Hold on to your bustles
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Canongate £17.99, pp835
Early on in this voluminous novel, the 'criticisin' of books becomes a bawdy euphemism for something that no lady would ever be caught doing, especially not in 1874, which is why, cloaked in the fetid fug of a London pub, William Rackham, heir to Rackham Perfumeries, sits awaiting the arrival of Miss Sugar, a young woman of less than fragrant virtue.
But Sugar is no ordinary tart; she is possessed of a 'masculine intellect' and in her spare time is writing a novel entitled The Fall and Rise of Sugar. Over the coming months, she will escape Mrs Castaway's brothel and install herself as William's concubine, his confidante and business adviser, and finally as governess to his neglected daughter Sophie.
As every undergraduate knows, the nineteenth-century novel is a big baggy monster and, after a series of shorter, sharp works, Michel Faber's latest is defiantly Victorian in style, content and, above all, form; the summation of 20 years' hard labour, it's a gripping beast of a book comprising five parts, 35 chapters and 835 pages.
Faber has blown the cobwebs off a cast of characters that includes prostitutes, a pastor, a do-gooding widow, a serial swooner bound for the asylum - or the attic - and a sinister doctor, along with bounders, beneath-stairs types and a ragged parade of disease-ridden crones and orphans.
Period detail saturates every sphere of life, from the whores' contraceptive 'bouillon' to highlights of the Season, but what animates Faber's characters is their conviction that they are living on the very cusp of change. In fact, with the Great Exhibition some 20 years behind them, this is the future: fashion is ruthlessly remoulding women's figures, the capital's pastry shops have all become 'patisseries', and even William Rackham has finally cut off his long university locks in preparation for life in the family firm.
Playing on the omniscience of the Victorian narrator, Faber leads us through his labyrinthine story in the come-hither voice of a brothel madam, breaching the boundaries of voyeurism within the first few pages by bidding us slide into bed beside a prostitute.
Sex is described in the business-like language of the trade, or else in prose purple and throbbing enough to make a connoisseur of such 'bad' sex fairly swoon in delight. But there is a violent and abusive subtext: the narrative muddles openings and orifices so that vaginas have teeth; hours are scalpelled from days; Rackham's fragile wife Agnes is subjected almost daily to Dr Curlew's tyrannically probing fingers.
Sugar herself has an unsettlingly prepubescent allure: with a boyish figure and husky voice - the result of a blade held too near to her throat once upon a time - her pale lips are perpetually cracked and bloody, and acute psoriasis has left her body striped like a tiger's, or one lashed with a whip. As the brothel's publication More Sprees in London notes, Sugar does what others won't, but her secret is that she'll do it with a smile. Hustled into prostitution by her own mother, Mrs Castaway, she is 19 by the time William meets her and already has six years' experience. 'You do the arithmetic,' our narrator instructs.
Faber is something of an unreconstructed feminist, and the novel that Sugar labours over while her punters sleep off their drink goes beyond autobiography, telling of the lurid exploits of a prostitute who carves up men, an inverted Jack the Ripper dreamt up years before he padded the city's streets. In fact, it's not entirely dissimilar to Faber's own debut novel, Under the Skin, but here, in such close proximity to the likes of women who specialise in dripping hot wax on to men's testicles, such self-lacerating disgust at his own sex is decidedly disconcerting.
The Crimson Petal and the White is a confection of melodrama, gothic horror, satire and sentimentalism. To say that it is a novel all about the Victorian novel would be to make it sound very dull indeed, but it is, in the wittiest, most irreverent way possible, teeming with the ghosts of literature past.
On his first evening with Sugar, William Rackham really does discuss literature - before pouncing on her from behind and flinging her bustle over her head. Not wishing to reveal his true identity at Miss Castaway's brothel, he creates an alias for himself, becoming Mr Hunt, a gentleman publisher occasionally called off to urgent meetings with Wilkie Collins. One old trollop even boasts: 'I've 'ad Charles Dickens.'
Sugar is not the only woman scribbling by candlelight: Agnes, too, seeks solace in the written word, but in the end all their sheaves of inky outpourings amount to nothing. The endlessly redrafted Fall and Rise of Sugar, Agnes's tragic diaries and later The Illuminated Thoughts & Preternatural Reflections of Agnes Pigott - all are cast into the wind, buried in the back garden, left abandoned under beds.
Our enduring infatuation with the Victorians is a curious thing, and while Faber may not offer much glossing, his text illustrates it perfectly.
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