CRAIG BROWN: EL James’s The Mister is fifty shades of AWFUL

The Mister

EL James                                                                                                            Arrow £7.99

Rating: No Stars 

Maxim Trevelyan, who lives in Trevelyan House in Chelsea, has inherited the title of Earl of Trevethick. And that’s not all. ‘I’ve just inherited a vast estate in Cornwall, an estate in Oxfordshire, another in Northumberland, and a small portion of London,’ he tells himself, early on.

He reminds us of this property windfall at regular intervals. For instance, on page 13 he writes:

‘Earl of Trevethick.

‘That’s me. Now.

‘It’s inconceivable. It’s devastating.’

The Mister is Barbara Cartland narrated by Alan Partridge: the standard penniless virgin, pursued by foreign baddies, swept off her feet by the strapping toff

Though he claims to have been educated at Eton College, he offers no explanation for his near-illiteracy. Clearly, no one ever taught him about sentences and paragraphs.

Instead.

He goes on.

Writing.

Like this.

His character, or what little there is of it, is borderline-imbecilic.

He helpfully tells us that sex is ‘my favourite recreational activity’ and ‘my speciality is being the black sheep of the family… but deep down I know how bloody useless I am’. 

Nevertheless, ‘access to a healthy trust fund since I turned 21 means I’ve never done a serious day’s work in my life’.

As you can see, the 13th Earl puts the V Thick into Trevethick. The book begins with him employing what he off-puttingly calls ‘a large part of my anatomy’ to undertake as much sex as possible, with women who clearly learned to talk through a close study of the Confessions Of A Window Cleaner films from the Seventies.

‘Let’s go to bed, Posh Boy,’ whispers Leticia.

‘All good things, sweetheart,’ he replies.

Once things are under way, Maxim thinks to himself, in italics: ‘Man, she really wants this.’

In her acknowledgements at the back, E L James thanks ‘James Leonard for his tuition in the language of posh young Englishmen’. Something makes me doubt she ever achieved more than an F grade.

Anyway, into Trevelyan House comes a hard-working Albanian cleaner called Alessia. We know this because ‘She sprays the bathroom mirror with Windolene and rubs energetically.’

By mistake, Alessia goes into Maxim’s bedroom. He is asleep, and in the buff: ‘the first naked man she’s ever seen’. His eyelids open ‘to reveal unfocused but brilliant green eyes’, which, we learn, are ‘the colour of the still, deep waters of the Drin on a summer’s day’. 

Fancy!

When Maxim finally comes to, he clocks Alessia’s eyes, too. In fact, he can’t stop clocking them. As the book goes on, he describes them successively as the colour of espresso, dark and fathomless, large and liquid brown, soul-searching, brimming with sorrow, round with concern, as well as ‘framed by the longest lashes I’ve ever seen’.

It’s love at first sight, on both sides, but because she is a virgin, and Maxim is overcome with respect for her, they remain celibate for well over 200 pages. Given that soft porn is E L James’s USP, her regular readers may well feel cheesed off at its absence. 

It’s like going to Nando’s and finding they’re clean out of chicken, or booking a flight to somewhere sunny and exotic and being told there’s been a change of plan, and you’re now on a bus replacement service to Nuneaton.

It’s a long, long, long 200 pages, full of skippable passages signalled by early-warning sentences like ‘So tell me more about life in Kukes.’ There follow Wikipedia-ish paragraphs – ‘Albania is a special place where family is at the centre of everything… Kukes is a small place in the north near the border with Kosovo’ – of almost sublime banality.

It turns out that Alessia is on the run not only from murderous Albanian sex-traffickers but also from a murderous Albanian vulgarian, who she is being forced to marry. 

Meanwhile, Maxim wants her badly. We know this because on page 190 he thinks:

‘I want her. Badly.’

and on page 191:

‘She has nothing.

‘I have everything.’

