The Crimson Petal and the White (Harvest Book) [Paperback]

The Crimson Petal and the White is currently being serialised by the BBC, and a great adaptation it is too. But if you don't read the book, you'll be seriously missing out.

It's a hefty commitment at well over 800 pages, but apart from the sheer weight of it straining my wrists, it couldn't have been less of a chore to read. From the opening pages, in which a sly, conspiratorial narrator invites the reader to spy, voyeur-like, on the characters, to the ambiguous, startling conclusion, I was gripped by this dark Victorian tale.

The apparently cold-hearted prostitute Sugar, largely unloved, frequently unlovely and often unlovable, is a dream of a character. She is complicated, ambiguous and contradictory, and yet I found it impossible not to cheer her on even at the height of her scheming. William Rackham, the weak-willed perfume manufacturer who 'buys' her from her increasingly terrifying mother and madam, Mrs Castaway, is absurd and dangerous by turns. In fact, William is a living embodiment of the saying 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. His position as a wealthy man in a 19th century patriarchy - a position he only reaches in the first place with Sugar as both his motivation and unofficial assistant - means that his snap decisions and capricious whims can have a horrifying effect, sometimes unwitting and sometimes deliberate, on the women around him. Casually neglecting his disappointingly female offspring and simultaneously idolising and despising his disturbed young wife Agnes, he often professes to be in love with Sugar - but will he tire of her one day and put her to one side, just as he shuts away his inconvenient wife and child?

Written in the style of a Victorian novel and exploring a number of Victorian themes and structural devices, The Crimson Petal and The White has numerous subplots, among them the touching but tragic story of William's pious, sexually-frustrated brother Henry and his unrequited love for charity worker Mrs Fox, whose sturdy pragmatism and refusal to be beaten something as trifling as tuberculosis makes her the antithesis of the naive, fragile Agnes Rackham and her obsession with 'the Season'. There is also Agnes' slowly-revealed back-story, through which we learn that her genteel, pampered upbringing has in its own peculiar way been just as harmful as Sugar's miserable early years with her abusive mother.

Despite being crammed with details, some of them uncomfortably grubby and visceral, some of them comic and some of them quietly domestic, The Crimson Petal and the White is never boring and never once feels over-written. Perhaps this is because every one of those details, no matter small, is significant and revealing. There isn't a line in the novel from which we don't learn something important and not a line that didn't draw me in just that little bit further. By the end, I cared desperately about Sugar, despite her ambiguity, despite her dubious choices, despite that little streak of nastiness that still sometimes surfaced in her. A brilliant must-read, not just for the engrossing story and the three-dimensional characters, but for its fascinating exploration of Victorian life and society.

Set in Victorian London, peopled by prositutes, madams, street sellers, batchelors, widows, Perfume manufacturers, hysterics and governnesses, "The Crimson Petal and the White" is everything it promises to be on the first page - an eye-opening journey and a dirty, jolting, wholly satisfying ride at that.

Its very difficult to express the novel's quality and density. Undoubtedly it is Faber's "magnum opus" to date, a startling 800+ page tome rather than his usual slick, moderate volumes. Furthermore, not a single page is superfluous - it surrenders to compelling detail and atmosphere, while still conveying a developing sense of character and an adequate pace of plot - the marriage of which is rarely accomplished with the good grace that "Crimson Petal" displays.

The story is at once convuluted, in that it follows a number of sensational and shocking individuals over one year of their lives, and incredibly simple, in that nothing resembling a contrived plotline is evident. The principals under examination are without exception well rounded protagonists - centred around William Rackham, the up-and-coming heir of a booming perfume manufacturer, they include his disturbed wife Agnes; the enigmatic Sugar, a prostitute who becomes his mistress and his ascetic, pious brother Henry. All of them undergo the painful, and wonderful, events demanded by the movement of time, and the changes of the Victorian social environment.

The Victorian era is deliciously invoked by Faber, who appears to have conducted exhaustive research both into the social and economic realities of the period. Equally, the experiences of his characters are realistically approached and at no time does the novel require a leap of imaginative faith. Meanwhile their complexifying relationships with one another provide good amounts of dramatic and personal tensions.

Some have found "Crimson Petal"'s content distasteful, even disturbing, and yes, it is a novel in which sex, violence and abuse feature prominently, but I would argue that this is no more than is properly required. At no point is Faber gratuitous or pornographic - harsh and disconcerting some scenes may be, they are hardly unrealistic or unwarrented.

Overall, a glorious triumph in the name of period fiction writing and a tour de force of style and character formulation well deserving of five stars and its international acclaim.

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!