The Phantom of the Opera by David Bischoff, 1976

Grade: B

 

Before I start with the chapter notes breakdown, a few words about the source material. Bischoff states on the publication page that this novel (which is not a new story, by the way, but a straight-up retelling of the established story) is based on Leroux; however, there seems to be a not-inconsiderable amount of influence from the Julian/Chaney film as well. The cover is a direct copy (albeit painted) of the famous scene in which Lon Chaney as the Phantom is theatrically playing the organ, down to the violin hanging in the background (scroll up! Find a copy of the movie and amuse yourselves trying to catch that exact shot! Oh, wait, that's just me that does that kind of thing), while the book pauses in the middle to offer up a series of black-and-white screenshots from the movies produced to date. Here, unfortunately, my lack of chronologically examined material starts to hurt me; I haven't yet gotten a chance to see either the 1941 Lubin/Rains film or the 1962 Fisher/Lom, so despite the fact that they were out before the writing of this book and clearly fairly popular in their day, I have no idea if they exert significant influence over this particular work. I'm returning to my regularly scheduled cursing of Amazon, who have been holding my copy of the Lubin/Rains hostage for the last month or so. It's entirely possible that the cover and screenshots were added by editors or publishers who wanted to entice the movie-going public to check out the book; certainly many elements that were removed in said movies appear to be back in Bischoff's version. But until I get the films, I won't know. That said, I reserve the right to take back anything boneheaded I say about things I don't know enough about but insist on talking about anyway.

 

 

Bischoff starts his version off with a Poe quote, from Eleonora; a very appropriate Poe quote, which I didn't fully appreciate until the end. It follows here:

 

"The question is not yet settled,

Whether madness is or is not

The loftiest intelligence--

Whether much that is glorious--

Whether all that is profound--

Does not spring from disease

Of thought--from the moods of mind

Exalted at the expense

Of general intellect."

 

It won't be immediately apparent, but this is appropriate because Bischoff's Erik is absolutely batshit. No joke. Almost every incarnation of the Phantom is a little bit wrong in the head, but this guy is way more than a few pipes short of an organ. He is an organ made of swiss cheese and live monkeys. We'll get back to his complete nuttiness later, but for now I'll head back to the beginning so I don't confuse the hell out of myself.

 

Chapter 1:

One of the most compelling things about this novel--and trust me, it does a lot of things right, which I found rather surprising and gratifying--is that it recharacterizes Christine as an interesting, realistic and three-dimensional character. Leroux's Christine was an allegory, a savior, innocent and mother figure all rolled into one for the purposes of the message of redemption and salvation, but as a result of that she was a fairly unrelatable character. She changed and grew, but she was in essence a saint, and the reader was unable (and I doubt Leroux really meant for them to be able, anyway) to connect to her on a sympathetic level, only on a reverent one. Bischoff's Christine, in contrast, is a real girl; she has normal, understandable reactions, and the reader is able to root for her as a person rather than as a professional victim. She may still be a little bit nicer than you would expect, a little bit more innocent and fresh-faced, but honestly, I think that's mostly window-dressing for this Christine. She ain't no innocent ingenue in this version. She's got her angle like everyone else, and while that makes her much less of a paragon of virtue, it also makes her more interesting as a heroine.

For example, Leroux's Christine is frightened by the sudden, dramatic changes in her voice, even going so far as to tell Raoul that she feels that her voice doesn't even belong to her anymore; by contrast, Bischoff's novel opens with a happy Christine flouncing down the hall after her successful surprise debut, full of girlish pride and excitement. As a reader, it's much easier to connect with her as a real person because she's understandable; we'll see as we keep going that Bischoff does this with most of his characters, because he is utterly uninterested in Leroux's allegory or symbolism, and instead just wants to tell a good story. God, Leroux. Why do you always gotta ruin everything with all this symbolism and moralizing and shit? For god's sake, let's just have a monster horror story with a happy ending.

 

In order to rush said horror story along (this little book is hardly 145 pages long, and it's got very small pages with pretty large type), Christine finds Buquet's body almost immediately, hanging in a storeroom near her dressing room, on the night of her debut. I understand the screaming and running away, but I'm not quite sure about her decision to not tell anyone about it and let other people discover him. Supposedly it has something to do with her fragile nerves, which I always feel is a cop-out. My nerves aren't any less fragile than yours just because I was born a century or so later, lady, and I could probably bring myself to tell, say, an usher or something. But I digress.