It’s not until page 240 – ‘desire scorches through me like wildfire’ – that anything really kicks off, but, to be honest, it sounds more like origami, or balloon-bending, than foreplay. 

‘In a split-second, her nipple is tall and rigid, matching its twin.’ They finally go the whole hog on page 249, but, for most readers, by then it will have proved to be too little, too late.

IT’S A FACT

The year after Fifty Shades was published in the US, the number of casualty admissions due to people trying kinky sex rose by 50 per cent.

In fact, what little sex there is reads like someone struggling to assemble an Ikea shelving unit. ‘With my arm under her behind, I slide her up my body so her legs are on either side of my hips. 

And I sit up so she’s astride me, her arms on my shoulders. I clasp her face and kiss her.’ The only surprise is that there’s no Allen key provided. On the other hand, His Lordship has no complaints.

‘She fits perfectly in my arms. I can rest my chin on her head, should I so choose.’ In another incarnation, she might have made the perfect rucksack.

The Mister is Barbara Cartland narrated by Alan Partridge: the standard penniless virgin, pursued by foreign baddies, swept off her feet by the strapping toff, but with added sports cars. One moment, Maxim is thinking:

‘She’s flawless.

‘In every way.’

And the next he’s climbing into his F-Type Jag and pressing the ignition.

‘The engine roars into life and I ease the car forward out of its parking space.’ Twenty pages later, he’s back in his motor. ‘I exhale, push the ignition, and the engine growls into life.’ 

Oddly enough, the F-Type makes just the same noise as Caroline, his brother’s sexy widow, with whom he is conducting an on-off affair: ‘ “Kiss me,” she growls.’

It follows a conventional boy meets girl/boy loses girl/boy finds girl again/wedding bells plot, though artificially elongated with those daft one-word paragraphs.

I have to find her.

Where will she go?

Home.

Brentford.

Yes.

As in James’s Fifty Shades series, the hero’s only discernible qualities are a huge bank balance and a bulging property portfolio. Alessia goes into his big house. ‘This house is so big!’ she thinks. 

He walks her round the estate. ‘Rosperran Farm has been part of the Trevethick estate since Georgian times. The Chenoweth family have been tenant farmers there for more than 100 years.’ Skip, reader, skip!

Materialism combines with snobbery to make Maxim the perfect partner. Maxim takes Alessia on a shopping jaunt and spends £1,335 on clothes for her. He offers her champagne. 

‘Champagne! She has read about champagne. But never thought she’d experience the taste.’

When he finally pops the question, he picks ‘the Thirties Cartier platinum-and-diamond ring that my grandfather, Hugh Trevelyan, bestowed on my grandmother…’ For any unwary reader who is still with him, he continues to bore on: ‘… It’s an exquisite, simple and elegant ring: 2.79 carats and currently valued at £45,000.’

Maxim introduces her to his numerous servants, among them an old Scottish biddy who says things like ‘Ah, lassie, don’t you be crying’ and a butler called Blake who says suitably butlerish things such as: ‘Will that be all, sir?’

To set Alessia at her ease, His Lordship says: ‘I know you’re from a different culture, and I know we’re not economic equals, but that’s just an accident of birth. We are equals in every other way.’ 

Rather than reply ‘You patronising git,’ Alessia ‘turns her tear-stained face’ to him, and says: ‘You are not ashamed of me?’ So he reassures her that he isn’t – ‘No. No. Of course not. I… I… I’ve fallen in love with you.’

At this point, ‘her eyes glisten with fresh tears’, she tells him that she loves him too and, according to His Lordship, ‘joy bursts like a million fireworks within me from head to foot’. 

Fifteen pages later, he’s hard at work teaching her how to use the cutlery like a proper Milady: ‘Always start from the outside and work inwards with each course.’ Happy days!

Part of the point of being a book critic is to read bad books so that you won’t have to. The Mister is not just bad, but awful. Or, as E L James might put it:

Not just.

Bad.

But.

AWFUL. 

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