There is a complete dearth of emotional maturity that is genuinely unsettling. It also has more red flags than a communist parade. The Mister is a romance for Brexit Britain, a coked-up toff reaching out across the class divide to help a poverty-stricken migrant find a home – though when they finally do get married, the Home Office doesn’t whisk Alessia off for daring to wear pyjamas in bed. James writes about sex like a 14-year-old and wealth like her trilogy hasn't sold millions (Not for long.) Where cinema gave us the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, James introduces us to the Magical Poor Dream Immigrant: an ethereal and exotic foreigner who can woo us with their cute grasp of English (Alessia calls smartphones “clever phones”) and their outstanding, natural intellectual talents (Alessia is a piano-playing savant and chess grandmaster with synaesthesia, because of course she is). She has no passport or power, but does possess an abusive father, an abusive ex-fiance, two angry sex-traffickers on her tail, and most importantly, her virginity. At one point, Milord Tremulous broods: “I’ve just inherited a vast estate in Cornwall, an estate in Oxfordshire, another in Northumberland and a small portion of London – but at what cost?” Dunno mate, but you’ve got accountants for that.Īnd instead of teenage virgin Anastasia Steele, we have 23-year-old Albanian Alessia Demachi, who has been trafficked into Britain and has ended up a cleaner in Trevelyan’s palatial home on Chelsea Embankment.

Replacing predatory tycoon Christian Grey in her first post-Grey novel is Trevelyan, also known as Lord Trevethick, an earl-cum-photographer-cum-model-cum-DJ who does a lot of one of those because his brother died and he needs to have sex about it. After having made her name with leatherbound rumpy pumpy in her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, The Mister is James’s goodbye to BDSM, and hello to what looks like a long career of writing retrograde romances between powerful men and uncomfortably vulnerable women. But Maximum Tinseltrousers is no Jacob Rees-Mogg with a collection of spreader bars. This is just sleep – so the next time you scream, I’ll be right there.’” He then thinks: “ Of course, I’d like to make her scream in a different way.”Īt least among all this wrongness, James gets one thing right: her randy English earl has a believably stupid name. “Well,” he thinks, glancing at his traumatised future paramour before asking for a box, “I might get lucky.” Later offering to share his bed, he says: “I won’t touch you. While paying for the dragon-shaped light intended for children, he spots condoms behind the counter. Her new romantic hero, British aristocrat Maxim Trevelyan, enters a shop to buy a nightlight for his attractive, sex-trafficked Albanian cleaner Alessia. T here is a small moment in EL James’s new novel The Mister that embodies her unique ability for libido-shrinking creepiness.

El james the mister review