Anyway, it was a believable depiction of Erik’s childhood: tragic and cringe-worthy.
Picking on Erik was so ridiculously easy and he did it. There are bad people out there and Javert was one of them. Readers also argue this section was unrealistic with Javert (lol that name)’s treatment. That was out of place, but that aside and his awkward hormone problems, this was pretty poetic too. The only gripe is his wondering about spiders mating. The parallel between her and Christine was obvious, with the doctor as Raoul.Įrik (1)- I liked this one too. She was realistic she was childish, she was shallow, and she was tragic. She was one of the most well-developed characters in my opinion. Sure, readers usually bash her with good reason, but I think Madeline wasn’t a bad person. No wonder this novel won the most romantic of the year. The smells, sounds, tastes, everything about the setting was beautifully described. He wasn’t just having a hard-on or being curious I honestly don’t think it’s very realistic to be that lustful.Ĭons aside for prose, the imagery was wonderful.
Kay’s treatment of Erik’s early lust for girls is kind of weird I don’t know if little boys feel the need to do it that intensely. Repeating adjectives annoyed me and there was too much description of Erik’s predator-ness. I didn’t have the need to say “shut up” to any of the narrators. The prose was very flowery and used the word “awesome” too much. Let’s take a look at it as its own book for now: On enjoyment level, I might bump it up to a 4. I get that Erik definitely represents some ideas of sexuality, or at least of that Gothic idea of the unknown and unacceptable (which includes sex along with a bunch of other stuff like racial Otherness, drug usage, and other stuff that nineteenth century writers were Kinda Freaked Out About), but Leroux’s Phantom has very little sexual subtext or behavior, so Kay’s habit of making him Sex Incarnate and constantly throwing people at him in the throes of desire (and ALL of them in pretty awful rape/consent-compromise scenarios - the khanum, Javert, Christine, his own mother) comes off as in poor taste to me a lot of the time, and downright creepy at other times.Now for the full review of Susan Kay’s “Phantom.” It’s long because I have a lot of feels, ok? All in all, I’d give it 3 ½ stars as a stand alone book out of 5. Kay absolutely set out to seriously sexualize the Phantom and his relationships with others, no doubt because of the more romantic spin on the story in the Lloyd Webber musical, and as a result she makes Erik a beign who is inherently sexual, which has always been a pretty weird avenue for me. But since we know that Leroux was not a Freudian, and that all of that is wildly developed out of some pretty small inference in Leroux’s novel, it’s not really something I’d say is anywhere close to canon.
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