The Crimson Petal and the White

Goodreads tells me that I added The Crimson Petal and the White to my shelves in April 2011. That was when I bought a copy of the ebook (probably for a couple of quid at most) and since then it's sat ignored on my kindle. This is just one of those books that I know is there, but have no desire to actually pick up and read. Well, I'll get around to it one day.... Now I don't know how I am going to pick up my next book, as I'm still too immersed in this one. It seems odd to say that an 800+ book finished too quickly but, in this case, I sped through the pages in less than 5 days and didn't want it to end.

What makes this novel so brilliant is the fact that the experience of reading it was truly like travelling back in time to the 19th century. Faber's descriptions of Victorian London are detailed and haunting, but more than that, Faber cleverly uses the voice of a narrator, who takes us on a tour of the London's streets and into the most vulnerable moments of people's lives. Seeing the everyday lives of the characters unravel, shift and change brought up many interesting aspects of Victorian life: extreme poverty, limited access to sanitation and health care, views on gender, poor understanding on mental health and the social expectations of each social class. This is most definitely a character driven rather than a plot drive novel. I very rarely sympathise with characters in fiction so deeply and feel so sad about leaving them at the end of the book. This is not to say that they were “good” and right in their actions. In fact I'd say none of them were, but everything they thought and did was understandable. All the main characters (Sugar, Agnes, William, Henry, Emmeline, even Sophie) I felt went through their own character development, which is very rarely done for so many characters, and even the secondary characters (Caroline, Colonel Leek, Clara, Lady Bridgelow, Mrs Castaway etc.) were individual and detailed.

To add my point of view about the ending, which seems to be unpopular with many readers: I was very satisfied with it. I felt it kept to the feel of the rest of the novel, that this was all just snippets of these individual's lives. There is no ending to the story, because whatever happens life goes on for better and for worse.

I think one of reasons I put off reading this for so long is that I was afraid that it would be a simple, dragged out romance. In fact, there was very little love between the characters. On the whole, most of the characters are simply looking out for themselves, trying to make their own lives better no matter how difficult that may be.

Often books this long can be rather intimating before they are started. Maybe it would have taken me even longer to get around to reading it, if I owned the physical door-stopper copy rather than a digital ebook. This novel, full of life and with not a single moment that drags or seems unnecessary, reminds me just how much that longer novels can be truly fantastic when you're completely immersed in their world.

There's a great 500-600 page novel in these 900-plus pages. I enjoyed parts of it very much, but in his zeal to mimic the Victorian writers Faber commits the same mistake many of them made in going on and on endlessly. And Faber doesn't have the excuse of getting paid by the word. Pity, because much of this is excellent, but it wears out its welcome, hammering its themes home with relentless, verbose repetitiveness. It could have been great, but falls short due to its author's inability to just stop.

Despite it being a weighty tome, you don't feel like you are reading one. Faber keeps your attention, though I had to go back and re-read certain passages to keep up with the plot. I have given it four stars, as the ending irritated me a lot. Worth the read, and will be re-reading it in the future.