Raoul
goes to the Paris Opera and sees his childhood sweetheart Christine performing
the leading role in Faust. He’s keen to renew their acquaintance, but Christine seems less than
happy to see him. When Raoul tries to find out why, he realises he has a rival.
Christine has never seen the mysterious Erik (and let’s be honest, she wouldn’t
want to), but he sings like an angel.
Unlike the other personalised classics I’ve reviewed, I had never read this book in its original form, though I do love the musical. I’m not usually a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but his Phantom of the Opera has a haunting story, interesting characters, and five or six songs I really like (which is about five more than I usually like in a Lloyd Webber musical), so I was very interested in reading the book the musical was based on.
It took me a while to get into the book. If
it wasn’t a personalised book, I might have given up on it – the story didn’t grip
me to begin with, and I didn’t really like any of the characters. The sweet,
innocent Christine seems insane and cruel in the first part of the book, and
Raoul de Chagny is so pathetic, I was mentally telling him to get over it, and
I usually love guys like that. Erik the Opera Ghost (who is never referred to
as a phantom) is obviously a monster, and the other characters seem obsessed
with making each other look stupid. Not the sort of people I want to read
about. I get enough of that in real life.
But in the second half of the book, I
became much more involved in the story. Once I got to know the real Christine,
she became a much more sympathetic character, and although Erik’s behaviour is
truly horrific, you can’t help wondering if this is at least partly a result of
the horrific way he has been treated from birth, simply because he doesn’t look
like other people. Being told you’re ugly all the time really hurts, and I had
a lot of sympathy for Erik at the end, though I couldn't condone many of his actions.
But I had a few problems with the
personalisation. When I was reading The
Phantom of the Opera. I feel really uncomfortable about the fact I’d given
the names of people I care about to characters who really weren’t very nice.
Erik does terrible things, Carlotta is an object of ridicule, and Meg is a
spoiled little madam - though, to be fair, BookByYou did warn me about Meg,
Carlotta has a similar role in the musical, and Lloyd Webber also makes it
clear that Erik – contrary to what Christine thinks – is no angel. It’s completely
my fault, but I really would feel awful if these people found out I’d named
such horrible characters after them. Next time I buy a personalised classic
book I’ve never read, I’ll be a bit more careful about choosing names.
The Phantom of the Opera is
an amazing book, though. Gaston Leroux’s descriptions of the opera house make
it seem like a scary, shadowy place. The tricks that are played on opera house
workers with an incredible sleight of hand are fascinating to read about. There
are a lot of interesting characters (including the Persian, who doesn’t appear
in the musical), many of them with secrets to tell. Maybe it’s not one to read
last thing at night, but it’s definitely worth reading at any other time.
Most of the characters have French names,
but as BookByYou is a Canadian company, it’s possible they have a lot of
readers with French names. Raoul’s elder brother is called Philippe. Other
characters include people with the names of Armand Montcharmin, Firmin Richard,
Professor and ‘Mamma’ Valerius, M. Remy, M. Mercier, M. Debienne, M. Poligny, opera
singer Sorelli, and dancer ‘little Jammes’. There’s also a Joseph Buquet who is
dead, but he’s still mentioned quite a lot. I don’t think it will matter too
much if these names are chosen for personalisation, as most of the personalised
characters are called by their first names - but it’s already difficult sorting
out the relationships between the characters, so you might end up with
characters who seem to be related to each other, when actually they aren’t.
