Take a photo of a barcode or cover
timeywriter 's review for:
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
I made it! Honestly, I was not sure if I was going to finish reading this one by the end of the year since it just kept going on and on. Not that its length was a bad thing, in fact I found myself entirely enamored when I was reading it. Granted, I gave myself generous breaks between it to read other books. I always came back to this though.
Set in Victorian England, a prostitute named Sugar rises through the ranks of society thanks to the patronage of a perfumer named William Rackham. That's it, that's the story. How did I manage to read nearly 900 pages and nothing of great consequence happened. And yet so much happened! I am baffled by this. I blame the narrator of the story entirely. The way it is written in the first person with a narrator literally leading the reader along the journey, was entirely fascinating. I also found the smaller characters far more fascinating than Sugar or William. Of course, Sugar and William had their merits, but at the end of the day Sugar was still a slave to the men of the world despite her every desire not to be and William was still an angry, loaf of a man who never opened his eyes to what was around him. No, I found Agnes, William's wife, and his daughter, Sophie, to be very interesting. Here are two women who society has deemed strange and even mad, yet it is really the conditions that they have been subject to that have driven them to madness. It was clear in Agnes and it was beginning to culminate in Sophie. Their madness was entirely driven by the men who ignored, abused, and refuted them. Without a doubt this was the basis of Sugar's novel that she was writing, yet she somehow lost herself along the way by falling victim to the very creature that her characters tortured and murdered in her novel. However, I have hope that Sugar realized this and such was the reason for her final actions.
Well, I feel like I ran a marathon with this novel. It was extensive with its details, I absolutely loved the descriptions and how real London became in these pages. After years of delaying in reading this, I am glad I finally got to it.
Set in Victorian England, a prostitute named Sugar rises through the ranks of society thanks to the patronage of a perfumer named William Rackham. That's it, that's the story. How did I manage to read nearly 900 pages and nothing of great consequence happened. And yet so much happened! I am baffled by this. I blame the narrator of the story entirely. The way it is written in the first person with a narrator literally leading the reader along the journey, was entirely fascinating. I also found the smaller characters far more fascinating than Sugar or William. Of course, Sugar and William had their merits, but at the end of the day Sugar was still a slave to the men of the world despite her every desire not to be and William was still an angry, loaf of a man who never opened his eyes to what was around him. No, I found Agnes, William's wife, and his daughter, Sophie, to be very interesting. Here are two women who society has deemed strange and even mad, yet it is really the conditions that they have been subject to that have driven them to madness. It was clear in Agnes and it was beginning to culminate in Sophie. Their madness was entirely driven by the men who ignored, abused, and refuted them. Without a doubt this was the basis of Sugar's novel that she was writing, yet she somehow lost herself along the way by falling victim to the very creature that her characters tortured and murdered in her novel. However, I have hope that Sugar realized this and such was the reason for her final actions.
Well, I feel like I ran a marathon with this novel. It was extensive with its details, I absolutely loved the descriptions and how real London became in these pages. After years of delaying in reading this, I am glad I finally got to it.