On the grounds that I am a psychiatrist, and a woman, I
felt compelled to write a review on thisbook: the book everyone is talking about, the
fastest selling paperback of all time.
50 shades allegedly started as Twilight fan fiction,
but soon took on a life of its own. The plot follows the
relationship between Anna, an innocent, in every sense of the word,
and, Christian, a charismatic, billionaire entrepreneur with dark
secrets. An accidental meeting precipitates a spicy whirlwind
romance ending in heartache in book one of the
trilogy.
Consistent with its amateur beginnings the writing is at best
unskilled and in its lowest points bordering on unintentional
comedy. The book is written in the form of the
heroine’s contemporaneous first person internal monologue featuring
such innovative features as the frequent visual imagery of her
‘subconscious’ and ‘inner goddess’.
Anna’s ‘subconscious’ bears no relation to Freud’s
psychoanalytic explorations and I can only hope that
the book’s
popularity will not further expand the incorrect use of the term
into the vernacular.
The ‘inner goddess’ appears to be Anna’s libido. Despite her
remarkable sexual and relationship naiveté, Anna soon makes up for
lost time.
The BDSM aspect of the book is largely a MacGuffin ("a
plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot
of a work of fiction"). Christian has a ‘twitching palm’ but
essentially the sex scenes are largely what would be commonly
recognised as ‘experimentation’ (I could quote a multitude of
women’s glossy magazines on the subject). The story does not
concern paraphilias, in the ICD-10 sense. If anything, plot
developments in the next 2 booksin the trilogy suggest that the author’s
intention is to portray the triumph of traditional family values
and standard sexual practises over darker passions and childhood
trauma. ‘The story of O’ this is not...
All in all, I would say that the concept may have had
potential (BDSM is not a common theme inbooks of this genre), but poor
character development and amateur writing skills suggest this is
more likely to aggravate than titillate , even in the context of a
holiday read.