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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Faber's relentlessly inward vision may explain the book's disgusted preoccupation with sex. Clearly part of what he wants to avoid here is using Sugar's profession to titillate his readers in the manner of high-end "erotica" and period-piece porn. He is grimly determined not to fall into the fantasy of the prostitute who enjoys her work.
That determination was present in another recent period novel, Emma Donoghue's "Slammerkin," the story of a teenage prostitute in the 1760s. The voice Donoghue found in that novel sounded like one of Sandy Denny's ancient English ballads that had been invaded by the rage of the riot grrls. It was a voice entirely in keeping with the experience of her heroine. Certainly, disgust with sex has a place in the story Faber tells. The fictional deaths Sugar metes out in her novel are the products of her own rage at being used, and you'd expect self-loathing from William for giving in to his physical desires (though with a half-mad wife, you can scarcely blame him).
But Faber lays the disgust on so thickly that it breaks the bounds of both his story and the characters. He is preoccupied with describing sperm: It appears as "warm gruel" squirting down a prostitute's throat; mixed with urine as "the germs of another man's offspring" pouring into a chamber pot; crusted on skin and genitals and bedsheets. The blunt language Faber uses in his sex scenes, language that in the 19th century could only have been used in pornography, is another of Faber's alienation devices, meant to break the decorum we associate with Victorian novels and convey the book's animalistic view of sex as nothing more than probing and grunting and spurting.
Fair enough, though Faber doesn't leave it at that. He feels compelled almost always to add a flourish, like describing the stink of a used chamber pot under Sugar's bed. The first time William stays with Sugar he wets the bed. The crowning touch in Faber's encompassing vision of the corruption of the flesh is that Sugar suffers from psoriasis (of course Faber describes the patches of red, flaky skin ready to come off). It's an almost biblical affliction: not the word made flesh but the sin made flesh -- painful, itching flesh. And it's echoed in Sugar's recurring refrain, "God damn God and all his Creation."
But the totality of this element of the book begins to feel less like a reflection of the character's consciousness than like Faber's own preoccupation. How are we to react when Sugar, bathing little Sophie, compares the child's freshly powdered pudenda to the white of a whore's made-up face? Compare any of the sex scenes in "The Crimson Petal and the White" to the scene in John Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman" where the hero makes a disastrous visit to a young prostitute. Fowles doesn't stint on the misery of the girl's life, and the sexual excitement his hero feels vies constantly with his repulsion throughout the scene. But it's a scene that Fowles contains within the scheme and narrative of his novel.
In fact that book is perhaps the most fitting comparison to "The Crimson Petal and the White." Fowles' novel is as much a pastiche as Faber's. And his techniques for alienating readers from their preconceptions about the era go far beyond anything Faber attempts; in one scene Fowles himself appears as a character in a railway car contemplating his hero. Yet the world Fowles creates is a bigger, and finally a more believable one than Faber's. Faber, who worked on this book through 21 years and four drafts (publishing another novel and collection of short stories in the meantime), re-creates Victorian London in order to seal it off. Fowles re-creates it in order to open a passage from our time to the past. (That is also part of what A.S. Byatt is up to in "Possession.") The final effect of "The Crimson Petal and the White" is of a cathedral built to display a dollhouse.
But while the book is damnably irritating, it is never less than compelling. Judging it solely as a read, the only complaint I would lodge against it is that the lack of incident makes the sudden rush of events toward the end of the book seem uncharacteristically melodramatic. A larger problem is that the story does not conclude but simply stops, which can make you feel like a bit of chump for investing so much time in it. It's as if, among all the other pleasures of the Victorian novel Faber is out to debunk, a satisfyingly rounded narrative is yet another.
I don't know when I've read a novel that divided my sympathies as much as this one does, engaging me on a narrative level while at the same time leaving me asking, "And? And?" There's no doubt that "The Crimson Petal and the White" is an achievement or that Faber is an ambitious and talented writer. The book is a compelling perversity: a long, detailed Victorian novel from someone who doesn't appear to like Victorian novels, who distrusts everything that would make a reader want to pick up "The Crimson Petal and White" to begin with.