 

Chapter 2:

Continuing the trend set by his change of Christine's character, serious changes occur to Raoul and Phillipe as well (does anyone else have trouble spelling Phillipe? Phillipe, Phillippe, Philippe... I can't seem to do it without checking). Rather than being a still untried youth looking forward to his first tour of duty, Bischoff's Raoul is already an experienced sailor, which adds maturity and effectiveness to a character who was all but nascent in the original novel. In a bold but extremely effective (at least in my opinion) move, Bischoff removes Raoul's and Christine's previous relationship; no longer childhood friends or sweethearts, they have never met prior to the events of the book. Rather, Raoul is enchanted by Christine's beautiful face and voice after a performance and determines to woo her. His personality is more fully fleshed out--he bribes a stagehand to get to Christine's dressing room, is fetchingly nervous about speaking to her, and is generally much more gallant--than in Leroux's original novel; as he didn't have a great deal of allegorical significance, the change is much more permissible, and definitely enjoyable. A modern reader can see why Christine would fall in love with him where they might have had trouble with the same in context of Leroux's Gothic fantasy world. In a telling moment, Raoul overhears Christine and Erik speaking in her dressing room, and assuming she already has a suitor, attempts to step aside and leave (though he is luckily stopped by another of the chorus girls); it is a vastly more mature handling of the subject than the original Raoul's half-faint, half-pout as he whinged about how he thought she was pure and unblemished.

 

The modernized characterization, however pleasant, is unfortunately a symptom of an overall modernization of most elements of the novel. This would have been fine in a contemporary, but Bischoff attempted to remain within the original time period, and thus his anachronisms are jarring. Christine is way too forward in her dealings with Raoul--the first time she meets him she grabs onto him in fright, a practically unheard-of liberty--and the fact that the two of them immediately agree at their first meeting to call one another by their first names is, again, ridiculously brazen. Leroux circumvented the social stigma of this by making them childhood friends who knew one anothers' names, but in Bischoff's case there is no excuse.

 

Chapter 3:

Christine continues her Flirtatious Hussy World Tour, not only flirting with Raoul like there's no tomorrow but also hitting the managers and pretty much everyone else who talks to her. I would have said that it appeared she was cultivating Raoul as a patron, like many opera girls of her time period; a sort of concubinage affair where she would be his lover in exchange for gifts and status. Sadly, I think this is just a case of Bischoff's road of good intentions leading to the hell of historic anachronism, as no such conniving is suggested in any other way. Alas, the cute ingenue of our day would be considered a shameless flirt in 1884. She even kisses Raoul on the first date! That's like... I don't even know. Like dirty backseat sex on the first date. The shock would have killed her chaperones.

 

Bischoff also chooses this chapter to begin his campaign to de-supernaturalize (I know that's not a word; I'm being creative!) Erik as much as possible. The retiring managers are completely unsuperstitious, and refer to the Phantom as a "hoaxer"; while this does help entrench the idea of a mortal Phantom in our minds, it also makes the retiring managers themselves less believable as characters. If he's some hoaxer in the opera house, interfering with their operations, why have they put up with being the hostage of a real, living person for so long? Why not bring the police into it? They even go so far as to suggest that the Phantom is a street bum that has somehow wandered into the underground of the opera house and claimed it as his territory, a ludicrous idea if they wish to be taken seriously (and one that Erik himself would no doubt find mortally offensive).

 

Chapter 4:

As a consequence of being more of a developed (and slightly modernized) character, Christine is much less submissive to her "Angel" in this version. The first conversation that we hear between them includes her telling the Angel not to meddle with the process of her becoming a recognized singer, chiding him and telling him that he must wait like everyone else. It seems out of place both because she is talking to a being she believes to be supernatural and divine, and because she supposedly holds a lot of awe for him in all other areas. It was jarring even in light of her more down-to-earth character, and like many other problems I had with the novel, probably comes from Bischoff's good intentions veering just a hair off course.

 

Interestingly, Christine's mother is added into the story; her original background of traveling with her itinerant violinist father is tempered by her mother working to pay for her singing lessons after the father's death. I find it very interesting that subsequent versions seem to always seek to remedy the motherlessness of the original novel; possibly they feel that the complete absence of a mother figure is a blemish on the novel, or they prefer that Christine (the true mother figure) be moved to the safer territory of lover and damsel, rather than encompassing both roles. It's not too hard to see why an author, particularly a more modern one, might find the Oedipan subtext disturbing. Christine's mother never makes an appearance, however, and only serves as background window dressing; no mention of Christine's celebrated Scandinavian origin is ever made, and I don't have a good theory about that one.

