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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Maybe this is part of Faber's point, a comment on how characters can get swallowed up in the panoramic style of novel writing. If that were the case, then Faber would need to show them more compassion. He would need to put us inside their skins, and he has already warned us not to expect this; in the scheme of his novel we are aliens.
At times "The Crimson Petal and the White" reads like an alien abduction in reverse. It is us, the aliens, who are whisked into the world of the specimens we are studying and made to remain quietly at the edges of the story observing. It is as if Faber has placed the whole of Victorian London under an enormous bell jar. The characters in this novel are not controlled by the interaction of fate and personality that precipitates the tragedies of, say, Thomas Hardy's novels. They are controlled by their creator's whims, his determination to show us that nothing good can be expected from anyone who lived in such a time.
This, I realize, is a hell of a way to write about a novel you admire. I can't deny that I was fascinated by "The Crimson Petal and the White" and -- one very serious flaw notwithstanding -- the book succeeds as a read. But I don't know when I have read a novel that so consciously sets out to chastise the reader for desiring the very things that led him or her to pick it up in the first place.
The book's main figure is Sugar, a prostitute who has risen above the squalor of the streets, whose appearance in a gentleman's guidebook to bordellos guarantees her a more moneyed class of client. That's exactly what she finds in Sir William Rackham, the heir to a perfume fortune who, obsessed with the desire to keep Sugar all to himself, agrees to join the family business he has previously shunned. Guided by Sugar's sharp business sense, Rackham embraces the role of capitalist wholeheartedly, earning enough to live with a retinue of servants and to keep Sugar in her very own cozy London hideaway.
But when Sugar feels too distant from William, and decides she wants to live with him, she agrees to give up her hideaway and become a member of the Rackham household as governess to William's child, Sophie. That move brings her in contact with Agnes, William's wife, who in best Victorian madwoman fashion is living the life of invalid recluse, shunning her own daughter and indulging delusions fed by the spiritualist tracts she devours on the sly.
And as far as the plot goes, that's largely it. There is a subplot involving William's pious brother Henry and his inability to declare his love for his closest friend, the widow Mrs. Emmeline Fox, who has scandalized the other women of her class by working at a society to aid prostitutes, journeying into the streets and even to the bordellos to talk to these women.
On both levels, the scheme of the book is pretty plain and consistent; it's about the conflict between the propriety of Victorian England and the desires that go against that propriety. But the larger context here exists almost by accident, deriving from what we know of the times rather than from what Faber has put on the page. He stays so insistently inside the residence of William Rackham, or the various places Sugar calls home, or the cluttered and increasingly squalid middle-class residence of Emmeline Fox, that the outside world barely exists. The churches, taverns, brothels and music halls the characters occasionally visit feel like distant satellites instead of places belonging to the same world as the main action.
Faber is not really interested in the workings of William's business (which is all right; as Orwell pointed out, Dickens wasn't interested in the particulars of business either), but there is also no reference to the politics or the military adventures of the time, and only the barest nod to the social institutions. By making the two major female characters writers (Agnes is a diarist given to recording both domestic minutiae and ramblings in which she envisions herself as a spiritual martyr; Sugar works on an epic pulp guignol about a prostitute who exacts grisly revenge on all the men who used her) Faber may intend to indicate that these characters are not given to looking outside themselves. But they are not the ones writing the book.
