The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

What a delightful book. Michel Faber is a prose master and a crackerjack storyteller, for sure.

This 2002 best selling novel bears many similarities to classic Victorian novels, such as those written by Dickens or Thackery. Its setting is 19th century London; it directly addresses the reader, as do many 18th and 19th century novels; it features a large cast of characters, from the lower to the upper classes; it is told in a leisurely and detailed manner and is very long, almost 900 pages. It is markedly different, however, in that it is very modernly realistic--Victorian England as it really was, in all its grit and glory.

The central character, the prostitute Sugar, is so extraordinarily well described and developed that she steps off the page. Introduced into the life of prostitution by her own mother when she is a young teen, she becomes an expert whore, all the while writing a novel featuring gruesome revenge on the male sex. When she becomes the favorite of a rising manufacturing magnate, it becomes possible that she might be able to rise from the squalor of her background.

Other characters--Sugar's good-hearted prostitute friend, her egotistical lover, his mad wife, his neglected daughter, and his confused but pious brother--are equally well rendered and lifelike.

Some readers may be disappointed at the open-end conclusion, but I would submit that nothing else would have been suitable given the realistic nature of the narrative. Victorian novels customarily ended with a tying up of all the stories, but this novel is not based in romanticism. Faber allows readers to imagine for themselves the ultimate fates of the characters, supplying their own "happily-ever-after" or more realistic outcome.

Don't be at all daunted by the length of the book; it flows so easily and is so impossible to put down that it can be read in record time, I assure you.

I would also recommend Faber's recent novel, The Book of Strange New Things, which is completely different in style and content but equally well done.