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A review of The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

Prostitutes, insanity, poverty, wealth and perfume in 1870's London. Jennifer Santiago

Reviewed by: Jennifer Santiago
About Jennifer Santiago

The Crimson Petal and the White Charles Dickens meets Jackie Collins in this stunning novel of epic proportions. London in the late 1870's is a savage place. Shoeless urchins scavenge the streets, hoodlums beat and rob drunken swells, peddlers hawk trashy wares on every corner, and thousands of prostitutes who know no shame ply their trade in dank dilapidated whorehouses. In one such house, 19-year-old prostitute Sugar compliantly and masterfully fulfills the basest fantasies of well-to-do gentleman from Notting Hill, but in her free hours between assignations, plots their grisly ends in the pages of her novel, "The Rise and Fall of Sugar."

Meanwhile, in Notting Hill, William Rackham, unwilling heir to Rackham Perfumeries, lives a stilted life with his wife Agnes, whom he is not permitted to touch as she grows increasingly insane, his daughter Sophie, whose welfare is the sole province of her nursemaid, and a bevy of resentful and thieving servants. Fancying himself a budding writer, William refuses to take over the helm of his father's perfume empire, so Rackham Senior embarks on a program of slowly cutting William and Agnes off from all creature comforts until at last William will have to give in. Agnes, suffering from a host of maladies and mental afflictions, drifts in and out of lucidity, sometimes placid and charming as a lamb, other times throwing fits and hurling vile insults at society friends.

It is not until William meets Sugar that he really begins to live. She is, astonishingly, a match for him in all matters both prurient and intellectual. Determined that no other man shall defile her, William resolves to make his father proud by taking over the family business, thereby securing an unlimited stream of wealth, which he can use to sequester Sugar in a private love nest, far from the drunken desires of lascivious Londoners. The arrangement is paradise, but his demanding schedule as a captain of industry and the escalating Agnes situation prevent William from slipping away to Sugar's consoling arms as often as he would like. When his daughter's governess resigns, William and Sugar hatch what seems to be the perfect plan- with Sugar overseeing Sophie, she'll be across the hall from William's study, accessible to him on a moment's notice.

As with all the best-laid plans, William's and Sugar's soon go awry, owing to difficulties with the business, the escape of Agnes, William's health, and the inexplicable onset of nausea Sugar is stricken with each morning during Sophie's lessons. But how can the strong-willed Sugar, who has become William's lover, confidant, business partner, secretary, marital advisor and governess to his only child, be dismissed once things have gone too far?

The secondary characters who populate the story are no less interesting- Sugar's madame, Mrs. Castaway, who spends her days cutting Mary Magdalen pictures from religious periodicals and pasting them all over the parlor of the whorehouse; William's bachelor brother Henry, who yearns to become a clergyman but is held back by his shameful carnal desires for Mrs. Emmeline Fox, a liberal-minded widow who mission in life is reforming prostitutes; Bodley and Ashwell, William's drunken friends who pass their time publishing bawdy pamphlets and patronizing every brothel in London; and poor Agnes, a devout Catholic so naïve that she believes her monthly menstrual cycle is brought on by hungry demons and who cannot comprehend that she has given birth and is therefore a mother to little Sophie.

Although the length of The Crimson Petal and the White may be intimidating, (a full 833 pages), readers are sure to make short work of this saga that is at once literary and pornographic.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: The Crimson Petal and the White

Copyright © by Jennifer Santiago, 2003

Reviewed by Jennifer Santiago:
-- The Lovely Bones - by Alice Sebold
-- 30 Minute Meals - by Rachael Ray
-- Raising Blaze - by Debra Ginsberg
-- Backpack - by Emily Barr
-- You Are Not a Stranger Here - by Adam Haslett
-- Bookends - by Jane Green
-- A Confederacy of Dunces - by John Kennedy Toole
-- Ash Wednesday - by Ethan Hawke
-- All Saints' Day - by Brent Benoit
-- The Stepford Wives - by Ira Levin
-- The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - by David M. Buss
-- Literary New Orleans - by Judy Long (Editor)
-- The Sopranos Family Cookbook - by Allen Rucker; Recipes by Michele Scicolone
-- Atonement - by Ian McEwan
-- The Crimson Petal and the White - by Michel Faber
-- Midnight Bayou - by Nora Roberts
-- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - by Ann Brashares
-- The Zygote Chronicles - by Suzanne Finnamore
-- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - by J.K. Rowling









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