The Crimson Petal and the White (Audible Audio Edition) Michel Faber Jill Tanner Canongate Audiobooks Books
Download As PDF : The Crimson Petal and the White (Audible Audio Edition) Michel Faber Jill Tanner Canongate Audiobooks Books
NOW A MAJOR BBC DRAMA starring Romola Garai, Chris O'Dowd, Gillian Anderson, Richard E. Grant, Shirley Henderson, and Mark Gatiss.
'Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them....' So begins this irresistible voyage into the dark side of Victorian London. Amongst an unforgettable cast of low-lifes, physicians, businessmen, and prostitutes, meet our heroine Sugar, a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can. Be prepared for a mesmerising tale of passion, intrigue, ambition, and revenge.
The Crimson Petal and the White (Audible Audio Edition) Michel Faber Jill Tanner Canongate Audiobooks Books
Having watched the mini-series on Acorn TV, I was all ready to read the novel. It met my expectations and then some. If you are interested in life in England during this time in history, you will love the book. It's very well written and never lags. It is also beautifully descriptive of the prostitutes' life and living standards of that time. It is particularly interesting to see how a marriage was accepted and continued when it was only for show. The book went into detail about how sheltered some women were before marriage. The wife in this novel remained sheltered and never grasped what life was all about. In contrast, Sugar, the prostitute was taught about survival and reality at a young age by her own mother, the madam. The book is never sleezy or crude. It is realistic and well written. If you feel daunted by the number of pages, give it a try. You may find yourself finished with this book and wishing it would go on. I recommend this book and consider it a masterpiece.Product details
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The Crimson Petal and the White (Audible Audio Edition) Michel Faber Jill Tanner Canongate Audiobooks Books Reviews
In 1870s London, England, William Rackham is an up and coming nothing, who, even though the son of the rich owner of a perfume empire, finds himself a bit lost in life. He enjoys the dandy world a bit too much even though he has a mentally ill wife, and his dad gives him only the barest minimum in the way of money in an effort to compel William to take over the family business. That burden would normally have fallen on his older brother, Henry, but the eldest wants to be a clergyman and has no interest in running a company. The problem is that William has no interest in the perfume industry either. He'd much rather hang out with his scalawag buds, and think of himself as an aspiring writer or artiste, even though he writes NOTHING. His beautiful young wife, Agnes, is suffering from a hidden brain tumor (Faber's narrator tells us this early on but the characters in the novel have no way of knowing about it and just think she's crazy). It makes her have major mental issues which compound the worldly handicaps of her already sheltered upbringing. She basically has no clue as regards to sex even though she birthed a daughter, Sophie, from her marriage to William. In fact, she pretty much ignores the existence of her own child. William, too, has little to do with his kid and leaves her care to his servants. He can't really decide what he wants to do with his life besides knowing that the perfume business isn't an option. A whore named Sugar changes all that.
Sugar is known throughout London as the prostitute that will do whatever a client asks, no matter how depraved or repulsive other whores might find it. Like William, she too, is an aspiring writer, with the difference being that she actually WRITES! She wants to publish a novel based on revenge fantasies on all the men she has slept with in her career. And by so doing, reveal mankind for the revolting animals they really are, and society as a skeleton of moral hypocrisy. When she meets William, she seduces him not only with her body, but also with her mind. She sets herself up as his intellectual and carnal soulmate, so much so that William even decides to take over his dad's hated pefume business in order to afford the price of making himself Sugar's one and ONLY customer!
In its most basic form, The Crimson Petal and the White is about sex. Sexual repression and sexual release. It's the book Charles Dickens would have written if he had been allowed to include not only human drama but also naughty bits that happen in the bedroom. Faber even imitates the omniscient narrators of old and makes witty asides about the past, present, and future of the characters. It's also about how dangerous, secret passions can become all too banal over the passage of time or when they become too domestic. A secret affair only holds its power and lust while it IS secret and you're in danger of being discovered. Once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, it loses whatever forbidden fruit magnetism it had at its inception.
The book is pretty lengthy, clocking in at just under 900 pages, and the saddest thing is that after reading all those pages and savoring the beautiful language, you get to the end and are like "WTF? That's IT???" All the characters are left dangling in space with no resolution whatsoever. It's like a tv show that gets cancelled at the end of season on a cliffhanger and you never find out what happened to the characters or plotlines. There's a book of stories called The Apple that supposedly sheds a bit more light on what happened to the characters after the end of the novel, but to me, shave off some of the 900 pages and add an ending. Dickens never left you hanging at the end of his books! Don't try to emulate 19th century novelists and then flub the end! I felt kinda pissed about it and considered swearing off reading any more of Faber's novels...but I guess after I cooled down I've become a bit more forgiving and will most likely read The Apple to give myself some closure. It just seemed a real ripoff to spend over a month reading a book and then the author just blows off wrapping up his work. I would say to avoid this novel if you want any sort of payoff at its finish. If it had an end I would have given it 4-5 stars. Without one, it's a 2 or 3 star book.
I had read, and loved, Faber's Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things, so I decided Crimson Petal and the White would be my first purchase. I read nearly 200 pages before admitting I was bored. Reading it became more and more of a chore, and by the end I detested all of the characters and the endless, go-nowhere plot. All of the characters are wretched in various ways, and while Faber does a masterful job of writing "in the period," I got the feeling that what primarily interested him was literary texture. I find it hard to reconcile this with his other two books, which were so imaginative and profound I couldn't put either one down (both resonate with me to this day). I would have given this one star except I have such respect for the author. If following the lives of a mass of unhappy people living in the seedy underbelly of England during the industrial revolution doesn't put you off, your reward is Faber's thorough knowledge of the period. I'm sure he has captured those wretched lives precisely.
This book has one of the best beginnings I've ever read. It's instantly engaging, as the narrator, speaking directly to the reader, draws you in to the seedy, grimy underbelly of Victorian London. It follows ambitious, embittered prostitute Sugar as she claws her way out of a second-rate whorehouse by means of a rather bumbling (married) heir to a small fortune. The details are extensive (the books weighs a ton), gritty and salacious. Faber displays as much interest in Victorian religious debates as in primitive contraceptive techniques, and he's clearly done his research (over a decade of it, he says). I absolutely devoured the first 300 pages and then--then I slogged through the rest. What began as an exceptionally promising twist on a Victorian novel simply wallowed on too long. The characters either did not evolve at all, or changed in implausible ways. The ending is more of a sudden, unresolved stop than a satisfying conclusion--not what you want after sticking with a book for that long. In short, it feels like a very good idea that the author hadn't thought through and eventually tired of working with. Read the first 300 pages. Don't bother with the rest.
Having watched the mini-series on Acorn TV, I was all ready to read the novel. It met my expectations and then some. If you are interested in life in England during this time in history, you will love the book. It's very well written and never lags. It is also beautifully descriptive of the prostitutes' life and living standards of that time. It is particularly interesting to see how a marriage was accepted and continued when it was only for show. The book went into detail about how sheltered some women were before marriage. The wife in this novel remained sheltered and never grasped what life was all about. In contrast, Sugar, the prostitute was taught about survival and reality at a young age by her own mother, the madam. The book is never sleezy or crude. It is realistic and well written. If you feel daunted by the number of pages, give it a try. You may find yourself finished with this book and wishing it would go on. I recommend this book and consider it a masterpiece.
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