The Crimson Petal and the White

published	September 11th 2003 by Canongate Books Ltd
binding	Paperback
isbn	1841954314 (isbn13: 9781841954318)
pages	894
description	Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Vi...more [close] 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 [close]
date added	01-21-07 edit book

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Kelly rated it:

07/22/08

bookshelves: 18th19thcen-british-reading-project, brit-lit, favorites, fiction

Read in July, 2008

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether..."

Thus does Faber begin his beguiling spell of a novel, the Crimson Petal and the White. He sets th...more Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether..."

Thus does Faber begin his beguiling spell of a novel, the Crimson Petal and the White. He sets the bar rather arrogantly high with such an introduction, intriguing the reader, drawing us in with words that manage to be both the sharp slap of a glove across the face as well as the whispered words of a mysteriously dangerous lover whose face we can never quite see.

This is the late Victorian London that Faber gives us. This London, this England, belongs to no one author's inspiration. It is the dirty, industrial exploitative mess of Sinclair's "The Jungle," it the deeply urgent, hypocritical, stridently moral mess of Thomas Hardy's desperately dark imagination, it is the woman repressed to barely breathing in the the attic of the Brontes' imagination, it is a nearly unbearably complex Dickens character that 900 pages are not sufficient to describe. Faber gives direct or indirect homage to all the teeming, screaming, whispering, and of course, most interestingly, involutarily silent voices of the era. No one could hope to capture it all, of course, but Faber does his very best. It is for this sort of novel that I wish the word "awe" could be reserved for.

Faber gives us various guides on our journey, characters connected somehow in the teeming mass, tenously, momentarily, or perhaps intimately, showing the reader many different perspectives on the era, as characters have sometimes vastly different experiences based on one degree of birth, 10 shillings in their pocket, an address three streets better than someone else's, or the lack of a few pieces of vital, basic life information. He manages to give us the deeply urgent feelings of the era, on a range of topics from progress and modernization to a deeply religious perspective on romantic love to consumerism to the deep schism between sexual and "spiritual," love. Different characters' views on these subjects were everything from repulsive to ignorant to poignant to infuriating, covered in grime, tears, and rage. And yet, I found myself deeply touched by the unlikeliest of small minded, miserable characters. It was as if I saw their hands flailing in the darkness behind a door, and I kept wanting to kick that door in to take their hands and lead them out, and I couldn't do a thing about it.

Faber brings out the realities of every day life that seem to never surface in novels of the era. He coats his city in filth from the very first, not scrupling to show us a child covered in piss or a whore cleaning herself after a rank smelling customer has left her. He speaks of decaying teeth in the mouths of beauties, carriage collison deaths in routine morning traffic, and the realities of burial in a city where catching disease from corpses was a very real risk in the streets. And yet, this is not a treatise on the difficulties of early modern life alone. Faber just means to point out that these things existed alongside the big ideas, dreams, and spiritual yearnings of the era. Even married ladies who had no idea what sex was or where babies came from had chamber pots that smelled and needed to be emptied in the morning. He is right to yank us from our polite disregard of such facts in the typical journey into this era, just as ladies of the time should have been yanked.

He is not without poetry or a sparkling, sly humor in descriptions of this roilng mess, either. That is one of the greatly surprising aspects of the tale. Out of a dramatic vignette of hustle-bustle London life, there are observations like this: "morally, its an odd period, both for the observed and the observer: fashion has engineered the reappearance of the body, while morality still insists upon perfect ignorance of it. The bodice hugs tight to the bosom and the belly, the front of the skirt clings to the pelvis and hangs straight down, so that a slight wind is enough to reveal the presence of legs. Yet no righteous man must dare to think of the flesh and no righteous woman must be aware of having it. If an exuberant barbarian from a savage fringe of the Empire were to stray into St. James' Park now and compliment one of these ladies on the delicious looking contours of her flesh, the response would most likely be neither delight nor disdain, but an instant loss of consciousness."

