EL James (right) and fans on the Today show (Photo by: Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank)
While the likes of Catherine Cookson and Jackie Collins would never sink so low as to give their green-eyed, heavily-muscled, sex-addled protagonist the catchphrase “Fuck a duck!”, they would certainly write him into the story EL James has created: that of an errant younger son thrust suddenly into family responsibility as Lord Trevethick upon the death of his better-loved brother, Kit, finding redemption in the virginal vagina of Alessia, a sex-trafficked runaway with a passion for Beethoven and Jo Malone bath products. In a predictable, paint-by-numbers plot, The Mister meets a mistress and exactly what you’d expect comes to pass. The only good thing to be said about EL James’ first exploration away from vampiric fan-fiction and into erotic fiction of her own imagining is that she has no creativity whatsoever, and so, most of the time, you can pretend you’re reading something written by someone else. With this on the first page, you don’t have to be the savviest reader to suspect that Alessia, a doe-eyed, long-haired Albanian cleaner with a headscarf and large pink panties that come to feature prominently in later exposition, is going to be the subject of plenty of very obvious jokes about “daily fucking”.
The Mister opens with an extremely important piece of translation – the difference between the word “daily” in US vernacular (a newspaper published every day but Sunday) and UK parlance (a woman who is employed to clean someone’s house on a regular basis). The author of Fifty Shades of Grey is back, with more unintentionally hilarious catchphrases and “linguistically bankrupt fondling of a clitoris”.
0 kommentar(er)
