The Crimson Petal and The White by Michael Faber
October 12th 2006 05:04
The Crimson Petal and The White By Michael Faber
Michael Faber is one of those guys(Jonathan Franzen and Philip Pullman are the others) who are regularly put up by the Brotherhood, zealously promoted and made into marquee stars even before you've registered their names. Faber is not quite there with Franzen or Pullman but he will be.
The blurb says that "is one of the most serious, and the funniest writers around." If The Guardian said that, it probably means that he is neither serious nor funny but is full of that juice which liberals are shot with through and through: bile. You can't call this novel bilious either. It's just plain boring.
The setting is turn-of-the-century Victorian England. Yeah, underneath all that prim stiff-necked, moral-spewing façade, there was a lot of dirt. I read somewhere that there were, hold your breath, at least 6000 prostitutes operating in London. Oh, dear! The hypocrisy of that don't-show-your-ankle age.
A certain section of intelligentsia has never stopped chest-beating even 100 years after the Dreadful Age has passed. The success of A French Lieutenant's Woman, another boring book turned into a classic attests to this fact. But, that novel arrived in the seventies. There is no justification for another rehash of the same thing to be promoted so aggressively nearly thirty years afterwards.
The Crimson Petal and The White is on the face of it a story dealing with the life of a young prostitute Sugar in the vile Victorian age. You are told she is spirited, sweet; OK, you have a ken for spirited sweet things, especially if they are prostitutes in Victorian England. But twenty pages into the novel, you wonder whether the author decided to read an entire shelf of Zola before sitting to write this one. This is not an original novel; it is an adaptation. Er, I mean, you take a nineteenth century open-your-eyes icon and do your own nineteenth century open-your-eyes take, substituing London for Paris. Seriously, no novel of Zola was this lengthy either.
After twenty-five pages, I am not feeling the rage against the system or the compassion for the victims I am supposed to feel, just boredom and wonder when this lengthy dreck of a book will finish. Or is that a too-bourgeoisie emotion to feel?
| 59 |
| Vote |
