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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Praised by critics as an erotic Victorian page-turner, this literary hit is addictive, it's true -- but its attitude toward sex is disturbing.
Oct 21, 2002 | We kid ourselves that at a certain point we're mature enough to stop judging books by their covers; but when it comes to Victorian novels, there's no denying we judge them by their thickness. What readers crave above all from Victorian novels (and I define them as both novels written in 19th-century Britain and novels that simply take place in that era) is a long, luxuriant reading experience that allows us to sink into the atmosphere, to lose ourselves in a wealth of character and incident.
Above all, we want to relish the past we're reading about as if we were savoring a travelogue. No matter how critical a Victorian novel may be of the society or the mores of the time, such novels play openly on our desire to wallow in both the opulence and poverty of the Victorians' world -- all from the cushy remove of our armchairs. And so many novelists often wind up fetishizing the period they have set out to criticize, using words as plush as the production values in a costume movie.
At 848 pages, Michel Faber's bestselling, critically acclaimed "The Crimson Petal and the White" certainly satisfies our longing to heft a doorstop into our lap when we pick up a Victorian novel. Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, called it a "big, sexy, bravura novel" that "has unpretentiously revived the spirit of the era's broad, socially conscious narrative tableaus," and Entertainment Weekly compared its author to Dickens. The novel has generally been received as old-fashioned 19th-century storytelling combined with 21st-century erotic frankness.
Faber, however, is not out to indulge our fantasies, and from the beginning he puts us on alert that he is not using Victorian England to charm us. In the first paragraph, the unnamed narrator states flatly, "You have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and another place altogether."
It's a very sly opening, one that means to lure us in by shutting us out. Faber works like a sinister figure who appears in the London fog and beckons to us while standing behind a "No Trespassing" sign. From the start, he castigates the very fetishization that other novelists have catered to. "Let's not be coy," says the narrator. "You were hoping I'd satisfy all the desires you're too shy to name, or at least show you a good time." If any flattering is being done here, it's Faber flattering himself. "When you first picked me up, you didn't fully appreciate the size of me, nor did you expect that I would grip you so tightly, so fast." As a novelist's expression of faith in his ability to snare us, that sentence is breathtaking in its arrogance. Faber has the audacity to include it before he's even begun his story.
But it isn't boasting if you do what you claim to do, and there's no pretending that Faber doesn't grip us. From the start "The Crimson Petal and the White" draws us in, at every opportunity rubbing our nose in the misery of the poor, the arrogance of the rich, the sexual repression of the time and the self-loathing of both the men who gave in to their repressed desires and the women who made a trade out of servicing them. It keeps that hold on us for all its length. If the cardinal sin of writing is being boring, then Faber must be judged to have a spotless soul.
And yet how he keeps that hold on us is, I confess, a mystery to me. There is nothing epic about "The Crimson Petal and the White" except its size. Wealth of character? Forget it. There are exactly four main characters, and two substantive supporting characters. The rest -- prostitutes, servants, bon vivants -- enter the action only when they're needed, and then as little more than spear carriers who've graduated to two- or three-line speaking parts. As for the story, it's nothing that couldn't be reasonably reduced to 200 or 300 pages.
