We open with Ana staring into a fire, wondering where the hell Christian is. It even made the TV news, even though he’s been missing for only eight hours. Unless you’re under 10 years old, that’s not missing, that’s just late.
Again, it’s Christian Grey’s world. We just live in it. Even in his absence, he is everything.
Ana goes through a greatest hits montage of remembering things Christian has said to her. (Not, take note, the things he said that made her said or frightened.) She’s already into bargaining.
Then Christian comes back. He just walks into the room full of his extended family, alive and a bit grubby. (Even his housekeeper is in tears at his return.)
That was a pretty short “dark night of the soul” for Ana. Her hickies hadn’t even faded yet. I was anticipating a drawn out plot of searching for him, Ana going through several stages of of grief (particularly the “anger” part), mounting tension, all that classic melodramatic stuff. Instead, it’s over in a handful of pages. It’s as if EL James is contriving a momentary absence of Christian, a strategic withdrawal, in order to make Ana agree to his marriage proposal. Some kind of pick-up-artist manoeuvre: get her invested in you, then withdraw and paralyze her with the thought of losing you.
No only is it manipulative, it’s just more bad writing. The previous external threats to Christian and Ana (Leila and Jack) were handled in such a way to remove any rising tension, and here his disappearance is resolved so quickly that there is no time to invest in the dramatic situation. Granted, EL James is writing a romance, not a thriller, but the thriller aspects are mishandled so they don’t compliment the romance.
This could have been fixed somewhat, if Christian’s helicopter had been found crashed, but Christian himself was missing.
I should also mention that Christian had somebody named Ros with him with the helicopter crashed, and nobody on the news mentioned her or asked if she was okay. She doesn’t have billions of dollars, so really, does she matter? She’s not a job creator or anything.
Oh, and Ana gives him a little electronic keychain that says, “YES”, to his proposal.
There is zero kink content in this chapter.
One Response to “The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades Darker: Chapter 19”
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The longer he’s missing, the less time there is for badly-written sex scenes. Plus him being gone a few chapters would mean having to develop a sub-plot.