Category: Jon Day

Grey

Jon Day in the Financial Times

‘EL James is Teflon-coated.’ So begins Jon Day’s review of Grey (the new addition to the Fifty Shades festering corpus): a highly entertaining, review-cum-quotation exercise in the Financial Times.

… Grey is told from the perspective of Christian Grey, a 27-year-old billionaire with what he calls a “dark, dark soul”. If it sounds like an interesting metafictional project, it isn’t.

The change in perspective hasn’t altered James’s style very much. Other than in the obvious way, she seems uninterested in penetrating the insides of her characters. Everything is told rather than shown. The closest thing we get to real introspection is when Grey thinks about himself, which he does often, sometimes in the third person. He looks in the mirror a lot. “My hair is wet from the shower, but I don’t give a shit,” he thinks. “One glance at the louche fucker in the mirror and I exit.” Occasionally he even thinks about himself thinking about himself: “I stop my wayward thoughts, alarmed at their direction. What the hell are you thinking, Grey?

Christian is forever commenting on his own prowess, in bed and elsewhere. “Flaunting my erudition,” he says, “I quote the words of Andrew Carnegie, my favorite industrialist.” He doesn’t just say things; he says them “emphatically” or “sardonically” or “dryly”. “My smile is ironic,” he thinks, again and again, as if to convince himself of the fact. He commends himself on the articulacy of his inner monologue: “She’s oil on my troubled, deep, dark waters. Hmm . . . flowery, Grey.

Fitz Carraldo Editions