions and go back to work: he actually cancels his next (presumably more important) business meeting to continue this awkwardness with Ana.

I’m 17 pages or so in. By this point I’m having flashbacks to the umpteen gazillion times I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and got bored. And Atlas Shrugged is full of hardly-even-concealed right-wing capitalist propaganda and two-dimensional characters and Ayn Rand Mary Sues. And I lasted WAY longer before putting it down and going, “Yanno, I can’t do this.” But this is already that painful. And boring.

And then we get Mr. Grey doing a complete turnaround and asking Kate a few questions about why she’s here. Which, IMHO, is perfectly understandable since she’s asked him about personal stuff, and which I’m hoping is all about making her feel  appreciated so she can leave smiling.
Nope: she’s resentful. She’s acting like he’s used some sort of mad headfuckery skills on her and he’s got Jedi mind control powers. Instead of doing that smile-and-lie stuff you do in job interviews, where you try to retain some sense of dignity, Kate blurts out everything like a gabbling mess, and my mind is made up: she’s pathetic, and he’s an arsehole. It’s a match made in heaven.

 

(Once again, I find myself thinking about just fucking off and finding some good fanfiction, because I’ve seriously seen better written and more engaging—and more sympathetic teenaged!Apollo Justice flustering a bit whilst still trying to hold his own against a Kristoph Gavin who is actually putting some effort into headfucking the poor kid.)

 

And this is the point where I go “What the everloving fuck, E. L. James?” and start hoping that the sex scenes make up for this, even if it’s just in the unintentional comedy department. Because that was painful in the kind of way that would piss off even the most dedicated masochist.

 

 

On the upside, I suppose I can at least rest assured that a) teenage girls aren’t going to be buying into this shit and saying it’s the Best Thing Ever, and b) no one’s going to expect high school students to read this. Let’s be thankful for small mercies, people.

On the other side, I have this sinking, horrible feeling like I did when I read The Da Vinci Code that if this is what makes a writer and a best seller, I am doomed forever.

Mind Fuck (Book One in the Administration Series), Manna Francis: Chapter One

A first chapter should introduce the story, give the reader an idea of what they’re dealing with, all that sort of stuff, IMHO. No punches are pulled here; we see Para-investigator Val Toreth at work in his department in the governmental offices of the European Administration.

He works in the innocuous-at-a-glance I&I department. Which stands for investigations (duh) and, um, interrogations. Toreth, as he prefers to be called (though nothing surprises him and he’s been called just about everything else in his line of work) is dealing with a suspect and requiring some answers. And he’s legally sanctioned to do particular things to the suspect in order to get them.
Nothing personal, of course, that’s just his job.

And, okay, I know he’s not meant to be a sympathetic character. I know I’m probably meant to be horrified by what he’s doing. But watching him at work –as you do for the first chapter– you can’t help but note a couple of things: firstly, Toreth isn’t brutal about what he’s doing. He lays what looks like his hand on the table, he’s pleasant and polite, and he gives the suspect the opportunity to cooperate with him. We’re not talking cops with phonebooks and exotic torture methods. Toreth’s not a bad guy, not really: he seems too efficient and dignified to resort to low-life thuggery (though my first thought upon reading this scene was “Okay, he mightn’t be abusive and creepy, though what about other people in his rank?”).

The second thought I had was, “Nice place to start a book called Mind Fuck. Because this is precisely how Toreth gets his interrogation to work, his suspect to cooperate, and the information he wants. Yes, it’s classic, Hans Scharff, honey-not-vinegar type stuff: and it works.

There is so much I love about the series, and to be honest, the first time I read the book, I didn’t pay much attention to the opening scenes. But this is a really good portrait of Toreth in his professional environment (which is where he seems to spend most of his time and where he comes across as being the most comfortable from my view). He’s been there for awhile, he knows his job, he seems to be challenged by it and interested in it, and he has an understanding of everyone in his workplace.

Down the track, we learn a bit more about them and the office politics and the feelings those in I&I inspire in others.

But for now, we have Toreth, work completed, information gained, walking out and whistling off-key, feeling quite pleased with himself.

