the crimson petal and the white by michel faber

Sadly, that leering tour guide dissolves like street excrement and only makes a surprise reappearance on the last page. It's an engaging and deftly written second-person point of view and one wonders if Faber has the strength to keep it up the entire book. The cobblestones beneath your feet are wet and mucky, the air is frigid and smells of sour spirits and slowly dissolving dung. Faber begins the book with an attention-arresting narrator who omnisciently guides the reader through the streets and bedrooms of 1874 London: You blunder forward into the haze of your own spent breath, still following me. The multilayered story requires plenty of time and attention to properly absorb - not an easy task in today's short-attention-span culture. The author says The Crimson Petal and the White was nearly 20 years in the making. The Crimson Petal and the White may come as a bit of a surprise to fans of Faber's earlier, well-received novel, Under the Skin- a psycho-sexual science-fiction thriller which most reviewers agreed was the kind of book which defied description.įaber's newest tale is easy enough to summarize it's the breathtaking way he handles plot, character and language that might leave most readers speechless with admiration. At 838 pages, it attempts much, and only rarely falls short. The story - which resurrects the ghosts of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Zola and Thomas Hardy in plot as well as essence and style - is clotted with seamy scenes of prostitution, madness, violence, poverty and religious agony and ecstasy. Put another way, if books were bosoms, this one would be heaving.

Of course, 125 years later, Faber has the freedom to put some very graphic intercourse on his pages. Faber packs the pages with sex, intrigue, repressed sex, intriguing repressed sex - the sort of things which would have made Victoria shudder on the throne.

Instead, we have Michel Faber to thank for delivering the kind of novel Dickens could only dream about penning. If time and circumstances had only been a little different, 'Boz' might very well have written something akin to The Crimson Petal and the White. Imagine Queen Victoria opening those pages, then fainting away in a dead heap. Imagine Charles Dickens writing pornography. Review | The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

The crimson petal and the white by michel faber