The Phantom Library

This book is goddamn boring. Boring cliches, boring cardboard characters, boring lack of depth, boring, boring, boring. The only thing that isn't boring is the author's inability to write in the English language, which while definitely not boring for me is still not going to win it any points.

 

As you may have noticed on the cover, this is the "revised edition" of this book. Yes, it's been through more than one edition, as if it were some kind of highly in-demand volume. I don't know much about its demand, but I do know that I could seriously have done without the highly-vaunted extended epilogue it now includes.

 

It’s worth noticing that there has been a lot of drama on the internet about this book; Binkley has been accused of plagiarizing large swaths of it, lifting material from online fanfiction written by other fans of the story. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but if she did plagiarize it didn't help very much because this is still like reading paint dry.

 

It seems you can judge a book by its cover, because whenever something has gone terribly wrong on the cover, it turns out that tragedy is in store in the pages. In this case, we have discussion of the "Changy family" in the back cover copy. Sigh.

 

Preface

 

"Would Christine have been able to love and appreciate Erik as he was, not just as her Angel of Music? Would a modern Christine have been able to look past his face and into his heart? Every society in every culture has rejected the ugly and unusual, but I decided it was time for Christine to make her own decisions."

 

Leaving aside the entire lake of cheese that it's obvious we're about to dive into, thank god for this book. I mean, I know that when I'm reading Leroux's novel, all I can think is, "God, why doesn't this woman make any affirming, life-altering, incredibly difficult, life-changing or defining decisions all on her own through her incredible strength of will and character?" But at least we know we’re about to read a modern-day adaptation!

 

Bizarrely, Binkley claims here that Erik is never portrayed as a flesh and blood man in any of the film or stage versions of the story. Is she watching some other versions that I don't know about? Even when they try for ambiguity, the vast majority of the film and stage versions are very clear about Erik's mortal, non-ghostly status. Most of the films actually show his origins as just being a dude who suffers a tragic accident and does not react well. I have literally no idea what she's talking about. Did she find the only copy of Midnightmare outside of China or something?

 

She follows up by saying that "...heartbreak around every corner would not have rung true in a realistic modern setting." So I guess she lives in a parallel universe where this kind of thing doesn’t happen regularly all over the world.

 

The writing misery is beginning here, so get comfortable with it now. It's not a wholesale slaughter of the language, just a gruelling, constant water-torture of it that had me screaming for relief by about halfway through the book. Numbers are not written out; commas are frequently omitted or put in the wrong places; the hypen appears to be a mysterious and frightening idea, since I can count the number of times it appears correctly on the fingers of one hand and yet I promise you it is used upwards of fifty times.

 

The author closes out the preface by claiming that realism is, above all other things, her goal in this novel. Let's see it!

 

Prologue

 

We open with Christine en route to the hospital, where her father has apparently just been admitted. Naturally, he's dead when she gets there. Cue the sad violins! I had trouble maintaining a properly funereal mood because I could not for the life of me figure out what had killed Daddy Daae; for five pages, while Christine wailed and moaned and laid haplessly on her bed, I was trying to reconcile the facts that he had heart medication and was on a strict diet yet has fallen over of an untreated heart condition, or the fact that the hospital called and said she should hurry to see him but later they tell her he was dead on arrival, or wait, now he had a brain tumor, but his heart... look, he’s DEAD, just accept that. Realism!

 

Fifteen-year-old Christine is now an orphan, but luckily her father's longtime friends, Jonathan and Rebecca (no de) Chagny, are all ready to step in and adopt her as her guardians. Apparently they'd already discussed this with Daddy Daae, despite the fact that his sudden death came as a massive shock to everyone. Jonathan and Rebecca are Raoul's parents, in case you wondered, which makes Christine and Raoul now effectively siblings and clues you in as to Binkley's very subtle approach to the question of Christine’s romantic prospects.

 

Chapter 1

 

We kick off this chapter with a recap of the fact that Daddy Daae just died of a heart issue (or possibly brain cancer or something), which is totally unnecessary since we just heard all about it in the prologue.