Series Overview: 50 Shades, E. L. James

I’ve seen enough frightening quotes from this series to induce a sense of de ja vu when I actually start reading it. And… yes: I own a copy of this book: that came about after one of the guys who works at my local Savers and I got to talking about trends, unfortunate and otherwise, in literature. I chuckled and said I imagined that there would be trends– like about two months after the latest Christmas release Bryce Courteney comes out, they hit the shelves at Savers, like abandoned ill-thought puppies and kittens which someone a bit dim assumed would make a lovely surprise for an unsuspecting friend. Like how, for awhile about five or six years ago, there must have been an entire section marked “Dan Brown.” Like how… yeah. There’s Twilight. I saw the wave of no Twilight to, well, now.

And next on the list: “I wonder when you’ll start getting the 50 Shades books in,” I pondered aloud.

“We already are.”

Oh. Okay. It’s not that it’s hard to find: the supermarkets were selling copies of it for under ten bucks. Everywhere was selling it. It surpassed Harry Potter sales.

Now, I really had no interest in reading it, to be perfectly honest. I don’t really do romance novels. I don’t have a specific dislike about romance as a genre, I realise it’s just as escapisty as your superspy stuff marketed to the guys (and to be honest, I roll my eyes at that stuff, too), I have friends who are very into the genre and I respect that, and I know that it sucks when people judge my preferred reading by the worst examples, so I try to avoid doing that. it’s just Not. My. Thing. And thankfully, I’m usually smart enough to go, “One person’s bodice ripper is another person’s headfucky suspense with sex scenes that will incite nightmares and the wrath of Amazon’s good taste council” and leave it at that.

50 Shades was a different matter. This book permeated everything. If you’re on the internet, you’ve heard about it. If you’re in the fanfictiony end of a fandom, you’ve heard of it. And if you’re a snarky bitch, you’ve laughed at it.

I know I’m the wrong target audience, but Twilight unnerved me. It wasn’t so much the idea of a horror novel about a naive young virginal school girl with crippling self-doubt and traces of narcissism getting stalked by and becoming obsessed with a vampire who turned out to be both glittery and a control freak… it was the way it was presented. Dark subject matter doesn’t scare me. But when I see it presented as romantic fluffy fare, and seeing people get insanely suckered into it as such… I get really fucking freaked out. It goes beyond a story, or simple escapism when people glorify the events.

Anyway, 50 Shades started out as Twilight fanfiction. One one hand, hooray for seeing fanwriters make it in the mainstream sphere, and hooray for E. L. James saying she’d be flattered rather than horrified by someone writing fanfiction about her work.

On another hand… the quotes I’ve read scare the fuck out of me. Not so much that it was written… or published… but that it was so fucking popular. Hooray! Let’s spread the idea to the masses that love looks like:

It’s taking all my self-control not to fuck you on the hood of this car, just to show you that you’re mine, and if I want to buy you a fucking car, I’ll buy you a fucking car,” he growls.

Ahhhm. Okay. I’m pretty sure, his noble self-control aside, that’s skeetering on the edge of implied abuse. That sounds like he’s wanting to fuck her as punishment for not liking the car he bought her to me. Then we get this:

“I want you sore, baby,” he murmurs, and he continues his sweet, leisurely torment, backward, forward. “Every time you move tomorrow, I want you to be reminded that I’ve been here. Only me. You are mine.

It wasn’t just me who wasn’t sure if she wanted some lube or a barf bag reading that, was it?

The thing is, I realise something: I’m being unfair. Perhaps these gems are being taken out of context. On the off chance they’re not, well, I didn’t want to do my bit to encourage the publishers to make more of this stuff, so I picked up my copy from Savers, much to the bewilderment of the guy working in the book section– and I keep meaning to be reasonable and fair towards it and to read the damn thing. It does seem a little bit nasty to poke fun at something just because everyone else on the internet is, and I suppose in the interests of diversity and truth-seeking, I should actually read the book (no, I’m not promising the series at this stage… I never made it through Twilight).

I didn’t say I wouldn’t snark, just that I’d be an informed snarker.

I seem to have diverged wildly from the intention of this section, though to be honest, not having read the books, I can’t give much of an overview or confirm what the blurbs tell me. I don’t know if there is a great deal of plot to speak of– that hasn’t been what people have been speaking of in regards to the book, if you know what I mean.

