The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Canongate £17.99, pp835
Hephzibah Anderson
Sun 29 Sep 2002 22.49 BST
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.
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber 864pp, Canongate, £17.99
Kathryn Hughes
Sat 28 Sep 2002 00.03 BST
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.
‘Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have never been here before.’
So begins Michel Faber’s epic story about a prostitute called Sugar who rises through the ranks of society in Victorian London.
From Bram Stoker to Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist selects the best writing about a subject 'central to much of our lives and indeed life itself'
Rowan Somerville Wed 15 Dec 2010 12.21 GMT
Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her, described by the Economist as "deceptively simple in plot and singularly musical in its voice, it is a study of the place where our past has become our present. A summer read to be kept – and visited in the dark days of winter..." Last month, the novel followed authors including John Updike and Norman Mailer in winning the Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award.
"Most adults are interested in sex. I am. My father was, and said as much to me when he was 92. I suspect that you are too. You're reading this after all. Being so central to much of our lives and indeed life itself, it is a valid and important topic for fiction.
"The challenge of writing about sex is to evoke the physicality, the yearning, the counterpoint between magnificent operatic grandiosity and ludicrous bestial grunting – without resorting to cliché. As the American author Elizabeth Benedict wrote: 'A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.' As an enthusiastic reader and a writer too, my opinion is that it doesn't matter how weird things get as long as it remains original and feels authentic.
"Some of the sex in the books below works as a device for revealing the state of society, some is a device for characterisation; a way of revealing truths about characters that they themselves may not be able to see – but most of it is just about desire, lust and sex itself."
Strange perhaps to begin this list with a book I really dislike – but churlish I feel to leave it out when it is such a reflection of contemporary views. Bleak, cold and mechanical, it's sex in a world without spirit with a faint possibility of redemption through heartless shagging.
A male fantasy of total female submission. It was hugely popular but also despised for its objectification of woman – the protagonist is called "O" – no more than a letter, a zero, an orifice. Half a century later it is discovered to be the work of a woman, Anne Desclos, who wrote not for publication but for the pleasure of her lover. It's fascinating: erotic, intense, in parts repellent, frequently pornographic and ultimately self-annihilating.
Aficionados the world over will laugh at my tentative and no doubt outdated steps into fiction about gay sex, but as a (so far) straight man this was my introduction. Beautiful language, powerful story; saucy too if you can let yourself go.
I bought this because it was meant to be disgusting and then found it to be much more than that. I was disappointed and later inspired – although it is pretty grubby. It was published by the Olympia Press – a Parisian publishing company specialising in erotica and the avant-garde. Five of the 10 books on this list were first published by this extraordinary house along with a host of classics such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer and The Ginger Man .
This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.
Has to go in. Since everything's already been said about this, let's hear from a great poet: "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/ And The Beatles' first LP." (Philip Larkin "Annus Mirabilis")
Short stories retelling traditional tales and uncovering the sexual politics within. Her sentences reclaim and radicalise patriarchal language: "her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks". Funny, original, and brilliant.
Unnerving, delicious, completely wrong, provocative, unbridled, surreal, graphically erotic, boundless and imaginative, indulgent and beautiful. What more can I say?
A work of art by our greatest living writer. The 19th century seen through a fiercely modern cinematic lens. Faber tears the gauze and the drawers off Victorian England with his skilful prose and virtuoso structure. Behold the wonderful heroine Sugar – complex, flaky of skin, keen of mind – ready to do what no one else will. A big book in every sense. Essential.
Although about a sociopath's utterly self-serving "love" for a minor this is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. The force of the writing is unparalleled. The balance of humour and horror, sex and satire, irony and delusion is extraordinary, and to me, without flaw. Just as the narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert seduces Lolita through deceit and thus reveals himself, so we too are seduced, deceived and revealed to ourselves with an artistry and uncompromising cruelty that is an appropriate and profoundly moral commentary on society.
Narrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters
Paraic O’Donnell Wed 7 Nov 2018 10.00 GMT
I
n historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.
For one thing, the 19th century – the Regency and Victorian eras, in other words – remains vastly overrepresented. In an informal 2013 survey by the Historical Novel Society, it accounted for almost 30% of that year’s titles, second only to the 20th in popularity, and with almost as large a share as all other eras put together. What accounts for this enduring fascination? Proximity plays a part, naturally, and the richness of the documentary record probably doesn’t hurt either. Empires need prodigious bureaucracies, and if there’s one thing the Victorians were spectacularly good at, it was writing things down.
For my part – well, I won’t lie. Some of it comes down to aesthetics. In The House on Vesper Sands, I wanted to dramatise wickedness and secrecy. For that you need darkness, snow and plenty of orphans. More high-mindedly, I wanted to rehabilitate the Victorian sensation novel, in which – long before the modernists thought of it – the author’s own trickery is playfully advertised. In other words – and each of the books I’ve chosen reflects this in one way or another – the Victorians didn’t just perfect the English novel. They made it self-aware.
While literary critics have occasionally embraced historical fiction, academic literary theorists have taken a harder line. They take a dim view of representing things generally, but especially of representing the past. This novel isn’t just aware of all this; it gleefully writes it into the plot. Its intricate parallel narratives involve a pair of fusty academics who discover both a secret affair between two Victorian poets and a hesitant passion of their own. The resulting novel (or rather, “romance”, both in the literary sense and the usual one) manages to be both extravagantly learned and utterly charming.
2. Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (2014)
Since this novel’s appearance in 2014, Moss’s star has rightfully risen. Bodies of Light deserves consideration alongside her finest work, and exhibits her peculiar gift for slipping among disparate settings (from Greenland to the Outer Hebrides) while maintaining unusual strands of continuity. Here again she is preoccupied with motherhood and the fragility of the self, and while her Victorian foray begins with the unearthing of infant bones, she is always digging into the human soul, including – or so it can often seem – the reader’s own.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002)
This justly celebrated reinvention of the Dickensian novel is not so much a reboot as a kick in the arse. Unlike Dickens, Faber has no time for the sanctified waif or the virtuous simpleton. As in Bleak House, we are introduced first to the city itself, with a warning that we must start at the very bottom. In Faber’s London, the fog hides nothing and the veils are all drawn back. Here a prostitute squats unceremoniously over her bowl to scour herself, while outside the blood runs among the cobbles “like a winding crimson weed”.
Lesbian love story primer ... Elaine Cassidy (left) and Sally Hawkins in the 2005 TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Photograph: BBC/Sally Head Productions
4. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)
A landmark of lesbian fiction, this suffered the unusual fate of becoming famous for the wrong reasons. The novel’s central love story should never be whitewashed, but it spawned a cottage industry of softcore Victoriana that overshadowed its author’s virtuosity. With its loveable rogues and dastardly schemes, Fingersmith has all the elements of the worst kind of knockabout pastiche, yet what Waters fashions from them is almost miraculous. From intricate plotting to exquisitely subtle observation, she is that rare prodigy: an author who is good at everything. Like her heroine, Sue, we see as a small child does “what I had never seen before – how the world was made up”.
Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles of the film version of Oscar and Lucinda.
5. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The unlikely love story that begins when Lucinda Leplastrier encounters Oscar Hopkins on a ship bound for Australia has become one of the most cherished of recent times. Yet it is a love story, Carey has confessed, that he ended up writing almost by mistake. Instead, the novel’s glittering and unforgettable central motif, a glass church floating on a river, had struck Carey as crystallising (if you will) Pascal’s notion of religious belief as a grand gamble. Oscar is an inveterate gambler, of course, but if he accepts Lucinda’s bet out of compulsion, agreeing to transport her fragile edifice into the remote outback, his persistence in this harebrained undertaking has given us one of literature’s most monumental acts of love.
6. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)
Atwood has always given us big ideas, but she hasn’t always shown as much interest in people. Alias Grace is as much a novel of ideas as any she has written, but is centred for once on a transfixing study of character. Grace Marks was a real (and notorious) historical character, an Irish maid convicted in 1843 of a brutal double murder. While brilliantly dramatising the Victorian urge to medicalise femininity, this novel dignifies its central character even as it wrings from the question of her guilt a merciless degree of suspense.
Michael Caine and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan/AP
7. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
Christopher Nolan’s darkly glamorous film version made this the best known of Priest’s books. While it did justice to the novel’s duelling Victorian stage magicians, it jettisoned its contemporary framing and, in doing so, much of its psychological subtlety. In Priest’s original telling, the historical rivals are discovered by a down-on-his-luck writer named Andrew Westley. As the magicians stalk one another, each maddened by the mystery of the other’s “prestige” (or trick), Westley is haunted by a phantom twin, and it is the reader who must discover the true nature of the illusion.
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013)
Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, this novel transports us not to the midst of Victoria’s reign but to the very periphery of her possessions, a disparity that Catton’s immense novel ingeniously exploits. Taking on the guise of a genteel pastiche, its customs seem familiar at first, but we soon find ourselves in unmapped territory. The intricate plot (involving a vanished prospector, a missing fortune and an ailing prostitute) is absorbing but becomes almost incidental, with Catton’s fiendish use of omniscient perspective purporting to show us everything while keeping us artfully in the dark.
9. Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge (1998)
Shortlisted for the Booker prize five times, it was not until after her death in 2010 thatBainbridge was finally honoured with a specially created award. Although it was chosen from among her novels by a popular vote, Master Georgie is one of Bainbridge’s most challenging and austere works. Indeed, she herself remarked that most people needed to read it three times before they understood it. She may have been right. With its carefully modulated perspectives and slyly observed details, this refracted Bildungsroman follows a young surgeon’s almost helpless progress towards the muck and depravity of the Crimean war, and it reveals new and brilliant facets no matter how often you come back to it.
10. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (2009)
Set in Epping Forest in 1840, The Quickening Maze examines the unlikely circumstances that brought the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson into brief conjunction. Clare’s alcoholism and declining artistic fortunes have brought him to High Beach Asylum, while the young and untested Tennyson, a guest of the asylum-keeper, is so self-absorbed that he scarcely notices the amorous attentions of his host’s young daughter. Animating such looming and disparate figures could have made for heavy going, but Foulds gives them human scale and careful shading, illuminating all he touches with his swift and shimmering prose.
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard – review
A national obsession in Norway, this autobiographical epic is somewhat indigestible
Michel Faber
Wed 25 April 2012
T
he corpse in A Death in the Family belongs to the author's father, and this book – marketed as fiction, but obviously memoir – is the first instalment of a six-volume fictionalised autobiography that has been phenomenally successful in Norway. The series has been bought by almost half a million of the country's five million inhabitants, necessitating some workplaces to declare "Knausgaard-free days" on which employees were cajoled to talk about something else.