 

Carlotta is a veritable potpurri of all the stereotypes commonly associated with opera divas. She's shrewish, overbearing, overweight, past her prime, snoberrific and generally abrasive to everyone around her. Why the change from the original Carlotta, who was a bit difficult, true, but basically as much of a victim as everyone else? I'd theorize that Bischoff was seeking a more villainous take on the character, one that would A) allow the reader to enjoy her humiliation and inject some comedy into an otherwise almost entirely suspense-oriented story, and B) give the reader somewhere to focus their automatic need to identify an antagonist. Erik is, of course, the final antagonist, but by giving us someone to hate a little bit more at the beginning, Bischoff has prevented us from immediately putting Erik into that neat little "bad guy" box; a good idea, since Erik is meant to be sympathetic rather than just the Creature from the Opera Lagoon.

 

Bischoff trips over the time period several more times in this chapter, unfortunately. Christine addresses Carlotta as "My dear La Carlotta", which made me snort grape juice right up my nose when I read it. It's perfectly appropriate to refer to her that way: "La Carlotta will perform tonight," or "Someone run and tell La Carlotta that was her cue," or even "I hate that bitch, La Carlotta." However, for the uninitiated (apparently including Bischoff), "la" means "the". It's added to the beginning of the diva's name as a conceit of respect and importance; rather than being Carlotta Somebody, she is THE Carlotta (rather like Madonna, but with more clothing). You can refer to somebody as the Carlotta; you can't say, "My dear The Carlotta," because you sound developmentally disadvantaged. The proper thing would be to say, "My dear Carlotta". (Well, actually, the proper thing would be to say, "My dear Senora," but Bischoff has already demonstrated a marked lack of interest in the proper avoidance of first names, and he sure as hell isn't listening to me correct him, so I'm giving up and turning to drink.)

 

Carlotta's direct confrontation of Christine seemed slightly anachronistic to me, as well. Leaving aside the fact that Carlotta's reaction to the warm reception of a chorus girl would probably have had a lot more to do with threatening the managers and parading her diva self around than with harassing Christine, even had she decided to make a fuss she wouldn't have gone personally. A serious disagreement at the time would have involved a lot of male protectors and intermediaries, and the women involved would likely never have spoken (or if they did, not spoken about the topic of contention); Bischoff's attitude is betrayed as more modern again, in his assumption that the ladies would go head to head rather than enlisting aid. Admirably feminist of him, but out of place.

 

The managers also take far too much interest in Christine to be believable in the time period. The modern attitude of prominence based upon merit would have been an ideal, but the fact would have been that a chorus girl (a strumpet, remember!) with no social standing would have been pretty promptly dumped from public acclaim as soon as La Carlotta returned, no matter how prettily she'd sung. Managers visiting Christine directly in her dressing room is scandalous; them reassuring her that they are convinced of her innocence is suspect; them paying so much damn attention to her is unbelievable and them knocking their diva is just bad business practice.

 

Modern vernacular creeps into the narrative in more than one place as well... Christine mentions that she is "frazzled", and tells Raoul that she needs to "boot him out" to get ready for the performance. Bischoff, my friend, you're not even trying anymore.

 

What he is trying at, however, is creating a believable romance for Raoul and Christine; and that he succeeds at, marvellously. His more realistic characters have a more realistic romance, but somehow he manages to retain the innocence of the love affair (never, ever is sex hinted at--good lord, what do you think these people are, animals?). The result is that, rather than understanding her societal decision to stay with Raoul, I now also believe that there is actually a mutual love relationship between them, which definitely makes the story more palatable to your average modern reader.

 

Chapter 5:

Oddly enough, Madame Giry is given a first name in Bischoff's version: Michelle. I'd say this was to give her a little more weight as a character, like Christine and Raoul, except that she appears only in this chapter and never again. Meg does not appear at all, removing Giry's mother figure.

 

I got up in anachronistic arms (alliteration!) again over one of Bischoff's managers saying the word "ectoplasm", but I looked it up, and you know what? The word was coined by French scientist and Nobel laureate Robert Richet, who lived from 1850-1935, so it's conceivable that the manager could have used that world. I learn something new every day. I still, however, scowl whenever I see it because it pulls me right out of the parlance of the time period. I know; you can't make me happy when you're inaccurate, and god help you if you're right for once.