I think a basic summary goes like this: girl (who is degree educated and who hasn’t had sex with anyone) meets boy (who is a considerably older dude who rocks a suit and has lots of money). Both are dysfunctional adults who act like lovesick teenagers, he’s a sadist with psychopathic tendencies– or the other way around and a lot of angst, she’s not, and at some point BDSM ensues. And, I suspect, from the first quote, he buys her a car.

We’ll see how this goes, hey?

Series Overview: The Administration, Manna Francis

Set in a distant future, The Administration puts a refreshing twist on the usual sci-fi dystopia totalitarian government schtick. Instead of the focus being on the resisters trying to change the system, actively opposing it, or being persecuted by it, Francis goes at it from another angle: what’s it like to work within it?

The blurb from the first in the series, Mind Fuck, offers us this:

There are no bad guys or good guys.

There are only better guys and worse guys.

One of the worse guys is Val Toreth. In a world in which torture is a legitimate part of the investigative process, he works for the Investigation and Interrogation Division, where his colleagues can be more dangerous than the criminals he investigates.

One of the better guys is Keir Warrick. His small corporation, SimTech, is developing a “sim” system that places users in a fully immersive virtual reality. A minnow in a murky and dangerous pond, he is only beginning to discover how many compromises may be required for success.

Their home is the dark future dystopia of New London. A totalitarian bureaucracy controls the European Administration, sharing political power with the corporations. The government uses violence and the many divisions of the feared Department of Internal Security to maintain control and crush resistance. The corporations fight among themselves, using lethal force under the euphemism of “corporate sabotage,” uniting only to resist attempts by the Administration to extend its influence over them. Toreth and Warrick are more natural enemies than allies. But mutual attraction and the fight for survival can create unlikely bonds.

Initially I was thinking I’d put my own razzle on describing the series, but this is a nice and succinct starting point. Of course, I’m going to be the antagonistic little fucker who sticks her head up and goes, “Toreth really isn’t that bad, people,” and want to start rambling about the universe itself, but like the canon’s virtual reality simulator, this actually has to be experienced for you to get the full impact.

I discovered the series randomly. I’d signed up for some sort of library thing on FaceBook, not long after getting my account there. At that moment, I was full of love for Erastes’ Standish, and when I went to review and add, someone else reviewing said that the book– and Francis’ Mind Fuck were her two favourite books ever. That was enough to get me interested. A brief glimpse at the blurb for Mind Fuck and I was completely intrigued: dystopia, bad guy protagonists and gay sex? Sounded like the sort of stuff I’d have been writing. I remember reading the book just before I got one of my tattoos, when I was half-asleep and coming off a night shift– it would have been February 2009, at a guess. And to be honest, I wasn’t overly impressed, though I realised there was hella potential there. And there was Toreth, who became one of my favourite characters in anything ever.

The Administration could easily be a simple sci-fi affair where there is good and evil and the eternal struggle for people to buck the system and do what’s right and there is tech so blasely talked about by the writer that it’s meant to sound casual but you know it’s secretly some fanboy’s masturbatory material. Francis turns the trope on its fucking head. For one thing, everything is mired in shades of grey– and she damn well realises it, as do the fans. (There is even a fan community with the name “Shades of Grey” on LiveJournal for the series. You can imagine my obvious heartbreak when a certain other series written by a fangirl and featuring kinky sex which also liked that phrase became quite prominent.) For another: she rightfully gets excited about the Sim– as does Warrick, the engineer developing it. Canon recognises quite rightfully that the thing is his baby and he frequently takes delight in it amongst putting in the sort of hard work and dedication to it that you’d expect from, I dunno, a young Bill Gates. As a reader, you share in the glee for– and the concern for– his product. You can see the potential for the thing when the government is what it is. And of course, because people do this, you have to wonder about the potential for the simulator to have, erm, adult purposes. Don’t worry: Manna Francis went there before you did, and there is corporate interest in utilising the Sim for adult entertainment purposes.