His characters are surprising, too. They often seem ridiculous, overly dramatic, silly enough to dismiss at first sight. The author himself seems to feel the need to beg his audience to pay attention, to follow along specimens that we can only roll our eyes at for just a little bit longer. Sugar, our main protagonist, goes through a social mobility and through many changes not at all common for a woman of the era. Her slow transition and revelation as her economic and social class change, the needs and focuses of her thoughts as she changes again and again what she wants out of life. It is amazing to watch her transformation from chapter to chapter, how her voice and thoughts change. Our main male character, William Rackham, is introduced as a silly, self-important twit with vainglorious artistic aspirations, and an aversion to any sort of responsibility. Even when he takes hold of his fate, he does not really rise in quality in the slightest. Some might say he even decreases. Yet... I came to understand him. He has all the flaws of men of the era, and some not even as badly as most. His struggles to cope with so much he doesn't understand, his delusions become pitiful, even painful by the end. His relationship with his wife ends up being particularly powerful. Poor Agnes Rackham is enough to inspire anyone, feminist or not, into a rage at what women were meant to be, and what they could not be. The struggles of Emmeline Fox and Henry Rackham brought tears of rage to my eyes... it goes on and on. Faber gets us so involved with people that perhaps we would dismiss from an author less talented. I could go on and on here about all the issues of feminism raised through the female characters, the perceptions of them through the eyes of men, the classism, relative morality, but I do believe I would run out of characters allowed in this review before I'd barely begun.

As to the ending: (spoilers, perhaps? Though I don't plan to give much specific away.) I liked it. It was abrupt and shocking, rather, but after 900 pages of this epic... I somehow think it appropriate. At least from a modern novelist. I could almost believe that he stopped it there out of sheer fatigue with his narrative, but I don't think that's entirely it. His interweaving of his storylines over and over again into the complex web that they became was far too delicately done for that to be the case. We're meant to see the sort of ending that reality gives us... if indeed there ever really is an ending. Is there?

"It is time to let me go," is a fittingly sensitive, yet cruel parting from a story that has embodied that contradiction.

PS- (okay, now stop reading if you don't want to see a sort of spoiler)
... I think they go to America, Martine. :) If the heavy handed hints at the end were to be believed.
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Martine rated it:

07/03/08

bookshelves: british, family-drama, favourites, historical-fiction, modern-fiction, pseudo-nineteenth-century, psychological-drama

Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: people who believe the journey is more important than the destination

If I had to give a one-word response to the big, sprawling monster of a faux-Victorian novel that is The Crimson Petal and the White, it would be 'WOW'. (With capitals. Yes.) At 895 pages, it's a big book, and it's not without its flaws, but such is the quality of the writing, the characterisation and the staggering amount of research that went into it that I was enthralled from beginning to end and stayed up until 4am on a weekday night to be able to read the last four hundred pages. I d...more If I had to give a one-word response to the big, sprawling monster of a faux-Victorian novel that is The Crimson Petal and the White, it would be 'WOW'. (With capitals. Yes.) At 895 pages, it's a big book, and it's not without its flaws, but such is the quality of the writing, the characterisation and the staggering amount of research that went into it that I was enthralled from beginning to end and stayed up until 4am on a weekday night to be able to read the last four hundred pages. I don't regret the sleep I lost that night; if anything, I regret that there weren't four hundred more pages to stay up for. That's how much I liked the book.

