The Phantom of the Opera (Bantam Classics)

by Gaston Leroux

The Phantom of the Opera <> Mass Market Paperback <> GastonLeRoux <> BantamClassics

Mass Market Paperback

Published January 31, 1990

About the author

Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.

In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, 1910), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, such as the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical. It was also the basis of the 1990 novel Phantom by Susan Kay.

Leroux went to school in Normandy and studied law in Paris, graduating in 1889. He inherited millions of francs and lived wildly until he nearly reached bankruptcy. Then in 1890, he began working as a court reporter and theater critic for L'Écho de Paris. His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In 1905 he was present at and covered the Russian Revolution. Another case he was present at involved the investigation and deep coverage of an opera house in Paris, later to become a ballet house. The basement consisted of a cell that held prisoners in the Paris Commune, which were the rulers of Paris through much of the Franco-Prussian war.

He suddenly left journalism in 1907, and began writing fiction. In 1909, he and Arthur Bernède formed their own film company, Société des Cinéromans to simultaneously publish novels and turn them into films. He first wrote a mystery novel entitled Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1908; The Mystery of the Yellow Room), starring the amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille. Leroux's contribution to French detective fiction is considered a parallel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's in the United Kingdom and Edgar Allan Poe's in America. Leroux died in Nice on April 15, 1927, of a urinary tract infection.

Reviews

[Sabrina Blandon]

Happy I finally had a moment to read the original! As a fan of the musical, it was nice to see the details of the original expanded upon in the book. There are, of course, differences between the musical and the original story. The original tale reminds me of similiar crime fiction writing style often by French writers or set in France like Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. There are moments where Gaston is clearly poking fun at other nationalities while in a way offering a new perspective of non-French (see the Persian character) speakers since it was common during this time. Christine's character in this book is vastly different from the musical Christine and part of me wished more was taken from the original! Gaston uses Christine as a vessel for her development from a naive woman towards a somewhat independent in thought woman who uses her voice which hilariously contrasts Raoul's sometimes feminine character as he undergoes his transition to being more "manly" when Christine is taken by the Phantom. These characters juxtapose each other in an intriguing way given the time period they were created in. The Phantom's character is also teetering between "good and evil" as readers leave to interpretation if the OG was a just a ploy for society's entertainment or if he was in fact a musical genius not meant for this cruel world. Even the other cast of characters have a complexity within them even if we don't necessarily follow them throughout.