And that’s another rare win for the genre: Francis doesn’t shy away from human quirks. For me, this is the cherry on top of something that is already wonderful. All to often, sci-fi comes across as frosty and sterilised and kind of hostile, like the writers have forgotten that at heart, the characters they’re writing about are, well, human. (Or alien, as they may be, but there has to be something about them to make them 3D and interesting for my interest in their plight to happen.)

Manna Francis turns that on its head, too. And she doesn’t try to be witty and silly and “funny” about it, either. Her people do people-ish things. Her government department runs like one, with its politics and policies and paperwork underscoring everything. It gives the whole thing an air of believability, especially if you’ve worked in such an organisation.

Offside, and amongst the thriller aspect, the governmental organisation, the office politics and the implementation of the law (which can be fucking brutal, but which doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched, especially if you were to throw in some of the circumstances affecting Francis’ European Administration and the political climate in Europe at the moment), you get glimpses of humanity for these people: their friends and families and what they care about. Thrown in amongst all of that, you see the reactions of someone who hasn’t really had to deal with this stuff before, trying to adjust to the kind of domesticity and social stuff that would be normal for a lot of people. And there’s romance. Sort of. And… there’s some really well-written kink which doesn’t feel gratuitous and which is used sparingly and well: it’s not porn. It’s action which is moving along plot and character development and it just happens to be sexually explicit.

And the whole series has so much going on that it’s impossible to contain everything tidily in a summation, but the writing is succinct and the pacing is generally done so well that you’re moving somewhere– even if you’re not 100% sure where while you’re reading, and you’re learning about the world and putting it all together as you’re going along. Subsequent read-throughs– and buying the paperbacks rather than just reading the free offerings (oh, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? Ms. Francis offers most of her work for free on her own website! [But there are two specific reasons in terms of learning about the series that will make you need the paperbacks that I can think of] By the way, it’s here: http://www.mannazone.org/) mean you’ll start noticing other intricacies as well, in the same way that you do when you watch The Usual Suspects after the first time.

This was totally the series that made me want to do a readthrough blog. Because a couple of reviews just ain’t gonna contain things.

So it continues here

I should say “Starts here,” but no, that’s the blog starting here. This whole reading and needing to, I dunno, debrief, has been going on for years. Since I was a kid reading Robert Cormier and wanting to see the stories of background characters in The Chocolate War (I wanted fanfiction before I even knew it existed!) to finding Harry Potter fandom and metaing about the politics at the Ministry of Magic (and oh, god, the legal system: how fucking SCARY is the legal system in that world?!) to where I am now, I’ve found that I can’t really just *read things*. Not if they get at me in some way. I need discussion, I need some debate, I need some closure for the stuff that’s made me think and imagine and empathise. Or, if something is especially awful, I need to vent. 

The idea of a read-though didn’t come from any of my book fandoms: it was actually a concept that the Ace Attorney fandom introduced me to: a “playthrough, case-by-case,” of the games which are, let’s be fair, very much “visual novels.” I suppose the attraction of the game was, for me, what I like about good books: well-written characters, complex storylines, great dialogue, and a hell of a lot of room for thought. Combine with a sense of humour and great music, and I’m hooked. (But it was the writing which won me over most of all.)

Anyway, through that fandom, I got the kind of meta and discussion that rivalled book fandoms. It was awesome. And since the games are fairly “take no prisoners” in their approach to delivering, erm, rather intense material, I think it was needed. Jokes aside about tentacle monsters and big gay lawyers with complicated and inconvenient feelings for one another and the really unnerving stares of at least two of the villians, you also have orphaned kids, post-traumatic stress disorder, one character with persistent anger management problems (Franziska von Karma is awesome, but seriously) plenty of violence, and at least a couple of shades-of-grey should-mentors-REALLY-be-getting-that-close-to-their-students? relationships. Oh, and a creepy pedophile who refers to the object of his affection as his little “teen queen.” And a legal system which is dangerously flawed, where defendants are assumed to be guilty and the mark of a good prosecutor is to get a case closed in as short a period of time as possible (did I mention that capital punishment exists in this universe as well?). And all of this, kids, is canon. There’s enough to discuss there before we start speculating on Apollo’s childhood or whether Kristoph and Phoenix were sexually involved in those seven years between the third and fourth games or what would have happened between Mia and Diego.