 

It turns out that Raoul is already twenty-seven while Christine is not yet seventeen, and that they have grown up together and he treats her in all ways as a younger sister. Again, the carefully trained eye can see the enormously looming subtlety of Binkley's cunning plan. Raoul lets us know in his inner monologue that he is fully prepared to sacrifice their friendship in order to take on a guardian role for her, which is a good thing because her new adopted parents have apparently decided to send her to live alone with him in New York  while they hang out at their house in Islip, eating cheese and crackers and being pretentious (she does not ask for this; they just decide to do it). I mean, right? Inner city schools are way better than the expensive and prestigious ones on Long Island, aren't they? And sending a sixteen-year-old to live alone with your twenty-seven-year-old son so she can "experience the city" is a sound parenting decision, right? Realism!

 

Raoul is a totally different character who just happens to have the same name, an older brother/guardian and lawyer who rarely turns up and never evinces even the tiniest whisper of romantic interest toward Christine. He's like white bread put in a blender and stuffed into a suit. He has nothing to do with the original Raoul except for the name. Obviously, it’s very important that we prevent any competition from interfering in the Phantom’s enormous romance.

 

The text wanders in and out of both Raoul's and Christine's points of view as well as taking random side-trips to Third-Person-Omniscient Land, which is jarring and difficult to keep track of as well as painfully amateur.

 

Chapter 2

 

Erik lives in penthouse number 666 (conveniently, it's just upstairs from Raoul's and Christine's apartment). See what she did there? Slightly less fun is the following realization that that Binkley is probably using the number not because it has anything to do with the occult but because she heard it in Lloyd Webber's musical.

 

Why are we at penthouse number 666? Well, Raoul decides that Christine is mooning around being sad about her dead dad too much, so he goes and finds his best friend Erik and wheedles him into giving her free music lessons to encourage her to try out for the school musical. Erik and Raoul: best friends! Raoul sending this girl that's supposed to be his ward off to spend every evening after school in Erik's bachelor pad: good parenting and a solution to problems! Erik: totally okay with tutoring whiny kids who don't even want lessons for free! Realism!

 

Erik's not around when she gets there, of course, but his assistant, Tomas Goldberg, is. Tomas serves as a combination butler/manservant/gofer for Erik throughout the novel; I'm strongly reminded of Hal in the Vale Allen novel, though his roots may go back even further to the various film assistants for the Phantom. Like Hal, and possibly to some extent Lajos and Ivan, Tomas' job is to make the Phantom seem much more sympathetic and human through interaction and loyalty. Regency era fiction cliche #4857, transplanted to the modern day for our pleasure: if the master is secretly a good man despite his horrible face/temper, all the servants will love him and defend him to the death even if he treats them like shit.

 

Cesar rolls in at this point. No, this book isn't quite ridiculous enough for Erik to own a horse in Manhattan, but it is ridiculous enough that he has a giant black wolfdog named Cesar living in his penthouse. Why? Well, as we all know, animals are as much shorthand for "secretly a wonderful person" as loyal servants are, and besides, he's huge and half wolf, which is also shorthand for "my owner is massively masculine and sexy". Why he's black as midnight (dark! tortured! sexy!) instead of white like the original Cesar I don't know, except that it's probably borrowed from the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film, which went for traditional black/white evil/good imagery when they brought out the horse. Like most things in this book, this Cesar is only linked to the original Cesar by his name and bears him no other resemblance.

 

Erik himself, when he arrives, is of course devastatingly handsome with thick dark hair and piercing green eyes. Hi, Gerard Butler! Like most other modern versions, he's given a last name, in this case "Drennan". One might think this is a random name starting in D (to match Destler, naturally) that Binkley pulled out of a hat, but if we look closer at its etymological roots, we can find that it's an Anglicized version of "O'Draighneain", which means "descendent of Draighnean", which is a name meaning "blackthorn".

 

So I’m putting it into the canon that this Erik is a descendant of Jason Blackthorn. I cracked the code!

 

Erik wears black frowny-faced masks the first few times we see him, which made me wonder if Binkley was drawing from Leroux, but it turned out in short order that he actually has a vast collection of fanciful masks, some full-faced (though of course he has a half-face disfigurement so he doesn't need those), some half-faced, and some fantastically glittery! He is fabulous, like the Phantom from the 1990 Richardson/Dance miniseries! He's got to be fabulous in some way, since apparently he's a fucking terrible music teacher, judging from the fact that it took him two entire lessons to "be able to discern her pitch and vibrato".

