Product Description: Meet Sugar, a nineteen-year-old prostitute in nineteenth-century London who yearns for escape to a better life. From the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, she begins her ascent through society, meeting a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters on the way. They begin with William Rackham, an egotistical perfume magnate whose empire is fueled by his lust for Sugar; his unhinged, child-like wife Agnes; his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, Sophie; and his pious brother Henry, foiled in his devotional calling by a persistently less-than-chaste love for the Widow Fox. All this is overseen by assorted preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions. Teeming with life, this is a big, juicy must-read of a novel that has enthralled hundreds of thousands of readers-and will continue to do so for years to come.
Amazon.com Review: Although it's billed as 'the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century,' The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder 'honest' life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, 'she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.' Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler
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Average Rating:
Rating: - A masterpiece
This is a novel so much about Sugar as it is about William who is a selfish, lazy and emotionally stunted man. The second person narration hints that the book takes place in William's England, where virgins are supposed to be flighty debutantes, wives are supposed to be sturdy matrons, whores are supposed to be insatible sexpots, and servants are supposed to sexless automatons.
Where William runs into trouble is when his females don't meet his limited expectations, which happens quite often, especially when a woman transends from one role to another. Once a female displays inferior capacity for her pigeonhole he's perscribed for her, he doesn't want her anymore -- until she's not there.
As for those who think the end was left ambigous, bear in mind that Sugar's plot was conceived of well in advance and there are plenty of clues if you know where to look for them. (Sugar didn't count the ... Read More
Rating: - A waste of a good plot
It is obvious that the author didn't know how to end the story that would not seem fatuous. Therefore he gave up and did not produce one. As a result of the author's cowardliness, the reader is left flat.
Rating: - If you have insomnia, try reading this
I fell asleep trying to read this. An incredible amount of descriptive detail. Too much. I do not need an entire paragraph to tell me how uncomfortable a woman looks in her corset. I also do not need to know a person's entire life story if they are never appearing in the book again after page 30. I fell asleep everytime I picked it up. Thank goodness I did not take it to the tub with me. I would have drowned.
Rating: - A waste of 900 pages
This book was absolutely a waste of time. The author was long winded and didn't take the story anywhere. Save your money. Infact, the author needs to pay you to read it.
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- A masterpiece
- A waste of a good plot
