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jaspersandwich 's review for:
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Nobody loved a doorstop novel quite like the Victorians. Russians extracted them still bloody from their tortured souls, the French tried to create Borgesian exact replicas of lives that take about the same amount of time to read, and the English jotted them off to show you why the social order must remain while permitting that the odd member of the lower classes might show promise.
What they all shared though was the proclivity for 50 words where one would suffice, explication to the nth degree over allusion and inference, and expansive detailed biography and subplot of characters that have little to do with the main tale. These were times when every bolt in a whaling ship or cobblestone in Paris were of incredible interest to readers who had little other opportunity to experience these sights by any other means, and the time to ponder them.
Then along came a century and and a half of literary experiment with a backdrop of vertiginous technological progress to bring us to Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.
As it concerns itself with Victorian whores with hearts of gold, and rich, stiff, emotionally-crippled captains of industry (where have I met them before?), Faber seems to have decided doorstop was the way to go, and hang the pesky intervening innovations in modernism, post-modernism, etc. There is a tale to tell!
It begins well enough, promising perhaps a John Fowles-esque critique of Victorian society from the modern day which evaporates slowly until it is time to abruptly say goodbye (where one can't help the feeling that although there is no Victorian denouement (thanks!), we have to stop SOMEWHERE). Besides this truncated finish, Faber's only other concession to the 21st century seems to be in making sexually explicit the parts which Victorian sensibilities omitted.
As such, we have a bodice-ripping, sexy wedge of a book which doesn't really take me or the novel as literature anywhere special.
The writing is of a high standard (which I knew already from the much better The Book of Strange New Things), and despite feeling little for 700-odd pages for any of the characters, I couldn't help wishing Sugar well as everything was turning to shit for her in the last 150. Perhaps my last Faber.
What they all shared though was the proclivity for 50 words where one would suffice, explication to the nth degree over allusion and inference, and expansive detailed biography and subplot of characters that have little to do with the main tale. These were times when every bolt in a whaling ship or cobblestone in Paris were of incredible interest to readers who had little other opportunity to experience these sights by any other means, and the time to ponder them.
Then along came a century and and a half of literary experiment with a backdrop of vertiginous technological progress to bring us to Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.
As it concerns itself with Victorian whores with hearts of gold, and rich, stiff, emotionally-crippled captains of industry (where have I met them before?), Faber seems to have decided doorstop was the way to go, and hang the pesky intervening innovations in modernism, post-modernism, etc. There is a tale to tell!
It begins well enough, promising perhaps a John Fowles-esque critique of Victorian society from the modern day which evaporates slowly until it is time to abruptly say goodbye (where one can't help the feeling that although there is no Victorian denouement (thanks!), we have to stop SOMEWHERE). Besides this truncated finish, Faber's only other concession to the 21st century seems to be in making sexually explicit the parts which Victorian sensibilities omitted.
As such, we have a bodice-ripping, sexy wedge of a book which doesn't really take me or the novel as literature anywhere special.
The writing is of a high standard (which I knew already from the much better The Book of Strange New Things), and despite feeling little for 700-odd pages for any of the characters, I couldn't help wishing Sugar well as everything was turning to shit for her in the last 150. Perhaps my last Faber.