Crimson Petal and the White [Hardcover]

Michel Faber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2002

Gripping from the first page, this immense novel is an intoxicating and deeply satisfying read. Faber's most ambitious fictional creation yet, it is sure to affirm his position as one of the most talented and brilliant writers working in the UK. Sugar, an alluring, nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870's London society offers us intimacy with a host of loveable, maddening and superbly realised characters. At the heart of this panoramic, multi-layered narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. The Crimson Petal and the White is a big, juicy, must-read of a novel that will delight, enthral, provoke and entertain young and old, male and female.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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 (Under the Skin) 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. Faber's central characters, especially the troubled William and the ambitious Sugar, shine with life, and the author is no less gifted in capturing the essence of his many minor characters-the evil madam, Mrs. Castaway, and William's pompous father-in-law, Lord Unwin. The superb plot draws on a wealth of research and briskly moves through the lives of each character-whether major or minor, upstairs or downstairs-gathering force until the fates of all are revealed. A marvelous story of erotic love, sin, familial conflicts and class prejudice, this is a deeply entertaining masterwork that will hold readers captive until the final page.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd (September 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841953237
• ISBN-13: 978-1841953236
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (533 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #849,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 100 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dickens with a twist, October 10, 2003

By 

J. Meegan "Voracious Reader" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crimson Petal and the White (Paperback)

This was a big, hefty mama of a book. At 894 pages it isn't what you'd call a light read. But what a book! Before I even start talking about the story let me say that this is one of the most well crafted trade paperbacks that I've picked up in a while. The pages are heavy and smooth with a silky texture that is a pleasure to touch. Combine that with an intricate and fascinating story and it makes for a book that is almost impossible to put down.

Some readers pointed out that the story doesn't really go anywhere at all. I agree. That's what makes it even more remarkable that I found it to be so compelling. The truth is...this is a "slice of life" story -- a year or so in the lives of a variety of odd, interesting characters. This is a character-driven book....not plot driven. If you're looking for grandiose, dramatic scenes, don't bother. If you like your stories to wrap up nicely at the end...then really don't bother. But if you like the idea of being a fly on the wall...getting to know a group of people and all their messy idiosyncrasies in great detail, this is the book for you.

The characters in this book were hard to like and hard to dislike. At times I found myself feeling sympathy for the least deserving of individuals, and getting irritated with the ones who seemed to deserve my sympathy the most. These were some of the most human characters I've come across in a while -- glorious in their imperfections and maddeningly difficult to pin down. Faber also does a magnificent job painting a picture of the time and place...his descriptions were some of most vivid that I've ever encountered in a novel and they involve ALL the senses.

I would not recommend this book for people made squeamish by frank sex scenes or those who are attracted to the lighter side of Victoriana (no fairies here). This is a story that gives equal attention to all sides of 19th century urban life--dark squalor, pristine elegance, and everything inbetween.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tennyson's epic poem about feminism retold, August 29, 2003

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crimson Petal and the White (Hardcover)

Seemingly overlong and decidedly graphic (in both the vulgar and literal senses), Faber's magnum opus, it's true, crams a 200-page plot into an 830-page book. Yet, while certainly engrossing and often difficult to set aside, "The Crimson Petal" is primarily a character novel, heavy on atmosphere, light on action, postmodern in its knowingness, and unapologetic in its grimy, lurid detail. (Think "Jane Eyre" meets "The French Lieutenant's Woman.")

Readers baffled by the title may appreciate knowing its source, which also provides clues to the novel's characters and themes. The phrase is lifted from Tennyson's epic poem "The Princess" (the source for Gilbert and Sullivan's "Princess Ida"), in which Ida becomes an advocate of women's rights, breaks her engagement to a prince of a neighboring kingdom, and establishes a university. The prince and two buffoonish friends sneak into the school dressed as women, and various and sundry events ensue, culminating in a pitched battle between the prince's peers and the princess's army, during which the three men are seriously injured. Placed under the women's care, the prince eventually wins over Ida, but only after converting to feminism and admitting that he should "be more of a woman, she of man." While the bed-ridden prince pleads his case, Ida reads the following song, which begins and ends as follows:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me....

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

In Faber's novel, "the crimson petal, now the white" is Sugar, a teenage prostitute who learns her trade from her own mother but who manages both to obtain a respectable, if unconventional, education and to retain a precocious level of dignity. Her ability to transcend the limits of her "station," as well as her willingness to "do anything you ask of me," leads Sugar to her prince, William Rackham, an heir to a perfumery who is stymied by his own artistic pretensions. Sugar becomes far more to William than an illicit relationship: she succeeds first as his mistress, then as his unacknowledged business partner, and then as... but to tell you more would be unfair.

The novel features four other characters, each uniquely displaying the nature of the fraught relationships between men and women: Agnes Rackham, William's near-mad wife, whose Victorian naivety is so complete that she is unable to comprehend how she came to be "with child"; Sophie, his six-year-old daughter, who is squirreled away out of view of everyone but the servants; Henry, his brother, who is called by religious devotion but who considers himself too impure to enter the clergy; and Emmeline Fox, a widow and Henry's close friend, whose eccentric opinions, along with her activities to save prostitutes from mortal and physical danger, scandalize other members of "Society"--and present Henry with more temptations than he can bear.