We need to discuss things, I guess. And I shamelessly LOVE meta. I love hearing other people’s theories (there is a beautiful essay someone wrote suggesting that Phoenix Wright displays behaviour consistent with being a sociopath!). And I love organising my own somewhere. 

The series that made me want to do this, in this sort of metatastic fashion (ie. actually discussing the material and not using it for LULZfuel) was Manna Francis’ The Administration. There is so much going on. So much to discuss. So much that has struck some sort of chord with me on some level. And the fandom? Is like a ghost town that wasn’t exactly a metropolis to begin with. So, yes, I figured I’d do read-throughs of, well, that series.

And then I got thinking: “I read a lot of serials. LOTS.” Sure, I have my usual likes (psychological thrillers, complicated, screwed-up, unhappy protagonists and characters who  are flawed to the point of looking believable– and at the same time, perfectly unredeemable, suspense, multi-layered things about “the system,” stuff dealing with power on pretty much any level, dystopian futures, et cetera) but every so often I will read something off the radar in those terms: because everyone else is talking about it, because I’ve seen excerpts on Tumblr and gone “WTF?” and I’ve had feelings about that stuff, too. 

A few warnings: I like stuff that probably isn’t in everyone’s taste. I will talk about the stuff I like, and that will probably include descriptions of explicit sex and violence. I also have the sort of sense of humour which… well, let’s just say that IRL, I’ve received some horrified looks. And I think that if you’re putting your book out there, it’s no longer your baby, it’s a consumable product, and therefore deserving of review, praise and criticism (the later two based on its merits if applicable). If this upsets you, grow a thicker skin, stop writing, or learn when to look away from the reviews which don’t grind your gears and focus on the ones which do. 

(And I’d like to put it out there: I’ve seen some hideous criticism of some amazing work– or even more sadly, complete ignorance of it. If you want to see a crazy, foam-at-the-mouth rant, get a few gin and tonics into me and start telling me about how the Fifty Shades series is so amazingly popular, or how Cassandra Clare is the quintessential fanfic writer who crossed over into original stuff while expressing complete “What’s that? Never heard of it” about The Administration series. Sometimes being known and loved isn’t the mark of a good writer, it’s the mark of good marketing, trending interests, and loyal followers. And a public that is still pretty damned conservative. [The latter is another gripe for a later entry… anyone want to buy me those gin and tonics?])

Some more warnings: I spoiler. The nature of this is that I talk about what happened in a section of the material I’ve just read, so it isn’t really rocket science, but probably bears stating: I will refer to stuff that has happened. If this is an issue, don’t read an entry until you’ve read the material yourself. 

To be honest, spoilers don’t bother me that much, because I’m always going to interpret a situation my own way and focus on the stuff that grabs my attention, and in a few rare cases, I actually prefer having a headsup about particular things. I sighed with relief when one of my favourite writers said that no, neither of the two leads dies at the end of things, and yes, they have a reasonably happy ending. (All this is relative, though, and dependant on me getting very into the characters. I mean, I was the creepy little shit who cheered when Gwynneth Paltrow’s head turned up in the box at the end of Se7en, and thought that was a nifty twist and surprise.) 

Another thing: even though I haven’t done very much of it here, I swear. I know there are still a few people who get highly offended about that, and I’ve had people being extremely condescending towards me, who’ve advised me that FaceBook will ban me for saying “shit” (since they don’t ban stalkers and pedophiles and hate commmunities, I’m pretty sure I’ll be free to live another day of posting depressing status updates and pictures of cats) and who’ve pitched fits because of it. With one notable exception, where I did modify my behaviour for strategic benefit, I really don’t give a flying fuck what people think of my potty mouth. It didn’t seem to hurt Gordon Ramsey’s career, and this ain’t my career. 

This should probably come as no surprise to the person who is an avid fan of a book with the word “fuck” in the title, either. Grow up and get over it.

I think that’s everything. Basically, I’m still finelining the system here, as I haven’t done this before, but I suspect there will be tags with whatever I’m reading or referring to, so hopefully searching won’t be a nightmare.

Oh, one last thing: I don’t usually just read one thing at a time. So expect a range of stuff to be “on the go” at once if you’re following.