 

Christine is still extremely broken up over her deceased father, so she starts bawling in Erik's living room and, since he's of course a gallant, dashing comforter of the ladies, he takes care of her with some casual embracing and patting. Sorry, Daddy Daae, but sometimes you have to fridge a parent to make romance blossom.

 

Erik is already not making sense and we've just met him. Somehow he's very excited about teaching Christine, even though he's... well, not, because we just saw him inner-monologue about how much he didn't want to when Raoul asked him to. And he composes new songs for her for each lesson? Who the fuck does that, even for students they love? Wait, he's telling us that he could have trained her to be an operatic diva within a month if he'd so chosen (he didn't because she just wanted a part in the school play)? You can definitely train and develop an operatic instrument in a month, y’all. Realism!

 

Christine's big moment, by the way, that everyone has been preparing for for a month, is singing "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" in the Christmas pageant. So, yeah. I'm so glad we didn't miss out on that and how devastatingly important it's going to be to none of the rest of the plot.

 

Chapter 3

 

Erik works at the Metropolitan Opera House, which makes sense if you throw him into modern-day New York City. Apparently he writes new operas for them all the time and they put on at least one a year, which makes much less sense. Does he own the Met? Is that how he can somehow put on a Drennan opera every damn season? Is this more realism?

 

Erik's current opera, the cleverly named Hart's Cross, is premiering, so naturally he wants to take the underaged student that he was bullied into teaching to see it. He demands that she wear red, which is not creepy or inappropriate or anything, right? Luckily, Christine has a zillion dollars to go buy fancy dresses on Madison Avenue even though we've been told she has no inheritance until she's an adult, so that all works out okay. Realism!

 

Madame Giry is a ballerina and successful Broadway actress; she has no real role in the story except for being Meg's mother (Meg is, of course, Christine's best friend from prep school, because what would a story be without Meg? Oh, right, it would be the original novel) and wanting vaguely to get into Erik's pants (don't worry, she never actually makes a move because No Other Woman Can Ever Truly Want Him). Her first name is Ann, which initially intrigued me because I always like seeing the different names new authors come up with for the old characters, but then I realized that it's likely derived from Antoinette, Forsyth's Giry's first name, in much the same way that Drennan is probably partially derived from Destler.

 

There are a few interesting things going on in this chapter which should be treasured because they are in the minority for the rest of the book. It is alluded to that Erik dated a redhead in Paris a while ago and that the relationship ended badly, though nobody will yet tell us any more information than that; is that a little clue that he and Carlotta used to date that I spy?  This didn't turn out to be the case, but giving Erik previous relationships is interesting and provides several avenues for exploration. Also intriguing is Christine's tour around his apartment when she's not supposed to be there, during which she turns up, among other things, a jade scorpion and grasshopper, a monkey-shaped musical box, and a red crystal rose, all pointing out that Binkley is trying, at least, to somewhat involve Leroux's text, though she's much, much better at adding cosmetic touches than at actually examining anything the novel is, you know, about.

 

Since she's sneaking around his apartment, Christine catches a glimpse of Erik's face while he's working on making a new mask (apparently he also makes them, because he doesn't do enough shit yet). There is no explanation of the actual disfigurement aside from her immediate panicked reaction; in fact, there will be precious little detail ever given to the deformity, which is described in only one scene and referred to incredibly vaguely over the course of the novel. Unfortunately, this doesn't come off as artistic or make me think that Binkley is trying to make a statement about the specifics not mattering; mostly it makes me think she doesn't know.

 

Pages 41 and 42 are tiring in the extreme. They are basically a great example of the author stepping in to argue directly with Christine via internal monologue, slapping down all her bad reactions and forcing her to reconcile and decide to love Erik in spite of his face at the speed of light. Bam, boom, she's seen it, she doesn't care, she doesn't so much as twitch, and she starts weeping for his pain before he even makes it into the room. Ah, I love compelling internal conflict in my characters, don't you?

 

As always with a modern-day Phantom who isn't played by Robert Englund, I have to ask this question: why no plastic surgery, Erik? It's 2001. You are rich as fuck (somehow). What are you doing running around with nebulously described "scars" and "devastation" on your face? Manhattan plastic surgery is superb - expensive as hell, but very, very good when it comes to reconstruction and cosmetic tweaking. If it bothers him enough to wear a mask everywhere and look super weird, why wouldn't he just pony up the money and get it fixed? Binkley doesn't know, and also obviously doesn't know much about plastic surgery judging from the continued vagueness and hand-waving of possible solutions. 

