What you learn from the new Fifty Shades of Grey book

You can’t say that I didn’t try. Gamely, I struggled through the first atrocious Fifty Shades book and skimmed its sequels, just to get up to date with what passes for modern culture.

Like it or not, the seeker for knowledge needs to ask why an ill-written pornographic rom-com brought British author EL James nine million global sales, and an improbable posse of women followers with daydreams about being dressed up and dominated by stern-jawed spankers.

Then I heard that the fourth book — released after Harry Potterish secrecy — would be told in the voice of the man who dominates the Fifty Shades trilogy. James, we learned, would imagine the words of zillionaire Christian Grey, the pervy flogger who wins the heart of the deeply stupid heroine Anastasia.

Well! My heart leapt with hope that, rather than being a worryingly odd bondage-obsessive, James might be a magnificent joker. Maybe it was a plan to spoof herself and take the mick out of her deluded readers?

No such luck. With crafty economy of effort, James has simply shadowed the whole plot of the first book, reproducing the clunky polystyrene dialogue word for word, and inserting italicised thoughts by Christian himself.

James also reproduces all the tediously samey sexual encounters, from the couple’s first tryst, in which Grey refrains from hitting Anastasia, to the final flogging which makes her — very temporarily — leave him, on the bizarre pretext that she cannot be "what he really wants".

We also, inevitably, get his version of the final really elaborate bondage sex interlude, which he conducts to the sound of Thomas Tallis’s Spem In Alium: the greatest of 16th-century religious motets, calling on the God of Israel to forgive sin. So that neatly adds some really offensive blasphemy to the gruesome sticky mix.

Ana’s account of the Tallis-flogging occasion says it was "agony beyond exquisite, raw and debasing". Grey’s version in the new book shows him equally pleased at the manoeuvre, especially when her hips "wriggle in time" to the music and she appreciates his cat o’nine tails every bit as much as his rabbit-skin glove.

This is an author who cottoned on early to the eternal truth that a lot of people will buy any old tosh, however badly written, provided it’s filthy and detailed enough, and that they’ll even buy the same sex scenes over again with a different narrator, thus saving you the job of inventing any new things to do with thongs. So Grey runs through the dreary gamut again, all topped and tailed, as it were, with pointless passages in which he meets other cardboard characters.

The commercial appeal of the original books, in Anastasia’s voice, is that they fed the most unwholesome kind of female dreams. They offer a man who is rich and worships your body. He takes control, thus removing a girl’s onerous postfeminist responsibility to get a life of her own and make some choices. The man is dominant yet deep down he is just a lost little boy who plays Bach on the piano and needs to be shown true love.

So in this new book what do we learn of Grey, the creepy, damaged, control-freak flogger of whom so many women inexplicably dream while their husbands get on with mowing the lawn or earning a living?

Well, we get some truly nasty admissions: that the first time he sees the virginal student Anastasia’s "small, sweet face blushing an innocent pale rose", he imagines that flawless skin "pink and warmed from the bite of a cane". He dreams of her "trussed and suspended from the ceiling", "shackled on the cross, splayed over the whipping bench".

The book’s final words, "Today, I win her back", carry a horrid warning that EL James may be preparing more lip-smackingly sadistic and cloyingly sentimental episodes in the whining voice of Christian Grey. Heaven help us.