What could be more charming than a big old Victorian house? Turrets, gingerbread scroll work, verandas, rooms galore. They make ideal bed-and-breakfasts. But actually owning an authentic Victorian house is another matter. Expensive to heat and maintain, they tend to have too many bedrooms and not enough bathrooms. Better to buy a modern house with a few Victorian flourishes and up-to-date wiring and plumbing.
Victorian novels are also commodious and finely wrought. But how many modern readers really care to make the necessary investment of time and energy to read David Copperfield? Those long sentences, those classical allusions, that excruciating propriety. Better to find a book that has the heft and moral gravity of a nineteenth-century “baggy monster,” but updated for modern sensibilities.
I don’t know whether Michael Faber could be accused of such cynicism in writing The Crimson Petal and the White, but I’m pretty sure that “Victorian-lite” was part of the appeal to some readers--including me. Over the course of 900 pages we read about the rise of the unfortunately named Sugar, a successful prostitute in 1875 London. Sugar is 19 and commands a high price for her youth, her exotic appearance, and her intelligence. Tall and thin with a wild mane of red hair, Sugar spends her free time reading and writing: she is composing a novel in which she fantasizes about the violent forms of revenge she would take against her clients if she had the opportunity. But she is at the same time the consummate professional, able to “read” her clients as well and conform to their expectations. She is also willing to “do anything,” which assertion kind of appalled me, even though the specifics were (fortunately) never spelled out. You would think that her other “qualifications” might exempt her from having to be quite so…obliging.
Anyway, young manufacturing heir William Rackham seeks out Sugar’s services and is so smitten that he offers to take an option on her 24/7, setting her up in a suburban flat. She graduates from prostitute to mistress. Sugar not only gratifies Rackham’s appetites, she becomes a valued business consultant, helping him with his correspondence and giving him advice on packaging, marketing, and the like.
Unlike novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens, The Crimson Petal and the White has a relatively short list of characters. Besides Rackham and Sugar there is Rackham’s dotty wife Agnes, his brother Henry, and Henry’s very proper lady friend Mrs. Fox. Late in the book we also meet Rackham’s young daughter Sophie. There is also the rather peculiar fact that most of these characters seem to spend most of their time alone. Indeed, The Crimson Petal and the White is a rather sad and lonely book. Rackham only rarely visits Sugar; Agnes spends most of her time in her room, under sedation, dreaming of angels. It’s one solitary stalemate after another. We wait in vain for scenes, confrontations, emotional outbursts.
I began to look forward to mad Agnes’s scenes as the other characters stagnated. Here she is at the piano:
Open before her is the sheet music of ‘Crocuses Ahoy,!’ marked with her own annotations to warn her when the demi-semiquavers are coming. She plays the opening bars, plays them again, plays them over and over. Softly and sweetly, using this piano phrase as accompaniment, she hums a new melody, her own, purely out of her head. The notes she sings, hesitant at first, resolve themselves into a fetching tune. How inventive she is today! Quite the little composer! She resolves to sing this song of hers as long as she can stand it, to send it as far as Heaven, to nag it into the memory of God, to make time pass until someone is summoned to write it down for her, and it’s printed up nicely and ferried to the far corners of the earth, for women everywhere to sing. 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.
Agnes is so detached from the world that she does not realize that she has a six-year-old daughter. I know there are cases where women have given birth without realizing they had been pregnant; it never occurred to me that this kind of ignorance could continue after the blessed event. Agnes and Sophie share the same house. But they never meet.
Nobody could ever accuse author Michael Faber of looking away from awkward physical matters. The sex scenes are aren’t especially detailed by modern standards, but let one of the characters have digestive problems and he brings us in close for all the details. I’m not complaining, but over the course of 900 pages there are several such …crises, and I’m not sure what the point is. Perhaps it is to supply what the Victorians have omitted, to complete the picture of their times. Whatever his intent, this septic orientation reminded me of Angela Carter’s astonishing story, “The Fall River Axe Murders,” from her collection Saints and Sinners, which gives us Lizzie Borden’s life in all its revolting, unsanitary glory:
How often, nowadays, in summer does your milk turn into a sour jelly, or you butter separate itself out into the liquid fat and the corrupt-smelling whey? When did you last see the waxy clusters of the seed-pearl eggs of the blow fly materialize disgustingly on the left-over joint?
Great stuff, this. We read about how the family’s Sunday mutton dinner is husbanded carefully through the week, each day’s preparation growing increasingly more rancid due to the lack of refrigeration. Reading the story, I actually began to feel vaguely sick—my brain lit up the way it does when you’re coming down with a fever, and I could not get to sleep that night as too-vivid images flitted past my closed eyes. You would not have wanted to be living Lizzie Borden’s life in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Whether murdering your parents with an axe was a rejection of the hideous constraints of that life or a kind of emphatic affirmation, I’m not sure.
The Crimson Petal and the White is not quite so infectious. It has wonderful scenes and characters, and yet it somehow feels less than the sum or its parts. It’s a curated view of the Victorian world, a vaguely anachronistic condemnation of its hypocrisy. Where Eliot and Meredith directed their irony against individuals and elements in their fictional worlds, Faber directs his against the very notion of writing—or reading—such a book. At times he addresses the reader directly:
The main characters in this story, with whom you want to become intimate, are nowhere near here. They aren’t expecting you; you mean nothing to them. If you think they’re going to get out of their warm beds and travel miles to meet you, you are mistaken.
When husband Henry Rackham is getting ready to bundle his mad wife Agnes off to an asylum, Sugar, who has since come on board as the family’s governess, intervenes and puts the delusional Agnes (who thinks Sugar is her guardian angel) on a train to the country, instructing her to find a convent when she reaches her destination and to ask for sanctuary there. I kept expecting Agnes to reappear at some dramatic juncture, to challenge the rather staid reality of the book’s final sections with her strange perspective. I wanted more Agnes, more "Crocuses Ahoy!" But she never came back.
