The classic tale that inspired one of the great musicals of our times, The Phantom of the Opera (1909) by Gaston Leroux is a gothic romance set in the lavish Paris Opera House.
What starts as a sensationalist, slightly pantomimic, premise of a ‘ghost’ that haunts the famous opera house quickly descends into something more sinister.
With mysterious deaths, a man’s voice that seems to have no body, and sightings of a ‘death’s head’, every page is filled with gothic happenings to excite and chill the senses.
In spite of the rumours and the strange happenings, the newly appointed managers of the Opera House disbelieve in the ghost. However, they do so at their peril!
The ‘Opera Ghost’ is demanding, manipulative, and obsessed with Christine Daaé, the prima donna.
Meanwhile Raoul de Chagny, a viscount who knew Christine in childhood, becomes enamoured with the singer. The age-old dilemma of the love triangle ensues.
At its heart The Phantom of the Opera is a tragic romance but also the mystery of who, or indeed what, is the ‘ghost’? A question that leaves you hanging until the end.
Alongside his literary career, Leroux was a journalist. The inspiration for the novel came from his reporting on a suspected ghost at the Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris.
The novel takes us on a brief trip outside Paris to Perros-Guirec, in Brittany. Oddly this part of the novel stood out for me and I particularly enjoyed the flashbacks of Christine’s childhood and the gothic churchyard scene.
As the story develops the Opera House feels increasingly claustrophobic under the tyranny of the all-seeing ghost.
Once the reader is introduced to the phantom’s lair, a lake beneath the Opera House, the setting becomes at once unfamiliar and unpredictable.
Leroux wrote prolifically and carved a niche in commercial fiction for film. This book does not pretend to be a literary masterpiece so if you’re expecting exquisite, lilting prose then this is possibly not the classic book for you.
While there are some effective literary traits in the first half of the novel, including clever use of parallels and repetitive imagery which reveals things to the reader through association, the second half of the novel becomes more and more expository.
At times the narrator intervenes, offering opinions with the authority of an investigator or contributing new information in the form of interviews, letters, and footnotes. I felt this sometimes jarred with the otherwise fluid narrative of the story.
Interestingly, Leroux also wrote a series of detective novels with the main character, Joseph Rouletabille, often compared to Sherlock Holmes. Indeed the historian’s narrative in The Phantom of the Opera reads like the thoughts of a detective.
Considering this tale was written at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel is packed with action and speech that moves the plot forward quickly. There is certainly no room for boredom when the opera ghost is in town!
If you love the classic gothic romance genre and fancy a night at the opera, then I thoroughly recommend this book.
The edition pictured above was published in 2011 by Harper Press, an imprint of HarperCollins
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