 

The chandelier scene was much more visceral; descriptions of blood and damaged body parts abound. This would not have been kosher for Leroux, who, like most authors of his time, left the horror up to the reader's imagination. It makes it more terrifying for the reader, but at the same time detracts from the otherwise carefully built ethos of high-level society and mysterious intrigue. Also, someone in the audience shouted that it was an earthquake, which... er, well, there really weren't any earthquakes in Paris, ever, in that time period.

 

Some of the original Christine's naivete is preserved as she doesn't seem to have an inkling of the Angel's true intentions for her; she believes that he wants her to avoid relationships with men in order to focus on her studies, rather than out of jealousy (despite the earlier "You must love me" interlude in her dressing room).

 

Bischoff seems to me to be a nascent storyteller. On the one hand, he is very gifted at creating likable characters and interesting me in his plot; on the other hand, sometimes the seams show. Take, for instance, this line, which occurs when Raoul sees the wreckage of the chandelier and the broken and bleeding bodies beneath it: "He would have gone immediately to the victims' aid, but for his concern for Christine." This is the first and last nod toward helping the smashed people out, and while I could see that Bischoff was trying to make the reader admire him for his sense of compassion, what it really did was make me think he was sort of a jerk. Christine isn't lying under a chandelier, dude. Prioritize a little, maybe.

 

In another move that brings Christine more down to earth in a character sense, Bischoff actually has her injured in the chandelier incident (trampled by her fellow chorus members, not hit by the chandelier). It's yet another "shock tactic", a way for Bischoff to engage a modern reader who might have found Leroux's original narrative lacking in appropriate titillation.

 

Chapter 6:

I know I said it before, but I'll say it again: Christine is staying in a man's house. I don't care what all the characters say; inwardly, they think that she and Raoul are humping like perverted little bunnies. When the managers come to visit and ask Christine if she's well enough to return to the opera, she says, "I am well now, but the de Chagnys keep me chained to this bed!" And, man... even the managers seem to cough discreetly and look at their toes. I want to say that Bischoff is doing it intentionally for comedic effect, but it's so spotty and completely un-backed-up that I have to believe it's accidental. Funny, but accidental.

 

A lot of this chapter continues on with my same gripes from before--the managers are too solicitous and concerned about a nobody chorus girl, particularly when they beg her to sing instead of La Carlotta, the dialogue is sprinkled with anachronisms (I believe Christine calls Raoul a "spoilsport" at one point, without benefit of a preceding article), and everything is just a shade beyond the pale in terms of believability. Bischoff, bored with my same whining, decided to throw in a comma splice for flavor, just to see if he could make me keel over dead.

 

The first of two major departures from the Leroux comes here; Erik and Raoul actually get into a physical altercation. Insanity, right? But, they do. Bischoff has been trying to establish Erik as a very corporeal, physical being, and this certainly reinforces that, but the supernatural element to his character is severely diminished. Bischoff compensates somewhat by giving Erik prodigious strength for some reason; while the effect is surprisingly authentic, it is nevertheless ultimately unnecessary. It is interesting that Erik accuses Raoul of harboring "foul desires" for Christine; of course, most of the cast is probably thinking the same thing (okay, they aren't, but they should be), but it serves as a reminder that Raoul is the "pure" character while the Phantom is the sexually "corrupt" one.

 

Chapter 7:

This conversation between Christine and Erik jumps the fence from sort of unrealistic to just sort of silly. Christine takes Raoul's word on faith that her Angel is really the evil Phantom, and accuses him, calling him the "Devil of music"; not only does this seem forward, it seems very out of place and lacks realism. Christine spends a disproportionate amount of her time attempting to rationalize things, and for her not to question something as life-changing as the sudden identity switch of a beloved teacher seems very out of character. Erik isn't much better--at the first sign of Christine's faith wavering, he flips out and shouts at her, completely giving away his earthly nature and ruining a carefully laid and maintained ruse spanning years. It's much too pat and convenient, and serves as a convenient way for Bischoff to get Christine firmly on the Raoul side of the equation by alienating her from Erik in one fell swoop.