 

There are problems that could arise - in fact, we've seen them addressed in some other modern versions - but Binkley glosses past them and leaves Erik hanging there, looking like a waffler who doesn't actually want to solve his problems enough to try (even if he failed, at least if he tried we’d know he cared). It's a problem that comes up primarily for Lloyd-Webber-style, fully-human modern-day Phantoms; the disfigurement's often not severe enough that it can't be treated with modern surgery/grafting/what have you, and without the deformity the Phantom becomes a different character entirely. You have to either come up with a plausible source for and reason that the deformity can't be treated (that involves research!) or come up with a substitute that functions similarly but can't be treated (trimethylaminuria, for example, though I notice a dearth of writers willing to tackle the idea that someone stinking to high heaven can be looked past to find the true love underneath). Binkley does neither.

 

Chapter 4

 

Raoul (who now has a steady girlfriend named Theresa in case anyone was still worried he might start hitting on Christine) gives Christine a kitten for Christmas. Aww. She names it after the lead from Erik's opera, which she has just seen and been whisked away on waves of rapture by. Aww. All the overwhelming maudlin happiness does not manage to camouflage the fact that Binkley apparently can't manage to stay in the same tense consistently throughout a paragraph.

 

Oh, lord, page 52:

 

"Stealing a glance at Christine, [Erik] saw tears rolling down her cheeks, but she was not crying. 

 

He knew what she was experiencing; he had seen it happen many times.

 

She was slowly being overcome with passion.

 

The tears were a natural reaction to being exposed to true beauty for the first time."

 

Do you see what reading this book is like? I need a literal breathing apparatus to avoid aspirating the cheese. While the original Erik's music was supposed to be a transcendental, superhuman experience, to be honest I have seen not even the tiniest little indication out of this putz that he has any kind of comparable talent (or the comparable madness/torturedness/need for expression that it represents). And even if he did, I could really do without the phrases "overcome with passion" or "true beauty" in pretty much any context.

 

At the end of the chapter, the gossip pages run a story about Erik and Christine, the mysterious young woman he took down the red carpet (!) from his limousine (!) to the premiere of his opera. Somehow it had never occurred to him that people might think they were dating even though he has frequently mentioned how much the gossip columnists love to speculate about his love life (Erik is apparently a celebrity, though why remains a total mystery to me). He is VERY ANGRY at this flagrant… business as usual.

 

Chapter 5

 

Erik has already conceived his burning passion for Christine now, which is absolutely gross considering that she's just turned seventeen and he's in his mid-thirties. She is literally half his age and still legally a child. The underage romance aspect is somehow actually MORE horrible and uncomfortable here than it was in the Vale Allen novel; Binkley doesn’t try to show why this relationship is happening, so this Erik has had plenty of lovers and is a mature adult, which means that the more he plans things, the more of a horrifying obvious predator he is. I guess you could say that at least Binkley isn’t trying to hide the fact that this asshole is a predator grooming a teen girl, but… that’s not any more admirable. Nor is the fact that Binkley obviously doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with this, since it’s presented as passionate and romantic.

 

And Erik is not just passively noticing she’s attractive, either. He’s having active fantasies, making her wear sexy dresses he chooses for her, and deciding to teach her the tango. A romance with such a wide age difference is always difficult, and Binkley doesn’t have even close to the skill needed to pull it off, ending up with an older man in a mid-life crisis and a teenager being taken advantage of. It’s horrible, and as USUAL, I would like to submit to authors to STOP DOING THIS.

 

Turns out I was totally wrong about that Carlotta stuff earlier, because she's actually shown up now and is a character in her own right, the reigning diva of the Metropolitan Opera House (but it doesn't work that... oh, never mind). Oddly enough, she and Erik are great friends and he delights in writing music for her. As with everyone else, neither her character nor her interactions with others resemble any other version of Carlotta in anything but name and ability to sing, but at least she isn’t being endlessly dumped on the way she is in most adaptations.

 

Erik sings Tamano for a rehearsal of The Magic Flute in this chapter, since the tenor is out with a cold. I couldn't help giggling a bit; somehow, the man who mocked Mozart as insipid seems like a strange choice for what might be one of the most intentionally insipid roles Mozart ever wrote.

