I'm enjoying it, but then I liked Twilight and Harry Potter too. And before you scoff, I've read plenty of literary classics and enjoyed them. Fifty Shades is clearly not great literature but then I don't think it pretends or aspires to be. It trots along in a pacey way and there's lots of sex. Simples.
It isn't risibly bad but it's deeply unchallenging and therefore unsatisfying. The characters are chronically one-dimensional with a hefty portion of really lame cod psychology thrown in. Plot developments are signposted a mile off and set up clumsily. The sex is titillating though - Mr Grey is a bit smooth and masterful (at first) - but by the time you get to sex scene no. 20 it has become very repetitively described.
However, I welcome this phenomenon. Literotica.com is a good resource but you have to decide that you're looking for erotic fiction, which therefore meant it reached a fairly minority audience. Fifty Shades has suddenly catapulted erotic fiction for women into the bestseller-of-all-time list. This can surely only be a good thing. It might mean that someone writes something intelligent about sex for a change, or manages to describe it well, now that publishers have cottoned on that there's an audience for sexy literature. It's taken it out of sleaziness and into every bookshelf.
I don't know how many of you detractors have ever tried writing about sex without it sounding trite, repetitive, mechanical, hackneyed or plain mucky. Treading a line between romantic slush and over-graphic squelchiness is really tough. I've tried, and I'm not gonna give you the link to it, lol. Authors I admire have tried to write sex scenes and failed dismally. Martin Amis was nominated for The Literary Review's "bad sex" award and rightly so (for a passage out of The Pregnant Widow). Asked about it, Amis said: "Very few writers have got anywhere with sex... my father used to say that you can refer to it but you can't describe it."
I agree - even the "smutty" novels like Lace or Jilly Cooper's finest don't go there. They allude but gloss over. If the Fifty Shades success encourages more authors to write well about actual sex I'm all for it.
And if one man reads it and as a result is able to give his bird a better time in bed, halleluja. I don't mean with the whips and paddles that Mr Grey favours, just in terms of recognising that taking command (when warranted) or
simply being good at what you do is a turn-on.
Meanwhile I actually can't put the damn trilogy down, haha. I'm telling myself that I'm just appraising myself of a current cultural phenomenon
