Why Am I Rewriting Phantom of the Opera?

When you’re a scholar of the Romantics, you come across a lot of incredible texts that have become under-appreciated since their day in the sun passed… You also become aware of how much fiction has improved since the advent of editors.* In re-writing Phantom of the Opera, I am trying to connect with a Sensibility that I found in the original, marrying modern writing practices with the emotion and tension of the original, and expanding Leroux’s seminal work into something a modern reader might enjoy more, but which also connects to the Romantic ideals of a past conception of literature.

Phantom of the Opera was a work that, when I read it for the first time, surprised me. I was impressed by the dark sexuality inherent in Christine’s relationships with everyone around her, surprised by the role played by The Persian (who is, as other Phantom fans will tell you, portrayed in a much less racist way in the source material than in every adaptation since), surprised by the nuance and detail included in such a short book. I fell in love with the prose and the concept even if I found certain aspects lacking, and I found myself clamouring for more of this story and this world. I was also surprised at how much it read like fan fiction.

I don’t think fan fiction is bad. From the perspective of a literary historian and a voracious reader, it is one of the best things that has happened to literature: a well of infinite content, beautifully categorised and shared for free, discussed and dissected openly by communities of fans including the writer. It’s like reading Coleridge’s diary or Wollstonecraft’s letters, without having to struggle with language or context. Fan fiction is a rabbit hole with a million directions to burrow into, matching however you feel in that moment and building on worlds and characters you already love. What is clear when you read fan fiction – and, especially, if you read fan fiction that has been ‘legitimised’ by being traditionally published – is that there is no editor present until much too late in the process to create the kind of tight narrative that we’re used to reading nowadays. This, in some ways, is a great part of its charm: like reading Dickens, who brings in characters or plot points then moves in another direction due to the serial nature of his publishing schedule, or Dumas, whose by-the-line salary is evident in the way he writes dialogue, fan fiction is without artifice. You see the self-insert characters, the deus-ex-machina, and the imitation of other writers or trends much more clearly. Each fanfic is a synecdoche, a world within a world, and – like classic literature – you get thoroughly absorbed into the world through the writing. It is a genre for fans of long rambles, strange pacing, and unusual perspectives, which makes it much less homogenous than traditionally-published fiction. Published fiction is usually shaped and polished to fit into whatever box is popular at present. Editing can even be a problem that gets in the way of the work – think of the amount of trilogies where the second book is somehow wrong or superfluous, where the beginning and the end was strong but the middle felt flabby. Again, this is because the editor came in much too late – there was already a strong narrative and a good book, and rather than improving it you broke it into pieces and made each the conventional length of a novel, making a patchwork book to match publishing trends (although, these books do sell very well, and they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t). Broadly, a modern editor should work with a draft that looks like notes, pull apart the seams from the very beginning, and aid the writer in making their vision accessible to more people, helping them articulate themselves onto paper.

This is not to say that literature was unedited before the 20th century gave us professional editors attached to publishing houses. There is a constant and violent debate that rages among Mary and Percy Shelley scholars, for example, about exactly what his influence was on her manuscripts**. Poets and authors of that generation would tinker with their work even after it had been published, and as such there is no real ‘definitive’ edition of many canonical works of literature. Even The First Folio, a broadly contemporary project undertaken immediately after Shakespeare’s death, had difficulty compiling the plays and is potentially not published ‘as performed’ by the end of the runs. Before ‘editorial’ was a career path, the writers themselves made edits, and manuscripts were passed around among friends and commented on. The value of editing an in-progress or already completed work have always been obvious to writers, and it is only the focus and method that has changed. My version of Phantom of the Opera may look like a rewrite, and of course technically it is – but only because Gaston Leroux is not here to listen to what I think it constructive criticism, making the story tighter and more enjoyable, expanding where I think a reader wants to see more, following each plot beat with precision in a serialised writing style to imitate his own. I am aiming to bring modern techniques to an ancient craft, not remove the authorial voice and replace it with my own.