So what's it all about? Well, it's hard to sum up an 895-page story in a few lines, but basically it's about an intelligent prostitute who lives in 1870s London, wheedles her way into a rich man's life and ends up changing several lives, not least her own. She's an appealing (albeit emotionally scarred and manipulative) heroine, and she's portrayed in admirable detail. So are all the other characters, who make up one of the finest casts since the heyday of Dickens. Randy gentlemen, cross-dressing prostitutes, society-obsessed ladies with brain tumours, would-be parsons tormented by sexual fantasies, love-starved children who grow up in the servants' quarters because their mothers can't be reminded of their existence, guards who spend all the days of their lives reciting news of deathly disasters, well-bred ladies who risk expulsion from polite society to help fallen women... they're all here, and they're drawn in shockingly intimate detail. All their thoughts, dreams and fantasies are spilled out on the pages, and for the most part they're riveting. Similar candour is employed in the descriptions of actions and places. Not content with simply providing lush descriptions of Victorian splendours (although he certainly does that, too), Michel Faber gives his book a distinctly modern feel by describing things no Victorian novelist in his right mind would ever have mentioned, such as, well, sex. The Crimson Petal and the White is full of highly inelegant sex scenes, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words. In addition, it features painstakingly detailed descriptions of unmentionable things like the heroine's skin disease, the sounds, sights and smells of London's red-light district, the vaginal douches with which prostitutes tried to prevent pregnancy, the look and smell of used chamber pots, a farting concert, and so on. This may sound off-putting, but the descriptions are so vivid and so, well, interesting that they greatly add to the authenticity and local colour of the book, presenting a truly kaleidoscopic view of London in the 1870s. The result is a rich and fascinating story which is at turns utterly Victorian and thoroughly modern, dirty and elegant, highbrow and lowbrow, disgusting and engrossing. It certainly isn't for the faint of heart, but in its own daring way, it's spectacular. I would even go so far as to call it mesmerising.

As for its shortcomings, well, I guess you could say the book is a bit jarring at times. Faber has an interesting tendency to introduce characters, devote many words to them, and then suddenly and quite randomly to kill them off or otherwise lose sight of them, thus making you wonder what their point was in the first place. In a way, the sudden deaths/disappearances are as realistic as the descriptions of the chamber pots and vaginal douches (after all, death does creep up on us very suddenly, and people do really vanish from our lives like that, don't they?), but it's an uncommon device in literature, and it's a bit jarring at times, especially since it's so thoroughly un-Victorian. Aren't storylines usually tied up neatly in Victorian novels?

Which brings me to the ending. Much has been written about the ending of The Crimson Petal and the White, which is as jarring and un-Victorian as they come. There is no 'Reader, I married him' here, much less a summary of what happened to the main characters after the final curtain. Instead, the story comes to an abrupt halt, leaving the main characters in medias res. Like many readers, I was initially put off by the ending, thinking that the narrator's sudden 'But now it's time to let me go' was a paltry reward for staying with him for nearly nine hundred pages. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the ending. After all, what could be more fitting in a book which is largely about fantasies than to leave the reader on a note which has him fantasising about what might have happened to the characters, weighing the pros and cons of each scenario? I definitely agree that Faber should have ended the story on a less abrupt note, but I've forgiven him for the openness of the ending. It works for me, even if many other people hate it.

As for conjectures about the ending... My guess is that Sugar and Sophie end up building a new life for themselves in Australia. What do you think, those of you who have read the book? ...less

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Teresa rated it:

08/12/07

bookshelves: readandreviewed

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in February, 2006

I've been of the mind recently that there is something slightly worse than bad. And that is: almost. Bad, one can deal with. It's easily classifiable, and can be (to paraphrase Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief) "whittled down to a more manageable size." Almost is harder. Almost teases you with what could have been, only to disappoint you with what is. Almost is wasted potential. Almost lingers inside you like a dust bunny under a bed in a clean room. The Crimson Petal and the White by ...more I've been of the mind recently that there is something slightly worse than bad. And that is: almost. Bad, one can deal with. It's easily classifiable, and can be (to paraphrase Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief) "whittled down to a more manageable size." Almost is harder. Almost teases you with what could have been, only to disappoint you with what is. Almost is wasted potential. Almost lingers inside you like a dust bunny under a bed in a clean room. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber almost lives up to its promise.

I was drawn into the novel by seductive narrative voice leading me down the streets of Victorian London. It was a little bit cinematic and a little bit Dickensian, and I was immediately enthralled. Crimson Petal tells the story of Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute who is renowned in London for doing everything. There is no depravity too extreme, as long as she's getting paid for it. Yet, that's not what makes Sugar truly interesting. She's interesting, because while she was raised in prostitution, she's literate and reads voraciously. She's also an aspiring novelist, hoping to better the plight of prostitutes by exposing their ills (and their secret vengefulness) to the world through her prose. Meanwhile, on the other side of London, there resides the Rackham family, and at its head, William Rackham, heir to a perfume company.