 

Also, the Phantom says, "Uh," as he's trying to make excuses that prevent Christine from figuring things out. Seriously? He's a musical and subterfuge genius with an extensive network of traps and spyholes, the brains to keep himself furnished and comfortable without anyone knowing of his existence, and amazingly talented in deception, but he can't think of an excuse fast enough to avoid saying "uh"? Out, Bischoff. Take your typewriter with you. Come back after you've had some time to sit in the corner and think about what you've done.

 

Chapter 8:

The Persian gets to make his entrance early in order to save Raoul from his own stupidity and get him away from Erik in his Red Death costume; Persian aside, it is puzzling that Bischoff has gone to such pains to make the Phantom a corporeal human character, and then goes right ahead and hands him supernatural abilities--first the super strength, which he attributes to insanity (and don't get me wrong, this Erik is nuttier than a fruitcake, but that doesn't make him super strong by default), and now his uncanny ability to pinpoint Raoul in a crowd, during a frenzied masquerade ball, when Raoul is completely covered and supposedly unidentifiable by anyone. It mystifies me.

 

Another thing that mystifies me is Christine's insistence that she must remain and sing the role of Marguerite the next night, rather than fleeing with Raoul. In the original novel, when she was still very sympathetic and undecided about her Angel, it made sense for her to stay out of loyalty to him (even if it was sort of boneheaded); in Bischoff's version, however, when she is terrified of Erik and believes him to be a dangerous madman, her explanation that she's obliged to perform because she told the managers she would doesn't hold water. If she had any brains at all, and sometimes she does appear to, she'd be fleeing in a carriage that second.

 

The inclusion of the statue of Apollo on the roof seems also to be a direct result of the influence of the Julian/Chaney film.

 

Chapter 9:

Phillipe, originally just a background character and one that Leroux made a point of telling us wasn't overly interested in or involved with the opera, is old friends with the opera managers; this appears to serve no purpose other than to give people a chance to dump some exposition all over the place so the plot can continue. More unnecessary praise of the no-name ingenue occurs.

 

One of the more interesting thematic changes involves Christine's voice; Christine is not the mother/savior figure of the original novel, but the "love" element carries through in her voice. Ergo, Erik is the father figure to that voice once again, from which many of his feelings of entitlement spring.

I made a note here about the prose in this chapter, but it really holds true for the whole novel; it's nothing to write home about. Adverb-happy and simplistic, it wasn't painfully bad, but I could really have used a more sure hand at description and pacing.

 

Bischoff incurs my ire here again, as well, when he states that Christine finishes off her solo with a series of notes "several octaves above middle C". My note says, "Does Bischoff know how the female voice works?", which is probably overly harsh. But consider: the average woman has a range somewhere from middle C up to about a high G (an octave and a half above). A trained coloratura soprano with a nice top-end range can go as much as an octave above that; the highest note in opera literature is a G above high C, which is two and a half octaves above middle C. Gounod's Faust, which Christine is supposedly performing, does not approach these highest notes, and even if she were adding a cadenza that spiraled up there, it's unrealistic to expect her to exceed that top-end G in a performance. Two and a half octaves does not constitute several. I was so distracted by the fact that Christine was apparently singing notes that only dogs could hear that I lost much of the rest of the chapter in a fog of confusion.

 

Chapter 10:

Like the Julian/Chaney film that it seems to follow so closely, Bischoff's take on the story removes the earlier, less terrifying visit to the Phantom's lair and just has Christine abducted for the final climactic showdown. The lair was nicely characterized, and I felt that some effort had been put in to relate it to the Phantom's Persian origins, which I appreciated. Score one for Bischoff. Erik's mask, too, is intriguing--a Greek dramatic mask, divided in half for the two emotions, which emphasizes his insanity very nicely.

 

And Erik is insane. Whoa, nelly. The original Erik was clearly unbalanced, but he was also sympathetic, and the reader could see that his behavior came at least partially from being shunned and abused as a child and from poor socialization as a result of his deformity. This Erik is a complete lunatic. He giggles constantly, and bounces around frenetically, hugging, pacing, jumping, falling to the floor in a frenzy of activity that belies both his agitated and greatly advanced emotional state, and that he does not understand his behavior himself. His often childlike behavior is a poignant reminder of his lacking upbringing, which gives us some much-needed sympathy toward the character; frankly, he is otherwise entirely unsympathetic, and frightening in his madness. Erik himself seems almost incapable, beliving that he has no choice in his actions; the despair he evinces when he tells Christine that he can never release her seems to indicate that the situation is beyond his power to change.

