Book-a-book of the Month Club discussion

Discuss the characters here . . . favorites, least favorites, etc.

I think Christine Daee is a bit of a silly twit. I also think She's written that way on purpose to give us some comedy. :D

I can say that this book is ending up much funnier than I expected. The managers are a comedy of errors and buffoonery.

I think most people expect it to be formal and stuffy because of the musical/movie, but it's not at all. It really is almost a comedy of errors and obviously written that way on purpose.

Raoul reminds me of a stock Victorian woman character - constantly breaking into tears, going pale and getting the "vapors".

T new opera managers are simply idiots. They don't know what all the opera owns (i.e. the stable and horses) or understand the internal workings at all. Not to mention the fact that they just bumble around acting pompous and above it all.

Not done quite yet, but I am in the section with the Persian narrative, and the Persian seems like a Deus Ex Machina to bring some elements to light for Raoul and provide narration for the final showdown.

Every single character in this book is a bit of an imbecile. It was almost as if they were trying to be as clueless as possible. And Erik was just downright creepy. In the musical, he's sort of portrayed as this tragic, romantic character and Christine and Raoul's story is much more believable in the musical than in the book.

Penny wrote: "Every single character in this book is a bit of an imbecile."

Penny - I agree, but I actually liked it! To me, this book ended up being a comedy (to my surprise) and I found myself laughing through most of it.

I wonder what Leroux's intention was? It certainly does not seem to match the romanticized version the musical translators came up with!

Because of when this book was written I suspect Leroux did not mean them to be as comical as we find them. I haven't read his other work, so i could be wrong of course, but books written in this time period seemed to take themselves very seriously. Characters were overly dramatic and prone to the "vapors" and hysteria.

I did the book a disservice by seeing the other forms first. Even the old black and white phantom is better than the original source, in my opinion, because films at that time were supposed to be almost campy. They had to in order to get their points across.

When we do a selection for our movie/book club I make a huge effort to always read first. Same thing if I see a movie is coming out based on a book. I'll try to read before I see if I'm at all interested. In this case I did not and I feel almost guilty about it. O_o