It's his meeting and subsequent infatuation with Sugar that's supposed to be the main story in the novel, but Faber packs the novel with intricate "secondary" characters that are much more interesting: Agnes, William's addled, very Catholic wife; Henry Rackham and Emmeline Fox, William's brother and the unorthodox humanitarian he loves; little Sophie Rackham, forced into observing her household rather than taking part in it; and Caroline, Sugar's soulful prostitute friend.

All of their stories are so captivating that it must have seemed a daunting task to do them all justice...so Faber opted not to try. Instead, the lives of the supporting characters peter out with no resolution, good or bad. Now, we all know that life is not a neatly packaged thing. Situations don't resolve themselves perfectly, and one could argue that the "point" of this book is that that's how life is. However, that "rationale" for ending things with no change or resolution has more often than not seemed like a cop-out to me. I did find the resolution for Sugar (which also involved Sophie) very interesting, but that, too, is glossed over. Sugar is more spoken about than spoken through, and I found that very unfair to her.

The Crimson Petal and the White has moments of brilliance, full characters, and an interesting narrative voice. It's just a shame that all of these wonderful parts don't add up to a more successful whole. I wouldn't tell you not to read it....at the same time, I will say that you shouldn't expect to be completely satisfied when you've finished. I wasn't.
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melydia rated it:

06/23/08

What a monumental waste of time. I probably shouldn't begin my review that way, but that was my first thought upon reading the last page just now. This is the story of a lout named William Rackham, his mad wife Agnes, and his troubled mistress Sugar. I especially enjoyed Agnes as the pitiably ignorant and tormented product of her high-society upbringing. I admit my disappointment with this book started when I realized it was about a man who falls in love with a prostitute, but I tried to ignore ...more What a monumental waste of time. I probably shouldn't begin my review that way, but that was my first thought upon reading the last page just now. This is the story of a lout named William Rackham, his mad wife Agnes, and his troubled mistress Sugar. I especially enjoyed Agnes as the pitiably ignorant and tormented product of her high-society upbringing. I admit my disappointment with this book started when I realized it was about a man who falls in love with a prostitute, but I tried to ignore the cliched premise and get into the story. There was no problem there - the characters are solid, believable, and (mostly) sympathetic. The description of 19th century England is so detailed you can see it in your mind. I did notice that all the major female characters in this story suffered from some physical ailment; I wonder if that was meant to be symbolic. The author wades tentatively into controversial waters - poverty, prostitution, religion - but never shares any sort of opinions either way, appearing to suggest that misery is something that is unavoidable and charity is nothing more than a drop in the ocean, unnoticed and not even worth the effort.

The book, at 833 pages (and it's the larger size paperback; this thing is massive!), is in severe need of editing. Entirely too much space is given to the frustratingly angstful relationship between the doctor's daughter Emmeline and William's brother Henry. It did nothing to further the plot whatsoever, just an aside that never wove itself into the fabric of the main story. They should have had their own book and stayed out of this one. There were other characters who likewise did nothing for the story (such as the prostitute Caroline), but they were minor enough that I can ignore them. The beginning should have been edited as well, as it starts out with a clever method of introducing characters and setting up scenes - the reader is being guided personally through the events by a sort of invisible spirit, invited to follow people around - but this is lost about a third of the way through the book in favor of more traditional narration. It should have been kept throughout or dropped entirely. Finally, I found the obsession with bowel movements annoying. I understand the author's desire to show that real people lived in these conditions, but I don't really need to read about it every time Sugar pees. The use of such a term doesn't help either. Perhaps such words were in the vernacular at the time, but after such flowery 19th century language it is very jarring to run across such modern-sounding slang as "balls" and "cunt" and "fart" in the (third person omniscient) narration.

Even so, I could have overlooked these problems in the interest of the story of the Rackham family, which is honestly engaging and appears to be building to a climax, the anticipation of which makes the book difficult to put down for the last couple hundred pages. However, this lengthy tome still manages to end in the middle of the action. Several of the main characters are left unaccounted for, their fates unknown to the reader. 833 pages and the story just stops, leaving the reader with the sinking feeling that they just wasted all those hours spent getting to know these characters. The story isn't even tragic enough to feel a satisfying sense of pity - you turn the last page and sit there, dumbstruck, wondering where the next chapter disappeared to and why the hell you bothered reading to that point in the first place.

