Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5890 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 894 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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. It's 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 favour, 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, Amazon.com

About the Author
Michel Faber's startlingly original novel, Under the Skin, which garnered accolades from around the world, was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award 2000 and nominated for the Dublin Impac award 2002. His award-winning stories and novellas also attract a huge readership. He lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Customer Reviews

800 pages, but I still wanted more!
Michel Faber's loose, baggy monster of a book captures the great narrative drive of classic Victorian storytellers, and wears its influences fairly openly. Sugar, the heroine, has an instinct for self-preservation as intuitive as Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp. The densely researched details of perfume manufacturing recall George Eliot's quarrying for "Middlemarch". And the frank sexual content will probably have Andrew Davies rubbing his hands with glee if he gets the chance to adapt it for the screen, as he's done with Sarah Waters' "Tipping the Velvet".

Michel Faber gives us a Victorian Christmas with all the trimmings, nights in whorehouses and opera houses, and some truly disgusting sounding Victorian meals... which seem worse, oddly enough, than the contraceptive routines he details the women in the book putting themselves through. He also writes wonderfully about being a six year old in 1875.

This took twenty years to write and research ; I hope a sequel won't take so long to complete!

You must read this book
This is the only book I've seen which has 4 pages of rave reviews before the book even begins, and they are all justified! From the minute you start reading you are helplessly drawn into this book and it is vaguely unsatisfying when you finish. Michel Faber makes no effort to glamorise the period as is often the way with period novels and shows us some interesting insights into how life really was in all levels of society. He manages to write convincingly in both the male and female persona (especially the female!). It is clear he has spent a lot of time choosing his words to maximum effect. I would recommend this book to anyone, except the extreme prude, as some of the language is quite frank and part of his effort to contextualise. Afterall, it is the story of a prostitute!

Bereft
I finished this novel this morning. I feel bereft without it. I cannot stop thinking about the fates of my heroines, and I feel as if I am living in a parallel reality. The signs of a great novel!

The story took my breath away - the twists and developments were very real, the way life surprises one constantly with what it can offer/enforce. The 1870s were alive, smelly, polarised, physical, and the characters recognisable, unpredictable, beautifully drawn and fascinating. I can't wait to read it again.