The Crimson Petal and the White in Retro Chapter Chicks

Apr 02, 2018 Candi rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, book-i-own, chunksters

"Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether."

This opening from an omniscient narrator brings the reader directly into the story and on a journey to Vict "Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether."

This opening from an omniscient narrator brings the reader directly into the story and on a journey to Victorian London that allows one to experience all of the secret and sordid details of the lives of its characters - much like a voyeuristic peek at what goes on behind closed doors and in the hidden chambers of those complex minds. What truly carries this story, in my opinion, is the strength of the characterizations as well as the superb writing. What didn’t work for me was the epic length of the book combined with a plot that sometimes seemed to stall or just failed to move forward at a pace I personally would have preferred. Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually the first to say that my favorite books are those that put characters before plot. I love getting into the heads of as many of the key players as possible. However, perhaps in this case, I just didn’t want to dally within these minds for quite so long! I guess there’s a limit to my curiosity about my fellow human beings. Homes have walls and curtains for a reason, I suppose!

So Victorian London… always a time period that fascinates me. I would concede that Faber does a tremendous job in presenting the details of that time period, including the destitution, prostitution, religion, the marked distinction between the upper and lower classes, as well as the handling (or more accurately, mishandling) of mental illness. This book certainly has a Dickensian feel to it – but more like a bawdy version of Dickens. A word of warning to the more sensitive reader – you may need to stomach more than your desired share of descriptions of a variety of bodily functions and fluids in this book!

Since characters are at the heart of this novel, I should spend some time mentioning them here. First and foremost we have Sugar, a young, ‘fallen’ woman who was forced into prostitution by her own mother. She has used her intelligence, cunning, seductive power, and her attentiveness to the needs of others in order to survive in the cruel world to which she was born. She is not just your ordinary prostitute, however. She is much sought after due to her ability to converse and intuit more than just the basest desires of her customers. Furthermore, unknown to her clients, she is an aspiring writer and a social climber. When she meets William Rackham, the perfume magnate, she sees an opportunity to advance herself, and Sugar is not one to pass up any possible advantage. William is a self-centered young man who has fallen into an inheritance of a business and a career that he never really wanted and for which he is quite ill-suited. I reached a point in the novel when I thought perhaps I could feel sympathetic to this wimpy little man, but then I changed my mind once again and he remains as a swinish personage. William is married to Agnes, an eccentric, delusional young woman who is on the road to insanity. One can feel a bit sorry for her as she suffers from a childhood without sufficient mothering, and now has to withstand the misguided efforts of a husband and physician who do not understand the unbalance of her psyche and the unhinging of her mental stability. She treats her own daughter, Sophie, like a child who is virtually nonexistent in her world. William all but ignores Sophie as a living and breathing entity in his household as well. The first time she is given any attention and the slightest hint of affection, the poor child positively glows. I believe Sophie to be perhaps the most important character in moving forward the plot of the novel, and it was with her introduction that I became fully absorbed. It is not her actions that drive the story, however, but her mere existence that does so… I won’t say more about this, however, as I don’t want to give away any key points of said plot. With a book this length, there are of course quite a few persons I could mention, but I’m not going to do so. However, I would be remiss not to point out my favorite character – Miss Emmeline Fox. She has aligned herself with William’s brother, Henry Rackham, in serving the needs of the impoverished and most ‘disgraced’ members of London’s most disreputable neighborhoods. She works for the Rescue Society and aims to bring the city’s prostitutes off the streets and into suitable employment in order to attempt to end the cycle of poverty and exploitation of these women. She is highly religious, but her charitable undertakings are completed without prejudice, judgment or even a whiff of self-righteousness. She’s quite unconventional, sort of like a Victorian, badass fairy godmother!

I definitely liked the second half of the novel much more than the first. Having said that, a nearly 900 page tome has to grab me a bit sooner to rate it in 4 or 5 star territory. I did enjoy where we ended up by book's end, although there were a couple of loose ends or questions I would have liked tied up or answered more firmly. I wanted to see more of Miss Fox before turning the last page, but alas, that wish was not to be granted either. Overall, I liked reading this book, I thought the writing was exceptional, but I’ve hopefully explained clearly enough the reasons for not rating this quite as highly as most of my GR friends. I do have another of Michael Faber’s novels stored away on my kindle for future, and I do look forward to reading that one when the time is right. I’m giving this book 3.5 stars, and am rounding down to a 3 which means I did like it, but didn’t quite ‘feel the love’!
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Nov 07, 2009 Phair rated it it was ok

Shelves: historical-fiction

I felt like I was being dragged by the author through a dismal swamp. Each step just dragged up another swirl of mud to make the going more difficult. I did not like the way I, the reader, kept being introduced to one character only to be "passed on" to another over & over again. There was never any character in whom I was able to become invested. It took me to page 400+ to be interested enough in the 3 principal women to want to stick it out and see what happened next. And after all that I fou ...more

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