FIFTY SHADES TRILOGY – MIGHT NOT BE EVERYBODY’S CUP OF TEA!

Hello fellow bookmaniacs! I coined the term and I hope you people like this. This week at bookshelf I am going to write about a highly controversial book series – The “Fifty shades” Trilogy written by E L James. This book must be the one with the most talked about plot in the last few years. If we Google the book, the hits and their content are surprising and kind of upsetting at the same time. Books sometimes should be taken lightly, appreciated for the plot and not dragged into social politics just because they portray a different lifestyle. 

                        

Plot 

The plot of the book is fairly simple, a bit similar to Twilight series if you look a bit closely. It is about a multi-billionaire Christian Grey and a very naïve and innocent girl Anastasia Steele. Christian and Anastasia (“Please call me Ana”) meet by chance and sparks fly. It seems too much like the Twilight’s plot for the first few pages with Ana not being able to control herself around Christian and Christian warning Ana that he is not good for her continuously.  It maybe because it is said this book actually began as a fan-fiction for Twilight. But, here Christian is not a vampire, he is entirely human but the catch is that, let’s say he approaches man-woman intimacy in a different manner, he is a Dominant. But Ana here likes him so much that she is willing to experiment and their “exploits” in all forms fill the rest of the plot. 

Style 

The book as such is written as being narrated by Anastasia with her Inner Goddess ;) providing a lot of subtext. For me personally, this is one of the stories where if you take it literally, it might not be exactly great literature but if you skillfully read between the lines it can provide you great insights about the dynamics of man-woman interaction and how intimacy is not just physical but also emotional and intellectual.

The character of Christian for me effectively portrays the “beast” in human form that Edward’s in Twilight. Vampires are fantasy but people like Christian are reality and I think we should acknowledge that we all have our own demons who affect our life more than we think or care to understand. Psycho-therapists have long since maintained that our childhood shapes our adult life right from our ideologies to relationships. This is in fact one of the core findings by the great psychologists Freud. This book and its characters are essentially based on the very same finding and are brought out in a rather raw form for some people’s taste.

Characters

Ana’s character on the other hand, is quite simple. She is a naïve, innocent happy-go-lucky girl who stumbles headfirst into love with a rather unconventional and disturbed person. In some cultures, people would find it difficult that girls like Ana still exist in today’s time. But for us, people in India we know that girls like Ana are all around us. Even otherwise, girls are sometimes brought up in a way to hide their sexuality, be naïve and innocent as a way of “protecting” them. There are always inner battles in a girl while she fights to let go of the rules and take on a new thing. Ana might be confused but is also extremely loyal, caring and a risk taker at heart.

The other characters such as Christian and Ana’s families, Ana’s friends are also well defined but form only the background of the play that is at the core about Christian and Ana’s journey towards a common ground in their varying personalities and perspectives on everything from relationship to work ethics. 

Verdict 

The book has everything a boy-met-girl and fell in love story should have with an extra large dosage on the raw sexual antics of the characters. If this book is on your bookshelf and you are somebody who prefers traditional and conventional romance in life, I would suggest you to read the book but knowing that you are not going to agree on a lot of decisions taken by the protagonists of this series. For somebody highly interested in reading about books that have psychological elements combined with eccentric characters, this book might be a good read.

Whatever you believe in, to like this good you need to have an open mind, a bigger tolerance for unconventional portrayal of relationships and a greater love for the world of books.

- Wanna-be-Savant