Michel Faber “The Crimson Petal and the White”
Now here we have a book that gripped me from the beginning and deserves to be called unputdownable. At 830 pages it is not a story to be read in a couple of hours. It took me the better part of 2 weeks to read it, even though I am not especially busy right now. Truly a book of almost Dickensian proportions that deserves to be savoured, if only to be able to spend some more time with its gripping cast of characters.
Interestingly, contrary to many other really long books (“The Historian” comes to mind), it doesn’t feel like half of it is superfluous and could have been edited out. The story is so detailed, and involves so many people and places, that nothing can rightly be sacrificed.
Faber’s bawdy, brilliant third novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era’s secrets and social hypocrisy. William Rackham is a restless, rebellious spirit, mistrustful of convention and the demands of his father’s perfume business. While spying on his sickly wife’s maid, whom he suspects of thievery, he begins a slow slide into depravity: he meets Sugar, a whore whose penetrating mind and love of books intrigues him as much as her beauty and carnal skills do. Faber also weaves in the stories of Agnes, William’s delicate, mad and manipulative wife, and Henry, his pious, morally conflicted brother, both of whom seek escape from their private prisons through fantasies and small deceptions. Sin and vice both attract and repel the brothers: William, who becomes obsessed with Sugar, rescues her from her old life, while Henry, paralyzed by his love for Emmeline Fox, a comely widow working to rescue the city’s prostitutes, slowly unravels.
Funnily, a lot of the important characters are either dead or unaccounted for at the end of the book. When I read the last couple of pages, I kept expecting to learn about the fate of the vanished women, but they are not mentioned anymore. When I reached the end, I kept looking for an epilogue or something, because I wanted to find out what happened to them and if they were safe. And that from me, who despises happy ends! Luckily, Faber resisted the temptation to tack on one of those. Or maybe he is just too good a writer for this temptation to even arise. Now that I had time to think about it, I am very happy that he left the women’s fate open for intepretation.
The whole story is a masterpiece of characterization and shows a deep understanding of human beings and their intentions and secret fantasies. With all the quite explicit sex scenes and descriptions of the goings-on at whorehouses and such, it surely is not for the prudish. But if you forego the pleasure of letting yourself be embraced by this story just because you blush when you read the words “cunt” or “cock” – well, then you probably don’t deserve any better. *shrug*
In any case, Michel Faber has earned himself a spot on my “to look out for” list and I have added his other books to my wishlist. I wish all the books I have read so far would have been this enjoyable.
Great review! I have to confess that while I liked the book, it didn’t live up to my expectations.
Susan Helene Gottfrieds last blog post..Susan Speaks: Here, There, and Everywhere
Well, that’s the thing with high expectations: I have very rarely encountered any book that really could live up to any kind of hype. Nowadays I make a conscious effort to try to have no expectations whatsoever before I start on a book I have heard good thing about. It helps that most of those have been languishing on my shelf for months, if not longer, before I finally get to them. Whatever it was I read about them, I have long forgotten by that time.