 

The friendship between Erik and Raoul is interesting - or could be, if Binkley did anything with it, but she doesn't. Since Raoul has nothing to do with his original roles or characterization, he's pretty much just a random foil friend who occasionally hangs out with Erik and further humanizes him, and since the two of them never have any kind of meaningful interaction, it's just as boring as the flat cardboard relationship between Meg and Christine.

 

By halfway through this chapter, I really need to know how many more descriptions of Erik's jock catching on fire whenever Christine walks into the room we're looking at here, because I'm going to need to break into the limoncello if it's more than, say, zero.

 

Excuse me, why is Christine "lining her eyes with black kohl"? Do we not have access to modern cosmetics in Manhattan anymore? Who uses kohl - which still has a pretty good chance of having toxic amounts of lead in it - anymore? feel like I should be a Google search for this book: "You searched for kohl. Did you mean eyeliner because this is not a period piece?"

 

Aha! The mystery ex-girlfriend is named Elisalette Mara. That's... wow. That’s a real frontrunner in the unnecessarily fancy overwrought names category. I checked, and that name does not exist except in this book. Realism!

 

But oh, no! Christine has a boyfriend now, the young, handsome, in-her-own-age-bracket James! Erik is, of course, jealous of him and fantasizes about killing him, which is both an entire field of red flags and also vastly disproportionate to the actual relationship Erik and Christine have so far cultivated. James is an attractive young student and musician, reminiscent of the Raoul figure from the 1944 Waggner/Karloff film, and will function in all ways exactly like Raoul, which is really confusing because if you were going to remove Raoul from his normal role, why would you then clone him and put him back? I really don't know if I understand this choice at all, unless it's an attempt to avoid demonizing or trivializing Raoul, but still find a way to demonize and trivialize Christine's boyfriend so there's no competition for Erik, which... well, I mean, it works, but it's also not a great writing choice. It's not Raoul's name that matters in the original story; it's his representative role as light, warmth, youth and love, and his personality as a valid contender for Christine's affections. Ignoring those while he's named James is not actually any different from ignoring them while he's named Raoul.

 

It turns out that things broke off with Elisalette because she couldn't handle Erik’s hideous face. This is kind of weird since like, they dated for a while, so what changed? Did something happen to make her suddenly not be able to handle it anymore? This is obviously meant for us to hate Elisalette for being an intolerant jerkface, but having all these important emotional moments happen offscreen is not helping there be actual interest or poignance in any of them. It’s also a weird choice that sets Elisalette in one of Christine’s original roles as the person who rejected Erik in fear of his appearance… essentially, we’ve split Christine in half so that she won’t have any qualities that aren’t fully on board with Erik, which really just says that the author didn’t like her being a complex and potentially flawed character.

 

Chapter 6

 

So Christine goes to this party that everyone who's anyone in Manhattan (including Erik, of course) is at, and she gets roofied by a young man intent on raping her. Why? Because the author is making a statement about how young women are taken advantage of and the world of powerful men is especially dangerous for a teenage girl? No, unfortunately because we need an excuse for Erik to powerfully save her and thus be an irresistible hero. When you have a “hero” who is a statutory rapist, I guess the only way to make sure the audience knows he’s the protagonist is to have him rescue his victim from a more violent rapist.

 

Erik does not collar the guy, call the police, take Christine to a hospital, let the hosts know, or otherwise assume any responsibility for what he's just witnessed. Instead, he decides that "the only logical course of action" is to go take Christine up to a dark room upstairs and sit there alone with her until she wakes up, because THAT’S not hideous or anything. He actually manages to make it worse by also whining about how much pink is in the random room's decor and thinking sexy thoughts about the unconscious drugged girl he's got draped helplessly in the bed next to him. He also muses on the fact that the drugger, Donald, is a notorious date-rapist who has done this to lots of girls, but does not explain why if he KNOWS this he has never DONE anything about it. That predator code of silence, I fuckin guess.

 

Naturally, some people come around looking for Christine and Erik lies about having her in the other room, ostensibly to protect her reputation, though what he thinks is going to happen if somebody catches him lying about having a heavily drugged girl in a dark bedroom I really can't fathom because he doesn't seem very concerned by it. He steps out into the hall to have this conversation, and pulls enough "These aren't the droids you're looking for" shit out of his hat to convince Christine's friends to go back downstairs, but when he turns around he finds that the door has been locked!

