Whores, porn and lunatics
Rowan Somerville's top 10 of good sex in fiction
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
864pp, Canongate, £17.99
Michel Faber has produced the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely. All the familiar tropes of high-Victorian fiction are here - the mad wife, the cut-above prostitute, the almost-artist, the opaque governess - but they are presented to us by a narrator with the mind and mouth of the 21st century. Where once the Victorian novel was lace-like with decorous gaps and tactful silences, now it is packed hard with crude fact and dirty detail. Faber's prostitutes douche themselves regularly and dab hopelessly at old stains, while his child-bride - knowingly called "Agnes" - is racked by terror of her own monthly bleeds. Faber's governess is a whore, his mad woman a Catholic visionary, and his Lady Bountiful - whose name, not by chance, is Emmeline - likes to masturbate.
All this might sound sensational - both in the Victorian way, meaning packed with stimuli, and in the contemporary sense of being calculatingly enticing - were it not for the fact that the novel's grosser moments are embedded in a narrative of exquisite historical accuracy. Set in Notting Hill (Faber can never resist a sly nod towards the modern) in 1875, The Crimson Petal and the White tells the story of William Rackham, an ageing young man who is obliged to give up hopes of authorship in order to turn man of business. Rackham Perfumeries is a long-standing family affair struggling to make the tricky transition into the age of mass production. Where once William dreamed of astounding London with his finely crafted thoughts on life and literature, now he floods it with mid-market face creams stinking of cheap lavender. Faber captures this slick new age brilliantly. Here is the London that Dickens did not live quite long enough to write about, a city of department stores and omnibuses, advertising hoardings, canned foods and shop-bought Christmas cards.
Sex has become a commodity too. More Sprees in London, an annual publication aimed at men who like to flatter themselves that they are connoisseurs of cunt, points William towards Sugar, a prostitute who holds an almost mythical place in the city's collective longing. Stick-thin and flaky with a congenital skin condition, Sugar none the less charms men with a unique combination of utter compliance (you can do things to her that other whores won't allow) and a well-stocked brain. Finding the kind of companionship with Sugar that will never be possible with his increasingly unstable child-bride, William naturally sets about buying her. Initially he sets Sugar up in lodgings for his exclusive use before moving her into the family home as his daughter's governess.
This is a supremely literary novel. Everyone in it is a reader and writer of some kind. Sugar has been busy putting together her own narrative of vengeance against the male species, the kind of thing that Dickens's Estella might have written if she had taken to literature. Agnes Rackham, meanwhile, has spent her parallel youth pouring out a gush of unremarkable thoughts to her Dear Diary, a multi-volumed document that Sugar reads compulsively for clues to the secrets of the house in which she and Agnes now live side by side. William, who at the start of the novel is still planning amusing little pieces for the better kind of gentleman's periodical, swiftly descends to tinkering with advertising copy and dashing off bullying letters to suppliers.
At this point the novel becomes positively gleeful about its capacity to inhabit, rework and skip free of its literary borrowings. There is a great deal of East Lynne here, the sensationalist (in all senses) novel by Mrs Henry Wood in which a ruined gentlewoman returns to her marital home to become governess to her own children, disguised only by some hideous scars and a sturdy veil. There is also a fair helping of Jane Eyre, a novel which Sugar has long dismissed as having little to do with the real lives of governesses ("Reader, I married him" is not a phrase she expects to utter any time soon). Meanwhile, Agnes Rackham, confined to her room with gathering psychosis, becomes a creditable stand-in for the mad woman in the attic.
Presiding over this cast of characters and their almost infinite number of literary shadows is the novel's narrator, as all-seeing as a George Eliot sage, yet as teasing and slippery as any post-modern storyteller. In the magnificent opening section of the book, Faber's alter ego reminds us of the arbitrary nature of the exercise in hand. Taunting us with our inability to read the unfolding cityscape - "the truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether" - he jostles us with the possibility that there are other, more interesting people and plotlines that we could have followed. His ending, too, astringently withholds the satisfactions we have come to expect from the classic Victorian novel. Not only do Sugar and William not marry (Sugar was right about that all along), it is unclear what does happen to them. Depriving us of even an "unhappy ever after", the narrative breaks off at a moment of high drama with the infuriating coo, "an abrupt parting, I know, but that's the way it always is, isn't it?"
As this existential playfulness suggests, the real literary progenitor of The Crimson Petal and the White is not so much Jane Eyre or Dombey and Son as John Fowles's 1969 classic The French Lieutenant's Woman. For while Fowles's talk of prostitution and premature ejaculation seemed daring at the time, he now seems as hobbled by the reticence of his age as Dickens was by his. Faber's ambition is to bring the Victorian novel bang up to date, filling in the polite gaps until there is literally nothing left unsaid. Thus in Faber's bold hands Fowles's Sarah, a fastidious fallen woman, becomes a whore who will take it up the arse, while Charles Smithson, racked by the guilt of the naturally monogamous, is morphed into William, a habitual consumer of pornography and prostitutes.
In less able hands this updating might have resulted in a novel that felt tricksy without being especially innovative. But Faber's writing is so dizzyingly accomplished that he is able to convince you that, just sometimes, the old stories really are the best ones.
· Kathryn Hughes is writing a biography of Mrs Beeton.
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