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James Kidd

The Mister
b y E.L. James
Vintage
3/5 stars
The Mister is E.L. James’ sixth novel. Or is it her fourth? The exact total depends largely on what you made of her two previous books, Grey and Darker, to all intents and purposes remakes of James’ mega-hits Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker. Does replacing Anastasia Steele with Christian Grey as narrator constitute new works or the world’s most profitable exercises in “find and replace”?
The size of James’ bibliography is not the only uncer­­tainty surrounding The Mister’s publication. James’ reputa­tion is going through a somewhat ambiguous patch. This can partly be expressed with one question: can E.L. do anything other than Fifty Shades? James hasn’t just rehashed the original trilogy in prose, she’s also rehashed it on the big screen. Is she even now planning screen rehashes of the prose rehashes?
Both projects made James even richer: the films’ gross, pun intended, apparently exceeds US$1 billion. But neither raised her standing as a writer. If anything, Grey and Darker may actually have wounded this. While James is more likely to win a Nobel Peace Prize than one for literature, her affable persona ensured she was admired for her success.

Indeed, her unaffected, mumsy good humour and amia­bility were crucial to the unlikely triumph of her controver­sial erotic genre, softening the blows meted out by Christian’s paddle. Moreover, the sight of a woman writer openly celebrating women’s sexuality for an audience of (mainly) women readers was bracingly liberating.
The naysayers who fretted over her starry-eyed portraits of male sexual violence and female submission always seemed like spoilsports, until #MeToo shifted the context. What exact­ly separated Christian Grey – the mani­pulative, sexu­ally aggressive billionaire overwhelming a naive, young subordinate – from the real-life Harvey Weinsteins? In this, Grey and Darker were at best badly timed, and at worst poorly judged.
As women fought back against oppressors, Christian’s usurpation of Anastasia not only felt out of step socially, it upset the delicate balance of power within the novels. James robbed herself of a primary defence: that Fifty Shades’ S&M games were controlled by a woman’s gaze, which also gloried in objectifying the hunky male lead. When this hunky male lead spoke for himself, by contrast, he seemed less enigmatic than cruel, less command­ing than petty, less domineering than relentlessly acquisitive.
Some of these frictions play out in The Mister – some before the novel even begins. The press release is a strange mix of starry-eyed wonder and steely commercialism. James’ potted biography is conveyed with the hyperbole of an overexcited football pundit: she is an “incurable” romantic and “self-confessed” fangirl, who is “blessed with two wonderful sons”. Rather cooler in tone are the remotely impressive facts and figures of her vast success: the box office billions, place on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, the 150 million books sold.
Fifty Shades juggled similar balls. Forget the headline grabbing hanky-spanky, James’ cocktale was a potent brew of romance and high finance. Christian may have sealed the deal with all those hearts and flowers, but his whips wouldn’t have worked their magic if his bank balance hadn’t been so large. The links binding love and cash are as old as novels themselves. It isn’t Mr Darcy’s good looks that overcome Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice: it’s the size of his stately home.
All of which brings us to The Mister, which makes its own claims on ancient narratives: here, fairy tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. The good news is the story ventures beyond the Fifty Shades universe. Hard-core Jamesians need not despair; The Mister doesn’t exactly reinvent E.L.’s wheel. Her ambition, at least to begin with, is to make this even rounder. The first words of chapter one are “Mindless sex”, both a provocation and a fair intro­duction to James’ new leading man, Maxim Trevelyan.
Naturally, “the action” that preoccupies Maxim morn­ing, noon and night is of a typical E.L. vintage: Heather from Putney, for example. “She’s hot. And willing. Yes, very willing”
If this seems like a name that exists only in novels such as The Mister, you aren’t far off. Not content with creating a handsome sex god rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, James presents us with a handsome sex god rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams who is also an aristocrat! The mindless sex has hardly begun before Maxim learns he’s to be Earl of Trevethick. Take that, Mr Darcy.
Naturally, “the action” that preoccupies Maxim morn­ing, noon and night is of a typical E.L. vintage: Heather from Putney, for example. “She’s hot. And willing. Yes, very willing.” We know this because as Maxim lords it over Heather’s erogenous zones, she groans and arches her back, “pushing her breasts into my hands”. One joy of reading James is for moments like these, when her bizarrely over­wrought prose creates inadvertent images. This sentence seems to disembody Heather from her breasts, which she then propels towards Maxim on a trolley of some sort.
We get the point: Maxim Trevelyan is Bertie Wooster the sex addict. In different ways to P.G. Wodehouse’s famously marriage-averse hero, romantic entanglements bring little joy. Maxim might pull more women than athletes do muscles and horses do carts, but his baseline mood zaps between Byronic brooding, teeth-grinding misanthropy and, most unappetising of all, guttural ingratitude.
“I’ve just inherited a vast estate in Cornwall, an estate in Oxfordshire, another in Northumberland, and a small portion of London – but at what cost?” Even more unnerving are all the staff who are suddenly reliant upon poor old him. “Too many, far too many.” You know Maxim’s serious because he apes James’ signature repetitions. This is employed, variously, to suggest fear (“Go. Go. Go. Don’t stop”) and, of course, excitement: “She’s close. So close.”