 

Chapter 11:

Bischoff refers to the Persian using a screwdriver several times in this chapter, each time setting my teeth on edge; I looked it up and it turns out that the modern screwdriver was invented in 1908, three years before Leroux's novel was written. It is therefore possible that the term would have been in use, but even if it had, this is another case where I found it very jarring and distracting from the narrative. There's just no pleasing me.

 

The Persian gives his quick backstory as he hauls Raoul down into Erik's catacombs, but the Persian terminology is vastly simplified where it isn't downright wrong. It seems that Bischoff may have been working from a suspect translation; he translates "daroga" as "leader", rather than its closer meaning of "police officer", and refers to Erik's prior mistress as the "Queen of Persia", despite the fact that she was merely a favored concubine of the Shah and certainly not in any position of power beyond that. This may also have been an attempt to avoid bogging down the narrative with details that force the reader to wonder (though when done well, that can be a good thing), but I also wonder if Bischoff's time period is betraying him again; the change could simply be due to the fact that 1976 America has far less of a fascination with the exotic than turn-of-the-century Europe, where the Far East and the tantalizing glimpses of exotic customs were terribly in vogue.

 

Chapter 12:

Leroux's Erik, who accepts his face as his curse from God, wears a mask only to avoid frightening Christine (and in fact is often seen without it in public); Bischoff's Erik, by contrast, has a massive fit when Christine asks him to see his face, complete with ranting, screaming, and various protestations of rage and self-hatred. Bischoff's Erik is much more inclined toward self-loathing, probably as a function of his insanity, and the author clearly saw Erik as more than just insane, but as utterly deranged.

 

Christine's immediate compassion for Erik following his fit is a little out of place, considering that he has just threatened her, but in the end surprisingly believable. Actually, the very fact that Christine has had no prior time to know the Phantom and has only recently realized he is a threat adds to her nobility when she begins to pity and feel for him. Even her removal of the mask, in most versions an act of curiousity, is here born of compassion and a desire to know what exactly it is that torments him so.

 

In another change from the Leroux Phantom, who told Christine that his Don Juan wasn't suitable for her delicate ears, Bischoff's Erik plays it immediately, almost without being asked. He does so in a childlike, approval-seeking manner, in order to once again reinforce the towering insanity of this particular incarnation.

 

I love it when an author manages to encapsulate his theme in one or two sentences, as Leroux did with his "my heart was divided equally..." moment on the rooftop. Bischoff does it with the following statement: "For a moment she did love him... she felt the deepest pity for him, wished that by some miracle he might be made happier." It is a masterful explanation of Christine's convoluted feelings for Erik, which do include love, but not of the romantic kind; rather, she feels respect and pity for him, and her natural compassion will not allow her to ignore his pleas for her love. As a side note, the many, many fans who feel that Christine's admissions of love indicate that she should have pursued him romantically instead of Raoul are often fixating on this core of feeling, thought they interpret it very narrowly.

 

Chapter 13:

Bischoff damages his own carefully set up ethos of Erik's mortality by giving him the ability to see in darkness, and by making his eyes pupil-less, something even Leroux didn't include. While it seems that the author is attempting to leave the nature of the Phantom somewhat ambiguous for his audience, he hasn't committed fully to the ambiguity, and it unfortunately comes off as merely confusing.

 

Chapter 14:

The humanization continues, as there is no mention of Leroux's Phantom's deathly chilled, bony body; this Erik is warm and comforting. In fact, much to my confusion, when Christine is terrified by his face and his verbal attack on her following its unveiling, she sinks into his arms for comfort. Seriously. Perhaps she has been drugged.

 

Bischoff brings the Beauty & the Beast narrative into the story. The Phantom of the Opera is, at its root, a retelling of this story, so it's not far-fetched, but it seems almost like meta-referencing for Erik to relate the story to himself in the text. We know this is a Beauty & the Beast story, Bischoff. We aren't that dense. However, his use of it does give us a very handy insight into Erik's madness. Erik refers repeatedly to himself as a beast, clearly viewing himself as less than human (in contrast to Leroux's Erik, who believed himself simply wronged by all other humans); he views his musical talent as his salvation, as the only thing about him which is worth the love of another person. When he piteously tells Christine, "...without love, the monster will have won," Bischoff has suddenly presented us with a new way of looking at Erik's insanity: as a case of multiple personalities. There is essentially a split between the "good" personality--loving toward Christine, musical, a worshiper of beauty, wanting nothing more than to be loved--and the "bad" personality--the homicidal, tortured, insane beast that reacts to the injustice of its situation. It is a very neat way of reconciling a completely, frighteningly insane character to the reader so that he is simultaneously able to represent evil and terror, and to bring a jolt of sympathy to the reader's heart. It is a very, very clever moment for Bischoff.