On the bright side, I did learn quite a bit about the time period and do hope to pick up more historical fiction in the future. Just not by Michel Faber....less

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Emily rated it:

06/05/07

Read in May, 2007

If you don't like reading about sex, don't read this book. And when I say sex, I don't necessarily mean the pleasant kind of reading about sex, or the titillating kind of reading about sex. I mean, there are plenty of gory details in here about the everyday lives of Victorian women and prostitutes. And many of them aren't pretty.
The thing that fascinates and attracts me to this book is that it could only take place in Victorian London, and yet it could only have been written in the modern era....more If you don't like reading about sex, don't read this book. And when I say sex, I don't necessarily mean the pleasant kind of reading about sex, or the titillating kind of reading about sex. I mean, there are plenty of gory details in here about the everyday lives of Victorian women and prostitutes. And many of them aren't pretty.
The thing that fascinates and attracts me to this book is that it could only take place in Victorian London, and yet it could only have been written in the modern era. Dickens would never have been able to describe these things in such detail; things that range from contraceptive methods used by 19th century women to the vulgarities used by men looking for fun on a night out. But not only would Dickens not have written these things, he wouldn't know how to write them for us 21st century readers. He wouldn't know that we don't know how chamberpots work, or that we've never watched impoverished children looting the scene of an accident. Dickens would never guess that we don't understand why a woman can't walk the streets alone, or why two deeply-in-love and unmarried friends can't just stop freaking out about hellfire and have sex already. But Michael Faber understands these things, and he manages to describe them in a way that is usually elegant, sometimes repulsive, and always fascinating.
There are some problems with this modern Victorian thing. For example, why must Sugar, the Prostitute Protagonist (I like this phrase, it has nice alliteration, I'll have to start writing reviews of novels about whores) also have a superior knowledge of literature? Why do the heroines of historical fiction always have to be so damn modern in their thoughts? I mean, yes, admittedly, it makes us relate to them, but it does not seem realistic. I read these books because I like to know about people in the past, educated or not.
For this reason, I found the character of Agnes particularly interesting. She's a mess, for sure, I don't know if she's any more typical of the Victorian woman than Sugar is. She's insane, suffering from brain problems, she's sexually repressed to the point where she refuses to acknowledge her own child, and she's basically a child herself. I'd much rather hang out with Sugar. Still, Agnes is a much more unusual case to read about.
Anyway, the bottom line is, I couldn't stop reading this book. Sometimes I thought it was over the top and melodramatic- but then I always ended up getting sucked right into the melodrama, even more fascinated than I had been from the start. It's definitely worth a try.
I will say, as a final note, that many people find the end disappointing. I was told, by a number of people, on a number of occasions, that the end sucked. Perhaps as a result of that (or rather, as a result of the fact that I don't always like neat endings) that I found more satisfactory than I originally expected. I don't think Faber leaves any loose ends unintentionally....less

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Anna rated it:

09/25/07

Read in April, 2003

Nineteen year-old Sugar is a whore in 1870s London. William Rackham is the proud, immature inheritor of the Rackham perfumery. William's wife, Agnes, is mentally off. William's brother, Henry, is confounded by his religion. William's young daughter, Sophie, is hidden away in the Rackham mansion and cared for by servants. Is it any wonder William seeks out a prostitute? Of course, we all know he's going to find Sugar. The only question is, what sort of tortured relationship between them can fill ...more Nineteen year-old Sugar is a whore in 1870s London. William Rackham is the proud, immature inheritor of the Rackham perfumery. William's wife, Agnes, is mentally off. William's brother, Henry, is confounded by his religion. William's young daughter, Sophie, is hidden away in the Rackham mansion and cared for by servants. Is it any wonder William seeks out a prostitute? Of course, we all know he's going to find Sugar. The only question is, what sort of tortured relationship between them can fill up 834 pages?

