The Crimson Petal and the White
This exquisitely written, searingly graphic, often hilarious but fundamentally flawed portrayal of life and loves in Regency London, I had looked forward to reading for months. I would take it out of my bookshelf and sniff the pristine pages. It was a beautifully produced volume.
It proved to be a massive disappointment. There were three gigantic flaws in what could otherwise have been an epic tale. The first concerned characterisation. When a novel is written in the third person, it is expected of the author that he or she will enter the heads of all the characters, especially the main characters, at regular intervals and tell us what it is they are thinking and feeling, what motivates them to do what they do; rather than leave it up to us to speculate, much as each individual character must of every other character.
The joy of reading a well crafted novel is to be able to enter everyone’s head simultaneously and therefore to know more than anyone else. This is what Michael Faber singularly fails to enable us to do. He begins well, with graphic descriptions not only of circumstance but of what his characters think of their circumstances. Each individual grows in meaningfulness as the story progresses. That is, until his well rounded touch vanishes, and what had once been a collection of marvellously three dimensional characters interacting with each other becomes a confused melee where those same characters suddenly lose entire sides to their personalities.
For an author to repeatedly fail to divulge aspects of a character’s thought processes that cause them to act in certain ways, when those actions have a pivotal bearing on the unfolding of the story, strikes me as remiss in the extreme.
The second major flaw is the sudden, unexpected and largely unexplained events that occur, turning the story on its head, again and again, for no discernible reason. A nonsensical death, an equally nonsensical recovery from certain death, a ludicrous, never explained disappearance, absurd changes in circumstance, inexplicable behaviour; the list is endless.
The third flaw concerns the end of the story. In its way, it is a neat reversal of the hopes and fears of everyone involved, including the reader: but it is not so much that it was manifestly not the end I wanted, but that it was not the end I believed any of the characters wanted either, even though they appeared to engineer it, that makes me fault it. The impression I got was that each individual in the book became less and less his or her own person as the story progressed and more and more a puppet for the acting out of a convoluted, and ultimately absurd plot that, if they had been left to their own devices, would not have come about.
This left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. Characters who I felt I had grown to know in intimate detail, and would have trusted not to behave in certain ways, suddenly began acting strangely. Since I wasn’t privy to the thought processes that had led to such a change, I felt this wasn’t simply irritating, it verged on the irresponsible. The impression it gave me was of a group of individuals with painstakingly drawn, solid, well defined traits, suddenly behaving confusedly, as if they had overdosed on medication, or had personality breakdowns, but with no indication given to suggest why - or, indeed, that - this had occurred.
Although I loved Michael Faber’s acute turns of phrase, his marvellous, evocative enthusiasm for his subject matter, his extraordinary erudition, and the rollicking energy of his potentially great story, sadly he spoils the effect by leaving vast chunks of his characters thoughts unheard and behaviour unexplained, repeatedly trips over the intricacies of his own plot, and finally, falls flat on his face in the mire he so accurately describes.
What a colossal disappointment!
April 10th, 2007 at
I couldn’t agree more with your thoughts - they are my thoughts exactly. I have just finished this book and am thoroughly disappointed in the directionless shambles Faber made of the last third of the story. To have devoted so much time to reading this book and to have been so poorly rewarded makes me feel more screwed than Sugar ever was. I would throw the book across the room but won’t for fear this 900 page brick will break something.
April 10th, 2007 at
I was in India when I read the book. I gave it to a beach hawker after I had finished reading it, and she used it as a door stop to the small hut she and her husband lived in. Even a year afterwards, it still enrages me that the author could have cocked his story up so badly.