 

In contrast to Leroux's Christine, Bischoff's actually admits to love for Erik--unfortunately for him, not as he would have hoped, but her compassion definitely helps. It's an interesting medium between the horror version Christines, who want nothing to do with him, and the romance version Christines, who love him with mad passionate fire. Leroux would have approved of the delicate handling.

Like Christine, Erik has had his parents re-inserted into the text; both are present in his childhood, though they are neglectful and abusive in the extreme. Obviously, Bischoff intends this to both increase our sympathy for Erik and to explain some of his insanity; it mostly works, though I could have wished it were a little less heavy-handed.

 

Chapter 15:

This version of Erik has his love of secret doors and traps extrapolated into being a full-on genius architect; the Persian tells us that he built the opera house himself. As the opera house was built in 1875, that would put Erik in his 50's during the events of the story; while that makes sense in context of the time period and the reputation he's built up, he's... well, damn, he's awfully spry for a dude in his 50's who's been living underground for the last decade or so, isn't he?

 

Chapter 16:

Interestingly, the marriage that Erik seeks to trap Christine into takes on different dimensions here. Leroux's Erik wanted to prove to the world (and to himself) that he was as worthwhile as any handsome man of the surface world, and he wanted "a wife, like other men" to aid him with that image; Bischoff's Erik, on the other hand, is less fixated on the world at large and more focused on Christine, and uses the marriage as a way of ensuring that she will not escape from him. This is another symptom of his inwardly-focused madness, which tortures him but does not extend to the world at large.

 

Chapter 19:

Here Erik actually pronounces himself and Christine married, an extremely interesting and telling moment. Unlike Leroux's Erik, Bischoff's has embraced his aloneness, his aloofness from mankind; by creating his own marriage ceremony, he demonstrates that he considers himself outside the law and exempt from the rules of the rest of society. After the marriage ceremony, he does turn his attention to the rest of the world, but it is not to seek acceptance or respect from them as Leroux's Erik does, but to throw his "success" in their faces; Bischoff's Erik seeks approval only from Christine, and throws her supposed "love" of him in the world's collective face.

 

Unfortunately, much like in the Julian/Chaney film, Erik is ultimately denied his salvation; Christine betrays him and breaks their bargain, running to Raoul, removing Erik's option to redeem himself by setting her free.

 

Naturally, the solution is a sword fight. Bischoff, apparently, watched Julian/Chaney's epic carriage chase and thought that shit was wussy. Instead, he has the Persian bust in with Raoul and engage in a mad sword fight with Erik, who despite being in his 50's and having had a really fucking hard day is still more than a match for him. I do have to give props to Bischoff, however, for remembering the bullet wound that Raoul inflicted on Erik during their first midnight fight; Leroux himself never mentioned it again, one of the many plot holes in his less-than-utterly-perfect novel.

 

And here is the final, craziest deviation: not only does Phillipe survive his dunking in the lake, but he bursts in at the end and shoots Erik. Christine, the betrayer again, lets him in; despite her earlier sympathy, she betrays no remorse at her actions, making her more realistic but a lot less sympathetic. The entire thing just smacks of trite pleasure-seeking; Bischoff resurrected the dead character and saved the day, allowing all the readers to have a nice, unchallenging happy ending. I didn't approve, but I didn't write it, so no one asked me.

 

Epilogue:

Then, of course, there's the classic Twilight Zone cliffhanger. Erik is dead... OR IS HE? It's such a blatant road to a sequel that I'm surprised one wasn't produced. From a reading point of view, this once again emphasizes the Phantom's monstrous nature by leaving the reader on a note of fear rather than sympathy or redemption.

 

Yeah, I was kind of mean up there. I didn't really mean it; you can see from the grade that I thought it was a nice, enjoyable novel, with a few little problems here and there and a regrettable tendency toward Hollywoodization. Overall, the author did a good job of creating compelling characters out of metaphorical archetypes, and if the allegory suffered... well, sometimes the reader is all right with just a good horror/adventure story. This one will do.

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