Victorian, THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE most assuredly is not. Whatever I was expecting from this novel, it was not the graphic and often repulsive sex scenes that I got. And when the plot isn't reading like soft porn, it's drowning in details. I managed to read the first 300 pages word for word, but after that it was either start skimming or give up, so I started skimming. And although the last third of the book was a pleasant surprise -- the characters become more fully developed, the plot takes some interesting turns, and the sickly sweet tone of the first half is focused into something much sharper -- I was still considerably relieved to reach the end.

Some other disappointments I would note: Several of the characters die without apparent reason, perhaps simply because Michel Faber tired of them. But neither did I miss them, since I never enjoyed any of the people in the first place, although I did grow closer to Sugar near the end. William positively disgusted me and I rue the 500 pages I spent in his company. And Faber's interesting technique of addressing the reader personally as "you" and tossing in little side comments (welcome comic relief, if you ask me) is lost about halfway through and unfortunately seldom reappears.

Least you think I am totally down on this novel, there were a couple of interesting points. The time period and its people are well researched and depicted with a sort of graphic honesty that's a lot like a car accident -- you'd like to look away, but you can't. Bodily functions are common in these pages. Dirt and grime and pain and insanity abound. Nothing escapes the author's probing finger. Nothing is too sordid to discuss.

I cannot recommend this novel. I found it irritating at best and regret the time I wasted on it. Still, THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE is notable for its honesty, crude is that may be. ...less

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Sammy rated it:

(review of isbn 015100692X)

06/12/07

bookshelves: the-okay

Read in October, 2004

This isn't a book for children, I can surely state that without opinion... that is unless you enjoy corrupting your children, because surely if you read this book to them they will know just as much as the Victorian whores do about the ins-and-outs of sex. The book is rich in detail and imagery with nearly every event, person, and location we incounter. Michael Faber clearly has a strong grasp on what he's writing about from everything to the fashions, sicknesses, technology, social patterns, an...more This isn't a book for children, I can surely state that without opinion... that is unless you enjoy corrupting your children, because surely if you read this book to them they will know just as much as the Victorian whores do about the ins-and-outs of sex. The book is rich in detail and imagery with nearly every event, person, and location we incounter. Michael Faber clearly has a strong grasp on what he's writing about from everything to the fashions, sicknesses, technology, social patterns, and even the way a woman's mind works.

His characters were brilliantly flawed. Imperfect enough that you could actually see them as real people and care for them as real people. There are so many times when an author tries to create characters that have one innocent flaw that usually passes unnoticed. Either that or they write a character so flawed you automatically know that this is the antagonist, and the character clear of imperfections is obviously your protagonist. This wasn't the case in The Crimson Petal and the White. There was no outright villian. And even if there was, the person I think is the villian may be quite different from the person you think is the villian.

The one flaw I found in this book is a flaw others might find rewarding, and that was the ending. Well, really there are three endings with each of the three characters that have come to the top of this book. I felt each ending very unsatisfying because it just left you hanging, there was no finished feeling or conclusion that came with them. It bothered me because with the way I was wrapped up in the story I wanted a resolution for each character, it didn't matter what the resolution was, just as long as it was there. It left me going, "That was it?" After such a wonderous read I was left hanging and dissapointed. But don't let this discourage you from reading this book. After reflecting on it, I realized that these endings were endings of a chapter in each character's life, and what happens next is really up for the reader to decide. And though it left me rather upset, it may leave other readers happy and content.

So despite the unsatisfaction I had with the ending of the book, the rest was absolutely superb and a thrilling good read. Mind you it is rather verbose and I suspect that over half the 20 years Michael Faber spent on this book was clearly spent writing it, you won't really worry about how much you have to read once you get involved....less

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Amy rated it:

04/21/08

bookshelves: 2008-books-read

Read in April, 2008

The author write in 2nd person, so it's you who begins the book wandering through a late 1800s, Dickens-esque England. You immediately find yourself keeping company with various "women of ill repute" who are immediately humanized as women that the industrial revolution is not looking kindly upon. In order to make ends meet, these women have chosen to work less than their factory laboring counterparts in return for higher pay and shorter lifespans. And among these women is a highly-soug...more

