You’d need more imagination than I have, and a helluva lot more than E.L.James has to interweave Pilates with your average bonkers, bank busting novel. So you’ll have to make do with the latter.
I haven’t seen the film, not will I, but over the summer of 2012 someone leant me the book. Here are my thoughts.
Just what is all the fuss about?
There is more convincing plot development in an IKEA flat pack instruction booklet and I have read bus timetables that are more erudite. Nuance? You’ll get more from the Mister Men. And lets face facts; it’s Mills & Boon with added raunch. Girls, we are basically reading a romantic fantasy, much of which is remarkably traditional. Vanilla fantasy maybe?
There is an attractive, and oh so very nubile, young protagonist. She has brains, to give a veneer of right on-ness. The male character is older (natch), rich, handsome, smitten…. and not long after our golden couple meet they have great, fulfilling, successful, two-vaginal-orgasms-in-a-row, earth moving sex. All of this from a guy who brings his own condoms, offers to use them and would probably bring our brave girl a post-coital cup of hot chocolate if he didn’t have a butler to do it for him.
Good points, well put, as ever Ms Plant.
And there is more…..
It is only fiction though, so I am supposed to do that “suspension of disbelief” thing, (as opposed, I assume, to actual suspension of our now rather less than chaste heroine, in chains, I presume). Even so, all that lovey, dovey stuff from a controlling dominant? No way. And how about the notion of wanting to change a man by loving them? Definitely fantasy! Here is a heart-and-flowers romance, or maybe a flash-car-and-first-edition romance, with a bit of S&M grafted on with all the finesse of a botched DIY job.
I didn’t finish book one. I stopped about forty pages short of the end so maybe there is an explanation for the schizoid behaviour of the eponymous hero. I couldn’t finish it though, because if I’d read about the plucky heroine’s inner goddess one more time I would have been compelled to add the book to the compost heap. What is an inner goddess anyway? It sounds like a kind of underwear that is meant to make you look thinner.
My cynicism appears to place me in the minority. I’m out of tune with the zeitgeist, thereby missing out on a bargain: the zeitgeist is on offer at the supermarket. It would seem that we’re buying porn with our parsnips nowadays. Are all those vegetables now destined for something more stimulating than mere soup making?
Holy crap! Maybe I am not seeing the gift horse….why have BOGOF when you can have buggery at 3 for the price of 2?
Hmmmm.
Now then, where did I leave my copy of Pride and Prejudice? Maybe its beside my inner goddess.
Only joking… The book that i am actually reading at the moment is called “Pelvic Power”. What is this? I hear you ask. A sex manual? A Rampant Rabbit with a more prosaic name? No. It is in fact a book about the anatomy and function of the pelvic floor. Now, one of the main selling points of FSOG is that it has allegedly improved peoples’ sex life. Rather ironically, Pelvic Power claims, that with assiduous practice of a raft of rather leftfield pelvic floor exercises, it too will do the same.
So, a question: which will improve my sex life? Reading, what is it called again? 42 Shades of Tedium, 7 Shades of the Story of O and 2 teaspoons of the Marquis de Sade, or doing the pelvic floor work?.
Holy crap! I’ve just remembered. I am single.
Never mind….where did I leave those parsnips?