The Crimson Petal and the White

Rating:
Summary: Let down
Review: It was like being ravenous, anxiously awaiting dinner, only to discover that the table is set with only dessert.

Faber lures you into his incredibly discriptive setting of London like a prostitute promising great adventure. Only to be let down. I found myself engrossed with the characters initially, finding their motivations surprising and intrigueing. As the novel moved along, I felt that Faber perhaps did not know how to end the book. Motivations became trite, boring, and unfulfilling. Faber drops forshadowing events aplenty, to the point that the reader is anxiously expecting a huge climactic moment where everything that was ever wrong with England at the time would be put right. It never happens. Faber takes people and objects in the book, invests the readers's time in the description of these things, and then drops the person/object from the story entirely. What was the point of Henry and his love interest, what was the point of Sugar's novel?

In the end, I continuted to root through the last pages looking for the real ending. Never found it. I only give Faber 4 stars for his ability to initially pull me into the book. This is the novel that could have been, but wasn't.

Rating:
Summary: 21st Century Dickens?
Review: In The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber has written an entertaining and fast-reading novel that brings what Charles Dickens was known for and updates it for a modern reader. Like Dickens, Faber exposes the grimier side of Victorian England, but Faber goes further, permitted by modern sensibilities to explore issues that a 19th century Englishman could never get away with.

The story is essentially a couple years in the lives of two characters: Sugar, a self-educated and ambitious prostitute, and William Rackham, son of a perfume magnate who is living beyond his means. The first liaison between the two has William aspiring to greater things, if only to afford exclusive access to Sugar. For William, this means a rise to great success as he at long last is worthy of his father's company. For Sugar, this is an opportunity to rise from prostitute to mistress. Mixed into their intricate relationship are a number of characters, particularly related to William: his ailing and emotionally immature wife, his isolated daughter and his ultra-religious brother, to name a few.

The back-of-the-book summary is a bit deceptive here, implying that this is a story of Sugar using a lot of men on her way to prosperity; actually, William is really the only man she is with in the novel, and he is nearly as much the main character as Sugar is. There is also a narrative style that is a bit off-beat, especially at the beginning, with the narrator speaking directly to the reader as a sort of tour guide.

If Dickens wrote in part to expose the social ills of Victorian England, Faber writes to expose the hypocrisy of the era, where nearly every character is damaged by the demands for extreme sexual repression. While some may argue that we are too sexually explicit nowadays (and might even point to this book as an example), Faber shows that the reverse situation was pretty bad in itself. But even without taking possible thematic content into consideration, there is still plenty of good stuff here: this is a fun book and well-worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Narrative, Big Letdown
Review: This book is an enthralling look at Victorian England, exposing the class system, the lives and choices of women, and the politics of sex and power at the end of the 19th century. For this, it is worth the read. I understand, I suppose, the purpose of leaving the fates of the characters open-ended. After all, we have been permitted to view their lives as voyeurs. We come in, medias res, and so shall we leave them.

But the final third of the book feels rushed and unfinished. I felt very let down at the end. Not because there are so many questions left unanswered--I can work with the supposed intention of that--but because it seemed so shallow. Characters, and their relationships, simply fall apart.

So, yes, it is worth reading. And yes, be prepared to be let down in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the read
Review: This was a wonderful, engrossing, engaging book- I did not want it to end!! Fans of Dickens will relish the detail that the author gives to Victorian England, you can see, smell and visualize what it must have been like in the late 19th century. The only problem with the book was that it ended so abruptly, I want to read about what happened to Sugar. I can't wait for the author's next book.

Rating:
Summary: Faber's ascent of a fallen woman.
Review: In his epic novel, Michel Faber travels the streets of 1875 Victorian London, where he introduces his reader to William Rackham, a wealthy perfumer, and his mistress, Sugar, a "precocious" (p. 34), 19-year-old prostitute with a "child-like curiosity" (p. 264) about life. "She's a strange one, that Sugar," her fellow whores observe, "she'll go far" (p. 34). Indeed, as Rackham's life slowly unravels over the course of Faber's 835-page novel, Sugar makes a remarkable ascent from fallen woman to mistress, to muse, to governess of Rackham's daughter, Sophie. Along the way, Sugar laboriously drafts her anti-male autobiography, "The Fall and Rise of Sugar." "My name is Sugar," she writes, "I am what you would call a Fallen Woman, but I assure you I did not fall--I was pushed. Vile man, eternal Adam, I indict you!" (p. 336).

In its penetrating insights into Victorian social hypocrisies, Faber's writing is reminiscent of novelists Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, only more erotic, and explicitly so. Faber's characters, much like Thomas Hardy's characters, become tragic representatives of the sins of their society. We witness them burn to death, go mad, drown, and lose their fortunes, wives and children. "Farewell then, 1875," Faber's wry narrator observes amidst all the tragedy contained within these pages.

I spent more than nine months reading THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE from start to finish, not because of its length, and not because it failed to hold my attention, but because I wanted to savor Faber's superb writing slowly.

G. Merritt

Rating:
Summary: Vivid detail does not make a story
Review: There is no doubt that the author of this book will make you feel as if you are walking the streets of Victorian London. Every last smell, sound and visual image will flash before your eyes (this includes everything you never wanted to know about 19th century excretement, skin diseases, sewage, and contraceptive methods). The characters are enticing enough, and I found it easy to stay with the book waiting for all the details to come together to form a plot. It never really happened. It seems as if the author spent all available resources on researching and then showing off what he had learned about London society but never mapped out the course of the story. There is more fun to be had in the world of Dickens.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!!!
Review: "One of the BEST books I have ever read!
It was absolutely mesmerizing, I couldn't put it down, and didn't want to let it go.
I am so sorry it took him 20 yrs. to write this, I would love to read more about Sugar!

Rating:
Summary: Tennyson's epic poem about feminism retold
Review: 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?

Rating:
Summary: Started Strong and Then It Just Died in It's Tracks
Review: I'm two thirds through this book and I don't know if I have the desire to finish. The book started strong and for a few hundred pages I was enthralled. There were a few oddities like the strange narrative device used at the beginning and then dropped. But the sweeping detail and interesting characters kept me avidly turning the pages.

But now, about 2/3 done or more, the book has simply lost it's way. A major character was killed off for no apparent reason (in a book that features a smallish cast of characters). The plot has taken a totally unbelievable turn and the narrative seems to juts be sitting there with nothing to say.

Very disappointing to say the least. Don't know if I can summon up the desire to finish, especially since so many readers feel cheated by the ending. The author of this book got the build-up right but he just can't seem to follow through on any of the interesting early material.

Rating:
Summary: Now What?
Review: I was very engrossed in this book and began to feel a kinship with all of the characters (William least of all). This is probably why the ending was such an incredible downer. I don't believe I've ever read a book that ended as abruptly as this did. Throughout the novel, we saw each of the character's inners as if we had a microscope into their souls, so why on earth Faber chose to leave us hanging with all of their lives is beyond me. We hung in there with all the character's baggage just to be left eternally hanging. How dare Faber leave us with poor Agnes last seen wondering the English countryside and Sugar is last seen abducting the little girl. Readers were owed a whole lot more than that, unless the author has a sequal in mind and wants to ensure we buy it just to find out what happened to the women in William's life. Who knows, he may do the same t thing to a sequal. What a shame, the author had fabulous character development - I was routing for Sugar the entire time! William is such a self consumed boar and his daughter is much better off with Sugar.