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Darby rated it:

(review of isbn 0156028778)

02/04/08

bookshelves: 2007, historical-fiction, novels

Read in March, 2007

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Basically it is the story of Sugar. Sugar is a 19-year old prostitute that is well read and intelligent. She is waiting for the opportunity to pull herself out of the misery of poverty when William Rackman comes into her life. William Rackman is the heir to a perfumery business who found Sugar when looking for a specific erotic skill. William's enchantment with Sugar leads him to purchase her making her his exclusively. He tries to give her every comfort he can think of and in exchange she's ope...more

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LindyLouMac rated it:

07/07/08

Read in July, 2008

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A delightful romp through the ranks of society in 1870’s London. From the very first page the author invites you to participate as though you were a character within its pages. The story starts by introducing us the lowest strata of Victorian society in Church Lane St Giles where we are introduced to the first character Caroline, who in turn will lead us to be introduced to the main p...more

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Lori rated it:

07/22/08

Read in January, 2003

recommends it for: Victoriana afficianados, historical fiction readers, vintage eroticists?

This book accomplished the impossible...it truly transported me to a different time and place. Such a cliche, to be sure. But, occasionally a book can honestly bridge the gap and so vividly portray a scene, an era or a geographical setting that I am swallowed up into that world almost completely. The Crimson Petal and the White made this happen for me and, a few year later, I still remember that journey to Victorian London.

The central chraracter is a prostitute called "Sugar" wh...more

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Siria rated it:

(review of isbn 0156028778)

06/04/07

bookshelves: 21st-century, british-fiction, historical-fiction

Read in April, 2007

Enjoyable and rather compulsively readable, but not particularly impressive, The Crimson Petal and the White is essentially an 18 rated version of Dickens—a cautionary tale set in Victorian London, but with more mention of prostitutes, erections and human excretions than you could shake a reasonably sized stick at.

The prose is quite solid, though it feels a little padded in places, particularly in regards to the Henry Rackham/Emmeline Fox subplot; similarly, the narrative flows well...more

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Miss Dreadful rated it:

(review of isbn 015100692X)

01/05/08

bookshelves: fiction, historical

Read in December, 2007

Very rich, long book you can sink into for several days. I found myself sympathizing with each character, and then getting royally annoyed with them in turn. William Rackham is the privileged and spoiled Victorian Man with a classic madwoman-in-the-attic wife, and Sugar is the highly intelligent and alluring prostitute he becomes obsessed with. Eventually, she is installed in his household as governess, but there's no Jane Eyre ending here.

Agnes is the wife--who isn't really mad, but suff...more

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Alice rated it:

01/03/08

bookshelves: historical-fiction

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: people very interested in Victorian London

I agree with a lot that has already been said about this book. Faber has almost written a critique of life in the late Victorian period for people of different social classes, different beliefs, and of course he includes a lot of sex...This is all very interesting, especially if you like learning about the Victorians. Faber writes wonderful prose, which has stayed in my mind for some time after reading it and he has vivid characters, looking at the development of not only the main protagonists. ...more

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Cobweb rated it:

(review of isbn 015100692X)

05/22/08

Read in May, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Priya rated it:

05/26/08

Read in May, 2008

Ugh. This book, and the length had nothing to do with it, took me about three weeks to read. (If it was any good it would have taken about a week, even with its 700 pages).

This book was beyond bad. If I could give it zero stars I would. Not only was the writing atrocious, but the narration was awful--I hate it when the narrator is not only third person omniscient but also directly addresses the reader in a very obnoxious voice that basically drove me mad.

I have to say that the book w...more

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Mina rated it:

03/31/07

Read in March, 2007

recommends it for: Bored Housewives? I kid.

I got this book because I love Victorian lit. I should clarify that this isn't a Victorian novel per se; a more accurate description is that it is a contemporary take on the Victorian novel. The descriptions of 19th century London are vivid and detailed; Faber lovingly notes the filth on the streets (and the sheets) and the stench of unwashed bodies in the air. The sex scenes are adequately salacious (were Victorian men really into anal play?) but this is no "bodice-ripper," despite w...more

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