 

Yes, Donald the Date-Rapist (random antagonists are fun!) sneaked behind him while he was talking to the girls mere feet away, slipped into the closed bedroom, and locked the door behind him in order to get ANOTHER shot at raping Christine. Why is he not running away when he knows someone caught him? Why isn’t he targeting some other girl instead of scouring the building for Christine? How did he even know where they were? NO ANSWERS, ONLY REALISM.

 

Erik, who breaks the door down with Powerful Masculinity and finds Donald atop Christine's unconscious body, throws the guy out a second-story window to land mortally injured in the middle of the party. Dramatic. I don’t have any moral problems with throwing a rapist out a window, but you’d think the police would still want to talk to the guy who just very publicly killed someone in the middle of a party where the room is full of his fingerprints and physical traces, all the girls at the party knew he was up there, and there is no possible way he could escape without anyone seeing him. But somehow, no law enforcement ever finds out what happened to Donald and the death is ruled an accident/suicide. Realism!

 

It is horrible yet entertaining when Christine wakes up all sore, drugged, and lying in a strange bed and then Erik gets all hurt feelings when she thinks he might have had something to do with it. That is but one of the many, many reasons that not taking her to a hospital/the police/her guardian was a bad choice, Erik! And then he gets angry when she wants to know what happened to Donald and gets on his high horse when she dares to judge him for probably killing someone. I mean, sure, defending her is great, but you’re not the boss of how she feels about what just happened to her and here’s a thought, you could have defended her and many other girls you apparently don’t care about by reporting him to the police the last fifty times this apparently happened that you ALREADY KNEW ABOUT.

 

Apparently Christine doesn't like bagels, or so she keeps insisting. Who the fuck doesn't like bagels? They're BREAD.

 

After a short interlude in which Binkley fondly hopes that we are on the edges of our seats wondering whether or not Christine was actually raped, it turns out that of course she wasn't; she's got to have a virginal flower vagina for Erik later, and also Binkley hella doesn’t want to actually deal with Christine’s feelings about any of this.

 

Okay. I have been trying to ignore this, I really have, but seriously, who has a fainting couch in their house? Erik has one and it is apparently the most important piece of furniture he owns, because they fucking use it for everything. They sit on it, they chat on it, they relax on it, they watch TV on it. Has Binkley ever sat on a fainting couch? They are not comfortable. She probably just means that he has a chaise longue, but combined with the earlier kohl I'm starting to believe that the author is not very solid on her time period.

 

I cannot translate my laughter at page 88 into onomatopeia. Suffice it to say that it was epic at this line:

 

"[Erik] stretched his arms high over his head, unknowingly raising his shirt and revealing his stomach to Christine for a fleeting moment before he lowered his arms..."

 

The titillation is epic, am I right? A MAN'S STOMACH? I need that fainting couch now! While I'm lying on it, I'll try to figure out why Erik's surely very expensive tailor or clothing establishment sucks.

 

Erik and Christine now have a painful conversation about Donald’s death. Erik seems to think he should be funny about the situation:

 

"Did you throw Donald Milroy out a window?" 

"No." 

"Oh, thank god, I--" 

"I threw him through a window. It wasn't open."

 

And yes, in this setting, I do think a jail could hold you, Erik, thanks for asking! You are a statutory rapist socialite with temper control problems, not a multi-talented super-magician and master criminal. You suck.

 

The crowning moment is on page 90, when he says with total sincerity, "Well, you know I'm not a violent person, Christine." And she agrees, when mere moments ago she was thinking about how secretly dangerous he must be (and how sexy that is, of course).

 

Chapter 7

 

Apparently, Erik is not only the in-house composer for the Met. He's also the costume designer. And the set designer. And the lighting designer. And the director! What the hell are the unions doing? That's what I want to know. Realism!

 

Here is where a very interesting choice rears its head: Binkley includes the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, making the event an important occurrence in her narrative. It's certainly a ballsy choice; some readers may find it poignant and moving, while others, particularly New Yorkers, may find it disrespectful of the disaster and the tragedy it inflicted on the city. It's one of the few things I don't have a strong opinion about in this book; I think Binkley went to a lot of trouble to try to make it important and hit close to home, and I think it worked fairly well for what it was. She was pretty young when this book was written, so it seems likely that it was probably a pretty major event for her.

