This report serves the purpose of filling in the background details of Erik’s life and activities to date. In addition he invents a report by the Persian of how he found out how to break into Erik’s domain, and even annotates it so that it looks like a real report.
In order to lend the novel veracity Leroux pulls in references to actual events and people and to the details of the lighting and water effects, scenery mechanisms and construction of a theatre which was built above underground water. A fruitful base for a thriller based on fact. It was also rumoured at the time that a ghost lodged in the cellars. It is a fact that a chandelier broke from its anchorage in the ceiling and fell on a packed audience, killing one person and injuring several more. The story is set in the Paris opera house of Palais Garnier, which itself lends exoticism, (as does a mysterious ‘Persian’ who pops up from time to time in the early part of the story,) and it is true that this theatre did actually have a lake, or an aquifer, beneath it with an access onto the Rue Garnier. Leroux was a music critic and uses his knowledge of the musical cannon and the behind the scenes workings of a theatre to frame his story which he tells through a narrator. In essence a pot-pouri of a novel, part drama, part gothic horror romance, murder mystery, fairy story, comedy. Suffice it to say that the original novel is packed not only with all the elements for which M & S became famous/notorious – romance between a junior aristocrat and a poor girl forced to earn her living in the theatre, danger, mystery, adversity and the final triumph of love, but it also includes comedy, exoticism, gothic horror, the supernatural, a fairy godmother figure, a wicked witch and historical fact. Most of you will have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical (1986) based on the story, or an earlier film version (1925, illustrated above), so I won’t go into the story.
After much ado trying to find a title which I could verify was actually published first by M & B and which was not exorbitantly expensive, I lit upon Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I wanted to source an early title for the session on books produced by Mills & Boon publishers at the beginning of their existence.
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