I truly did visit the Paris Opera in 2019, and the manuscript itself (if you can call a book that has never been physical such a thing) really has been written in the basement archive room of a library in London, surrounded by copies of The Times from as far back as the 18th century, bound in red leather books a foot tall, encompassing six months of history at a time. The tour I took was inspirational, connecting my physicality and the world I inhabited with this short Romantic story that I had read a couple of times before and loved. It was this tour that got the cogs in my mind turning, thinking about the aspects of the original Phantom of the Opera that I thought displayed the most frustrating promise, about how, with an editor, the book would truly have been one of the all-time greats. I thought about how people have connected with the story through its retellings (and, I must confess, about how ALW is probably the worst thing to have happened to musical theatre and the British theatre scene, perhaps ever?) yet I wasn’t one of them – what did the story give to me and why did I find it so infuriating that there was a ‘je ne sais quois’ that was present in the original, but not any subsequent adaptation? Ultimately I realised that this was Romanticism, and Late Romanticism in particular – this book was the contemporary of Kafka, of Futurism, of Gertrude Stein, but it reflected Victor Hugo and E. T. A. Hoffmann more. This could be seen as the last gasp of true Romanticism in the age where Modernism was upon us – and it is the Romanticism that I do not see in any adaptation, instead finding melodrama, love stories, and unconvincing sex. No adaptation has connected with that kernel of Romanticism I found, and I wanted to amplify that and sharing it with the world. I then found myself underground in this library, thinking about the role of serial fiction, journalism, and how to write a novel when you have to earn a living – and saw a connection through history between myself and Gaston LeRoux. Despite all the change in the literary world and the way books are written, published, and consumed over the course of a century, perhaps we were inspired to the same end.

To me, updating Phantom of the Opera is something I am doing akin to how I would edit a book. I read it again, much more thoroughly, and made detailed notes about what I thought was missing, what questions the text left with me, and what I felt didn’t quite make sense as the manuscript developed. There is certainly a modern perspective added – characters like Madame Elise (without whom I felt the character of Phillippe did not make sense, and who I felt had been implied by the original book), a more explicit engagement with themes of sex, abuse, and female agency, and an engagement with historical context that comes from a much more modern research-based practice which reflects the difference between being a writer in the 21st and 19th centuries. Although my version of the story will be longer, and more complex, it will not be more nuanced, and instead aims to make explicit the themes and actions that were under the surface in the original. You can see in my writing that I am consciously engaging with Gaston Leroux, and imitating his voice to an extent; being more than simply inspired by his work, but deliberately following each plot beat and meticulously trying to keep the sensation of the original. The Sensibility. Instead of adapting the story for a new medium and moving the story on from his original, I am trying to breathe fresh life into something I loved, keeping its spirit alive and passing my love on to others.

A new section of Fantôme is coming next week. The experiment – and the adventure – continues.

* Yes, I am a professional editor. No, this did not influence my position on the role of an editor in the book-making process; in fact, it was probably the other way around: I am an editor because I think it’s an important role.

** If you think Percy had anything to do with it, you can fuck off. William Godwin I can accept as a voice in her work, but not Percy.

On This Topic:

• Joanne Harris on sensitivity readers, a new kind of editor that is once again improving fiction and making it more accessible
• Read Gaston Leroux’s original story and tell me it isn’t all there, bubbling under the surface…
• Read the 1818 edition of Frankenstein to disprove the idea that teen girls can’t write, or that books all need editors.

To-Do:

• Catch up on shows – for once, I have shows, and I am behind on them all. This is why I don’t have shows.
• Diet plan with A
• Tidy desk & do a clear out

Today’s Culture:

• Pam & Tommy is really very good – Lily James is excellent.
• Season two of OWL HOUSE is on Disney+
• Drawtectives. Julia LePetit’s mind, yo.