The Crimson Petal and the White (Paperback)

by Michel Faber (Author) "Watch your step..." (more)
Key Phrases: receiving hall, travelling case, William Rackham, Miss Sugar, Doctor Curlew (more...)

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 the Hardcover edition.

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 the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 944 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156028778
• ISBN-13: 978-0156028776
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (491 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #217,057 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	J. Meegan "avid reader" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lolita meets Merchant/Ivory - Wow, what a story!, September 11, 2002

By	Karl Miller "kemspeaks" (Phoenixville, PA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

I can't say enough positive things about the pleasure of reading "The Crimson Petal and the White". Faber has created a character that ranks with the best prostitutes in fiction, and the other characters populating his novel allow for the type of plot twists that make a novel engrossing, and in the end memorable.
The central plot of "Crimson Petal" involves the efforts of a young hooker (Sugar) to escape a horrendous teen life, and then find her way in a more successful metropolitan society. Her benefactor (or more appropiately , "Sugar" daddy) Rackham, has his own baggage (a mentally disturbed wife, an ill child and a very troubled brother), and his bringing Sugar into the mix both complicates and liberates his life. This isn't a happy ending story, however, because no character deserves (or even desires) trust. This is revealed by the various novels being written by each of the characters as the story develops - making this a series of novels, unfolding in a novel. In that sense, it reminded me of "The French Lieutenant's Woman", but "Crimson" is much more of a page turner.
After 800 pages, I wanted more. Faber's use of language, while sometimes extremely graphic, is incredibly attractive. While the people populating his story certainly aren't lovable, they are fascinating. And this is a story unlike anything you have ever read before.
There will be a lot of mentioning of Faber's name at the various book awards this year. His storytelling skills are that good.

21 of 21 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)

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?