Name: The Phantom of the Opera
Rating: 3.75 (14 reviews)
ISBN: 9780141191508

Gaston Leroux

Jann Matlock

Sightings of a ghostly figure in the Paris opera house lead to a discovery of a disfigured genius who secretly lives among its passageways.

The Phantom of the Opera

Tim Pendry

The first thing to say is that this is late romantic tosh. The second thing is that the superb introduction (best read after the novel) and its cultural influence (a silent horror film and a musical both high in their respective canons) still makes it worth reading. We can look it either as a cultural phenomenon or as literature. If we say that Gaston Leroux was first and foremost a journalist then we are saying that it is not in the first rank of literature but just a successful crowd pleaser suitable for its place and time - France before the First World War. The basic story has its merits - the fantastification of the Paris Opera [Palais Granier] and the elaboration of reality (there is an underground 'lake' of sorts beneath the building and there was a Paris Commune that may have made use of the building) are truly Gothick. The Phantom himself is a Gothick creation who lives in a simulacrum of the classical underworld. He plays the devil in relation to the innocent, young and exceptionally dim-witted heroine Christine Daae and her romantic lover, the almost as dim-witted and excitable aristocrat, Raoul de Chagny. There are so many tropes being drawn together here - the Devil's trill, the divine nature of music, beauty and the beast, the possibility of redemption, the descent into Hades and the abduction of Proserpine - that one might mistake it for art. Instead, it is a bit of a dog's dinner in which occult classical themes end up alongside camp comedy, bogeymen in graveyards, hidden doorways and trap doors, insane vengeance, emotions laid on with a trowel and a mad supervillain. Introducing the whole is a lengthy process of trying to persuade us that music (opera in particular) is somehow at the very heights of human accomplishment where both the Phantom, though a dark force, as creator, and Daae, as performer, both sit. The romantic tosh lies in the way these supreme achievers are drawn to each other and in how the performer must be rescued from the flawed creator. The book becomes an exercise in self-indulgent hysteria perfect for a controlled and repressed bourgeoisie. It is sub-Wagnerian in this respect. I was tempted down the route of exposing some of the absurdities but nothing I say would deter its advocates. It is to be read not for its worth but precisely for that absurdity and its insight into what might have excited the French reading public looking for a thrill in 1910. Typical would be the extended sequence introducing a bit of orientalism of an almost Fu Manchu nature. In fact, the oriental, 'the Persian', is a hero who enters the underworld to try and rescue Christine with Raoul but the aim seems only to give us a 'torture chamber' (an oriental cliche). The 'torture chamber' is baroque in the extreme (the word absurd springs to mind again) with crisis after crisis similar to those that would be soon appearing in cinema serials - exciting certainly to its audience at the time no doubt but truly requiring the suspension of all critical faculties. Indeed, the theatrical suspension of critical faculties - after all, this was written by a jobbing journalist! - is central to the novel which has started with the sort of passionate invocation of operatic theatricals that makes heavy-handed play of (you may have guessed this) Faust. Yet, once you accept the theatrical nonsense, some longeurs from over-writing, broad and irrelevant comedy involving the Directors of the Opera and the utter lack of realism, it is possible to suspend judgement and go with the flow even if it is all rather ridiculous. The novel sits in a no man's land, a grey area, where being appalled critically conflicts with a recognition that, although a little clumsy in places, it is a thriller fitted to its time and place, filled with sufficient incident and outrageous plot to inspire canonical films and musicals. If you are going to read this, try and make sure you get the Penguin Classics Edition for the introduction. It may not entirely justify the book but it will explain it and in explaining it justify the time spent reading it.

The Phantom of the Opera

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