Various elements of Tennyson's poem work their way into the novel, such as the characters of Bodley and Ashwell, who mirror the prince's partners-in-crime, Cyrial and Florian. The poem also supplies clues to the ending, which some readers find "sudden" and "ambiguous." In Tennyson's fairy-tale version, the prince understands that honest empathy and social reform, not stealth and belligerence, are how to gain admission into the company of women. He says to Ida:

"Blame not thyself too much," I said, "nor blame
Too much the sons of men and barbarous laws;
These were the rough ways of the world till now.
Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know
The woman's cause is man's...."

In the more realistic Victorian London described by Michel Faber, however, William never achieves this understanding; he capitulates fully to "the rough ways of the world" and its "barbarous laws," and rejects the college of women "governed" by Sugar. Given what's happened in the final chapters, what could be more clear than that each character is destined to go his or her own way?

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More, please!, September 16, 2002

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crimson Petal and the White (Hardcover)

If you are one of those people who thinks most of the books worth reading were written in the 19th century, by people like Dickens and Trollope and Hardy, you are in for a rare treat. Faber's sprawling, gritty, lush Victorian novel, reminiscent of the best of all three, brings to life the world of 1875 London, from the grimiest, rat-infested alleys to the overladen dining tables and "servant-infested passageways" of the rich. In the course of his 834 pages Faber takes the reader to factories and taverns, music halls and fashionable Season parties, grubby brothels and formal calls.

Faber (whose first novel, "Under the Skin," is totally different) takes advantage of his 21st century perspective to discreetly drop the Victorian circomlocution and ornate flourishes when the action calls for brevity. Not that you'll notice as his eloquence and skill as stylist and storyteller fuse so perfectly. The modern perspective also allows for graphic detail. There's a lot of sex, though not much eroticism. His protagonist, Sugar, started life as a prostitute at age 13, and sex is a living to her, not a pleasure. There's a lot of dirt and degradation and the politics of class and sex are ugly and entrenched. Yet it's a story full of life and hope and real people.

An omniscient narrator begins by inviting the reader into the lowest slums to begin making the connections without which meeting the story's loftier characters would be impossible: "their servants wouldn't have let you in the door." It's a cold, sleety November night. "The cobblestones beneath your feet are wet and mucky, the air is frigid and smells of sour spirits and slowly dissolving dung." Caroline, an unlettered country girl, finding in prostitution a refuge from the numbing, slow starvation of factory work, meets a former colleague who has gone up a rung in the world, Sugar.

Tha narrator fades away (although returning to tell us, for instance, that Agnes Rackham has a brain tumor, which will never be found) after introducing William Rackham, reluctant perfumery heir and tormented would-be artist, and the story gathers steam.William's allowance has been drastically curtailed by his father, impatient to hand over the reins. Forced to buy a ready-made hat, to make do with one less maid, William is miserable, and hearing of a prostitute who will do "anything," he resolves to be distracted.

But Sugar, as well-read as she is willing, captivates him. So obsessed does William become that he masters his father's hated business in order to restore his allowance and monopolise her. William discovers an interest in the arcana of perfume and soap and his fortunes ascend. As do Sugar's. She now has more time to read and to work on her novel - a pornagraphic opus of the violent death of heartless men.

She also has less freedom of movement. As point of view shifts between Sugar and the Rackham household, Faber contrasts Sugar's situation with Agnes Rackham's, William's sheltered, delicate and deranged wife. A virtual prisoner, alternately pampered and medically abused, Agnes' struggles to fit into the social world she was groomed for - her beautiful wardrobe, her total lack of biological knowledge, her constraints of behavior and speech - grow increasingly grotesque and heart-wrenching.

Sugar, transferred into a home of her own, given more money than she can spend, fights boredom with an obsession to learn everything about the Rackhams so as to secure her position. Distanced from her old life, she grows fastidious. The ugly violence of her novel repels, even embarrasses her. Agnes' delicacy attracts her. As Sugar's fortunes entwine more closely with the Rackhams,' Faber introduces a "Jane Eyre" element, underscoring the gulf between that novel and this.

There are a myriad of lesser characters who play crucial parts in breadth and development - William's older brother, Henry, a gentle religious zealot tormented by his own sexuality; Emmeline Fox, a consumptive, tart-tongued widow and the object of Henry's affection, who evangelizes among prostitutes; William's old school chums, a pair of repulsive but amusing dandies; the Rackham servants, Sugar's horrible mother, various prostitutes. Faber shifts point-of-view at will, giving human voice to various levels of society and Victorian thought. His characters are masterful. Even the worst of them arouse empathy (well, maybe not Sugar's mother), and the best - Sugar and Agnes - practically step off the page. And in the end, it's William, despite his worldly freedom and privilege (or because of it) who is the most constrained, his soul the most confined.

In an interview with his publisher, Faber comments on character: "One of the most absurd tragedies about us as a species is that each of us is convinced we're misunderstood, alone, a misfit. There doesn't seem to be anybody in the world who feels they're what a standard-issue human being ought to be. Literature reminds us of this paradox-our specialness and our commonality." Faber's book is another paradox - a novel with perfect Victorian sensibilities, which could only have been written in our time.

I could go on and on, but I've run out of space. Suffice to say if this book was another 800 pages I'd be happy.