I did try my best to avoid the great hype around the movie premiere for a few weeks, but since my husband also read (and almost liked!-he says), the trilogy, I found my self sitting at the cinema on a Friday evening. Let me tell you, that was painful. What an utter awfully wooden rendition of a book that I had enjoyed quite a lot. It was really, really bad. Cringe-worthily bad. I will be the first one to admit that the book, while very entertaining, was no literary masterpiece. Still, compared to the movie, it almost seems so.
Coming out of the cinema, and with that huge cliffy at the end, I felt I needed to re-read the books (to scratch the itch, so to say). So I did. And then I found a link to this re-working of the story, from Christian's mind, no less. Whoah! Gleefully rubbing my hands, I got to it, and I devoured it all in a train trip from London to Yorkshire. And what a surprise it was: it was much better than the original!!!!!
So this is a first for me, a kind of novelty. A full male POV of a previous trilogy, but the catch here is that it is written as fan fiction by someone else. Without getting into the value ethical questions about doing something like that, and understanding that the story still belongs to E.L. James, G.E. Griffin has done here something rather astute. Well, Christian to me was always a much meatier character than Anastasia, a lot darker and complex, and here we have a direct line to his thinking patterns, it was pure joy to read. The main things that made me enjoy this slightly more than the original story were:
The very silly and annoying inner goddess and subconscious in Ana's mind are obviously nowhere to be seen, since we are in Christian's
mind, not in Ana's (thank God for that, they were what made me give the first book 4 stars, not 5).
We get the privilege of attending some of Christian's therapy sessions with Dr Flynn. This was great. Totally enjoyable and really well executed by the author. I found myself really liking and relating to Flynn as a fellow therapist. He had not been given enough material in the original books, and in this one, I though he was a great therapist, really, really spot on and good technique too. Well done here, G.E. Griffin!
Through these therapy sessions and through having a better understanding of what goes on in his head, Christian's change of heart about his sexual proclivities, and his willingness to refrain from the more extreme of his sadistic behaviours makes a lot more sense and it is a lot more believable. This had also been one of my major misgivings about the internal consistency of Christian's character in the original book, his swift apparent change in a very short space of time and with hardly any intuitive justification. His reasoning and motives are better explained here, as you have a direct line to his inner monologue. And he does grow and heals a lot through the three books.
We also get to "know" what was going on in his mind during some interesting moments in the narrative.
I have continued reading the other two books in this male POV during a short holiday, and I have also enjoyed them, despite finding them a tad repetitive, although this is my own fault for reading them after re-reading the original trilogy.
Just hoping that by completely over-dosing on Fifty Shades I will manage to stay away from the next two movies, but I very much doubt it, anyway.
Ah, and I will probably be reading G.E. Griffin's first "real" book (Starr Fated) too.