Maxim wouldn’t be a romantic lead if all this adolescent moodiness didn’t have a plangent emotional source – in this case, the sudden death of his older brother, Kit, the preceding earl. Just when you feel an ounce of genuine pathos for the harassed aristocratic multimillionaire, Maxim promptly sleeps with Caroline, who is not only Kit’s grieving widow but also his only friend.
Actually, Maxim is a fantastic creation in all senses of the word. Narcissistic, entitled, vain and shallow, he would be utterly loathsome if he weren’t so absurd. He might seem like a crass, over-privileged conker, but deep down he is a soulful, brilliant, melancholy pianist and composer of soulful, brilliant, melancholy melodies. Here is E.L. James the irrepressible fangirl so in love with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight that she wrote Fifty Shades in tribute. Only now she’s so in love with hoary old Mills & Boon clichés – terse, mysterious but wounded musicians whose genius can only be refreshed by love – she has written The Mister.
Only, I began to wonder. Is Maxim a knowing come-on? Is The Mister a libidinous, postmodern satire – not only of its own genre conventions, but the snobbish introspection of present-day toxic masculinity? Is James attempting nothing less than an English Psycho – using Maxim to expose faultlines in modern Britain, modern men and even James’ recent negative press?
Adding weight to this interpretation is The Mister’s hero­ine and second narrator, Alessia Demachi. In much the same way that Maxim is Christian Grey only more so, Alessia is Anastasia Steele in concentrated form. Because if you thought Anastasia was a disempowered ingénue, what happens when you learn that Alessia is Maxim’s cleaning woman? Not that Maxim realises, of course: it takes him three weeks to notice his trusty old retainer of three full years has been replaced by a sinuous, gorgeous vision in a “ghastly blue housecoat”. Once Alessia is noticed, she stays noticed: “She’s f***ing exquisite,” he ponders, sensitively.
The proximity of sex trafficking and sex goddess is uncomfort­able. Much of this unease is due to Maxim, whose dreams of Alessia as “an angel” mixed with more sinful desires are hackneyed to say the least
James’ bold strategy is to fuse the inevitable sexual gym­nas­tics that follow with Alessia’s dark past of sexual violence in Albania. Whether E.L. pulls it off (no pun intended) is probably a personal matter for each reader.
I myself wasn’t convinced. While Alessia is likeable, the proximity of sex trafficking and sex goddess is uncomfort­able. Much of this unease is due to Maxim, whose dreams of Alessia as “an angel” mixed with more sinful desires are hackneyed to say the least. James doubtless sees him as an unreliable narrator, but Maxim is too entertainingly asinine to sustain such nuance. While James is perhaps having her erotic cake and eating it, she should also be applauded: for her sincere ambition to challenge her genre’s conventions, and to push them towards good work.


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The charmingly affable writer publishes yet another hanky-spanky page turner
Venturing away from the Fifty Shades universe, although not too far, The Mister introduces a new romantic hero


The charmingly affable writer keeps it kinky with yet another hanky-spanky page turner that ventures away from the Fifty Shades universe, although not too far.


An assessment or critique of a service, product or creative endeavour.  Film reviews, restaurant reviews, reviews of art exhibitions. (Eg. Crazy Rich Asians: an important film, yes, but a good one?)


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Review | E.L. James’ The Mister: absurd erotica that verges on uncomfortable

The charmingly affable writer publishes yet another hanky-spanky page turner Venturing away from the Fifty Shades universe, although not too far, The Mister introduces a new romantic hero

The charmingly affable writer publishes yet another hanky-spanky page turner

Venturing away from the Fifty Shades universe, although not too far, The Mister introduces a new romantic hero