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The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40200.The_Crimson_Petal_and_the_White?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Crimson Petal and the White" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1222767604m/40200.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40200.The_Crimson_Petal_and_the_White?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Crimson Petal and the White</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16272.Michel_Faber">Michel Faber</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13506833?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars 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.
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/94602?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Kelly's review
rating:
bookshelves: 18th19thcen-british-reading-project, brit-lit, favorites, fiction

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, ...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.
...less

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comments (showing 1-13 of 13)

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message 1: by Martine

07/14/2008 07:45AM

It gets better. Enjoy!

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message 2: by Kelly

07/14/2008 07:50AM

Oh, I am. Can't wait to get out of work and bury myself in it again. :)

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message 3: by Kelly

07/22/2008 08:11AM

I finished it! :)

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message 4: by Martine

07/22/2008 08:27AM

Glad to hear you enjoyed it as much as I did! Beautiful review. You're right on the money, except (ha!) for your guess about the afterstory. Judging from a very cursory glance at The Apple, which I'll start reading in earnest tomorrow, they do in fact go to Australia. Come on, you didn't think all that stuff about Australian geography was there for nothing, did you? :-)

(Perhaps I was more attuned to it because I'm going to move to Australia myself soon...)

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message 5: by Kelly (last edited 07/22/2008 08:33AM)

07/22/2008 08:32AM

Aw, really? I was getting America from a couple insistent comments by Sophie at the last about: "America tomorrow, Miss?" or something of that nature. Foiled again! Can't wait to hear what you think of The Apple!

PS- You're moving to Australia? How fantastic! I would love to even visit there.

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message 6: by Martine (last edited 07/22/2008 10:20AM)

07/22/2008 08:51AM

There's a pretty strong clue just after William has fired Sugar. She's counting the money she has left and finds 'it's wealth enough to take her to the ends of the Earth'. From an English perspective, that would be either Australia or New Zealand. I guessed it had to be Australia because of all the Australian references in Sophie's curriculum. But maybe it was just because I happen to have Australia on the brain right now. :-)

Yep, I'm moving to Australia in October. My boyfriend lives there and I like the country enough to give it a shot. It's horribly far away from home, but the lovely weather, spectacular scenery and cheerful locals will probably make up for it...

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message 7: by Kelly (last edited 07/22/2008 09:02AM)

07/22/2008 09:02AM

I suppose that makes sense now. I guess I was caught up in Sugar's emotional state towards the end, and thought it a hyperbolic exaggeration like a lot of other things in her mind at the time. :)

I hope you love it! What a wonderful new life adventure! It will be quite a change, as you say. I mean, you'll probably have to take up some form of watersport, at least! :) I know a few people who spent their study abroad year there, and they all came back the most relaxed, contented people. Much more so than those like me, who tried to do the crazy, harried tour of Everything in Europe. :)

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message 8: by Martine

07/22/2008 10:20AM

Yeah, it could have been an exaggeration, but I thought it fitted in rather too well with the other clues, so I chose to take it literally. Looks like I was right. :-)

I'm sure I'll enjoy living in Australia. It's funny, I've travelled to a lot of places, and I had a great time at most of them, but I never truly felt at home anywhere but home until I went to Australia and found myself thinking, 'Yeah, I could live here.' And then my Aussie friend became more than a friend, and suddenly the prospect of moving to Australia became very real indeed...

I can see why your friends who spent their year abroad in Australia came back such relaxed, contented people. The country seems to have that effect on people. It certainly did on me. I hope the effect won't wear off after a while...

I hope you enjoyed Europe, harried tour or not! May I ask where you went?

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message 9: by Sarah

07/23/2008 02:18PM

What a wonderful review! I'm really intrigued by this book now. Thinking of picking it up on my next trip to the bookstore...

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message 10: by Kelly

07/23/2008 03:19PM

I hope you do! Read the first few pages, at least, while you're there. That's all I needed to get hooked.

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message 11: by Paul

07/23/2008 04:31PM

Great review - I assume you know Faber's book of stories The Apple answers all the questions we have at the end of this might novel?

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message 12: by Lori

07/23/2008 06:04PM

I had no idea! I have to pick it up, altho I read The Crimson a few years ago so I don't remember alot. I did think she was going to America too!

Kelly, I'm agog with this review.

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message 13: by Kelly

07/24/2008 06:10AM

Paul: Yes, I do, and thank you! Martine's reading The Apple right now, so she's getting all the answers. I'm closing my ears and going "lalalalala I can't hear you," until I can find out for myself! :)

Lori: Thanks, and I'm glad I'm not the only one to be deceived at the end there! I suppose Australia would be more interesting, anyway. Instead of Civil War Reconstruction, its all former criminals and lawlessness and kangaroos. So it's not so bad to be wrong here, maybe? ;)

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