Finished "The Phantom of the Opera"

Chatter

I love gothic literature. There's a good amount of it that I read and I think, "Wow, this really holds up." A bit of that good gothic silliness from Victorians not knowing better about things we take as common knowledge today, but at its core, a very solid story. Admittedly, I haven't read enough of the genre yet; I only recently began reading prolifically again after having had my brain fried by scrolling as a teen, and then giving up scrolling last year. My sample size is quite small.

With my limited experience, however, I place The Phantom of the Opera in a place that's somewhere between "solid story" and "incredibly silly".

The Book

The first half of the book really had me. I personally have not seen the musical all the way through before; I just never feel like continuing after the first half hour. I've been told by someone who has seen it on stage that being in the literal audience changes the experience for the better in an extreme way, so I won't write it off yet until I get that chance for myself. I have, however, seen the 1990 miniseries with Charles Dance as Erik, and I absolutely adored it. So, going in, I know generally the plot of the musical secondhand, and the plot of this miniseries. The book is a very different beast.

Upon reading about the things everybody says about the Opera Ghost, I'm incredibly impressed. This Phantom's ability with smoke and mirrors goes far beyond what I understand of the musical and know from the miniseries. The mystery is also far stronger in the book, as a result of the focus being taken away from Christine by having the story be told from the perspective of a journalist uncovering the story of the Opera Ghost through investigation. It's an account of people knowing something is going on, and that Christine is central to what that something is, but being unable to figure out anything helpful due to the Phantom's talents.

Once Erik reveals himself to Christine, however, there's a bit of a shift. Meaning that everything quickly goes to chaos and madness. Until this point, as I was reading about all of the things the Phantom was pulling off, I started to fear that the explanations for how he was doing it all were going to fall more on the ridiculous and silly side. I was very correct.

I'll start with what I thought was genuinely cool and interesting. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that even though I knew Erik was in the walls and floors, I couldn't figure out how he could make his voice appear in a room he wasn't in. Although, that was only half of the answer, the other half being ventriloquism, which I completely forgot existed despite the fact that I watched Shaggy of Scooby Doo abuse it nearly as much as Erik did in my childhood.

Now, I'll talk about what I thought was silly, funny, even. A lot of the unseen and unexplained appearances and disappearances of items, things being tampered with, etc., is just Eric shoving his arm up through the floorboards and doing what he needs to do as fast as he can. I laughed out loud reading the description of his contraption and envisioned him waiting for just the right moment to pull the ol' switcheroo, arm waving in the air as everyone's back is turned.

The rat-catcher. What is that thing. I don't get it. And in the book, when they encounter it, they're just like..."How did he do that? Guess we don't get to know." It made for a good ghost story when heard about secondhand earlier in the book, but experiencing it in the flesh was just a very confusing encounter. What does it do? It doesn't hurt. It just goes in and leaves with its rats.

The torture chamber. The concept of it is a little cool, and the coolness is overshadowed by...what is it? I get the iron tree and the mirrors, but the forest? The desert? The sand? What? Also, the mirrors are glass, and they have pistols. It isn't the end of the world that they left their boots behind. 

The punjab lasso technique. Erik's most lethal skill in close combat is that he's really, really good at throwing nooses around people's necks. 

And then we get into his backstory; why is he so good at throwing nooses around people's necks? How is he so good at trapdoors and mirrors and all? Who is the Persian to him?

Erik was in the circus because he was so ugly and looked like a corpse and had no nose, and there he picked up nearly all his tricks of the trade, until he went to Persia to be an official, I guess? Where he made a bunch of contraptions for his betters there, and also got really good at throwing nooses around people's necks. And then because he knew about all the secret contraptions, he was going to be executed, but the Persian saved him and put his clothes on just a normal rotted corpse so that they would think he was dead. And then he was hired as a contractor when the Opera House was being built and he said, "You know what would be fun? If I gave myself a little rat maze and theme park under it." So he did that.

It's all just a perfect storm come together to make him the perfect Phantom, which I thought was very silly until the Persian completely called me out. He has to do all of this ratman sewers bullshit because he's too ugly for people to want to respect him or treat him well. If he was good-looking, he could do it all in plain sight, receive critical acclaim, and be happy. Of course, then I would think that he was a very silly good-looking rich person, but I wouldn't feel as bad about it.

Conclusion

I was rarely bored while reading this, and for most of it, even kind of knowing what the answers were, I was sucked into the mystery and the drama. The dialogue in particular is very humorously written in a very intentional way, and I kept sending quotes to my friends as I read along. The silliness of it is extreme compared to other books sharing the genre, but very enjoyable. While reading, I got an idea in my head that it'd be really funny if something made a jackass-esque video using some of the dialogue and scenes from this book as a guideline. So somebody needs to make that happen.