 

It would have worked better if she hadn’t shoehorned Erik’s and Christine’s first kiss into the chaos, of course. The dramas of the other characters, such as Raoul's girlfriend who managed to escape the towers in time or Carlotta's twin brother who didn't, were much more interesting, and while I understood the attempt at depicting love and hope rising out of the flames of tragedy, it was done poorly and flatly and just irritated and intruded on the proceedings. Setting Christine's birthday on the same day, however, was a good choice; the representative leap from childhood and innocence to adulthood and misery is nicely resonant.

 

Every time someone talks about how Erik and Raoul are brothers in all but blood, I get all excited because I think of all the ways that could be explored in an interesting way if this were a book that were actually well-written. Alas.

 

Erik knows, once Christine has left, that there is "only one solution" to his unwanted arousal. Apparently that solution is a cold shower, which is not what I would have guessed.

 

Christine hears Erik sing for the first time in this chapter, which involves him "hitting all auditory wavelengths" and exploring "the full spectrum" of the voice. I am imagining Christine as a dolphin or a bat, or a dog reacting to a whistle. This Erik has not been set up as nearly as mysterious, magical, supernatural, or even talented enough to have some kind of bizarrely large range, and even if he did... spectrum? Wavelengths? Realism!

 

Is there enough pathos yet? Of course not, so Erik turns on his answering machine to discover a message from Elisalette, the woman who broke his heart. She was on the second plane to strike the towers and called to apologize and try to say that she loved him before, with about the amount of drama you'd expect, the message dissolves into incoherent exploding sounds and then goes dead. This area, I feel, does tread uncomfortably close to offending people closely involved in the tragedy, mostly because it's such a cheap way for Erik to start freaking out so Christine can comfort him and a quick fix to remove Elisalette from the picture to make way for Christine.

 

Apparently, Erik's masks are all porcelain. That’s hugely inconvenient, but I’m sure it’s because they need to be able to shatter dramatically, as at this moment when he throws it off and yells at Christine to look at his face. While I'm glad we got the description, it’s not very impressive when compared to the original. His skin is "puckered and stretched" his "veins were visible at his temples", and his skin is "thin and sallow" and in some places looks "gray". That's... it, aside from the many scars from failed plastic surgery attempts to fix it, which don't make a lot of sense, either, when he’s richer than the rest of the universe and can afford to pay unbelievable specialists. It's just... sigh. It's a decent attempt, but it's not nearly ugly enough to be unfixable or to effect the kind of social ostracization the Phantom's character needs to be subjected to, partly because of the modern setting and partly because Binkley doesn't want to make him so ugly he couldn't still be hot. (Otherwise we'd end up with Leroux's Phantom and that would just be too gross for words, right?)

 

I do like, however, that she describes the gray flesh as being very corpse-like; while he doesn't have anything approaching Leroux's Phantom's death's-head, the idea is thematically consistent with the original novel.

 

Chapter 9

 

There is a whole lot of Destiny's Child in this book. Christine likes to listen to them and sometimes tell us their lyrics. Poignant.

 

Erik is apparently continuing to write new music for every lesson of Christine's. Has this man never heard of “Caro mio ben”? And even if he hasn't, good lord, she can't learn and perfect a new song every other day, you jackass.

 

Elisalette, we learn from Tomas, was blind. This is an interesting idea; it's mostly intended to amp up our sympathy for Erik since he couldn't even get a blind woman to look past his face, and it's an interesting reverse from the many versions that prefer to set him up with a blind woman to prevent conflict over his face from occurring. It's still more than a little bit odd that she ran for the hills, though; while I'm sure his face didn't feel like a picnic, there's nothing actively wrong with his flesh and the visceral shock of seeing something that looks like death just wouldn't have been there for her. I don't believe in her terror at the revelation of his face, or, at least, I don't believe it for this Phantom.

 

Apparently, Erik named his dog after "Julius Cesar", about whom he was reading when he adopted him (out of the gutter, thus saving him in a beautiful act of kindness, naturally). Because he's so French and all so he would obviously use a French version of that name, right? Right? Wait.