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Flesh tones
Michel Faber ups the ante on Dickens
BY CLEA SIMON

The Crimson Petal and the White
By Michel Faber. Harcourt, 838 pages, $26.


Imagine if Charles Dickens had lived in less-censorious times. Would he have depicted the ravages of poverty — the early aging, the alcoholism and disease — in more graphic terms? Or would fear of losing his readership have kept his poor pure, their sufferings noble?

Trudging through the same slums, Michel Faber has no such fear, nor any of Dickens’s lingering sentimentality. In the late Victorian London of The Crimson Petal and the White, Faber’s engulfing new novel, every sort of depravity available is presented — from child prostitution to invasive (and misogynistic) medical practices — with a level of detail Dickens could only dream about. It’s a world where passersby " dawdle to examine a blood spill " and a woman’s skull hides a tumor " the size of a quail’s egg. " Even his putative protagonist, a particularly talented and well-read prostitute named Sugar, " suffers from an unusually generalized psoriasis, which in places crosses the diagnostic line into a rare and more spectacular condition called ichthyosis. "

Far from recoiling from such horrors, Faber’s characters revel in them, or at least his wealthy ones do. Their city is the playground portrayed in " More Sprees in London, " a publication detailing brothels’ specialties, where the " Great Flatelli " farts well-known airs for a cheering music-hall audience. Sugar’s keeper, the perfume manufacturer William Rackham, even regards her skin disorder as an aesthetic enhancement — " tiger stripes " — appropriate to such an exotic pet.

Sugar and her colleagues, however, see life differently. After days of cold, nights of slimy sheets, and hours seeking customers while strolling through streets studded with feces, they dream of warmth, clean beds, and ample food. Sugar, despite her rave write-up in " More Sprees, " also fantasizes about revenge: she works, in secret, on a bloodthirsty manuscript, a novel of murderous payback that makes even the rest of The Crimson Petal and the White blush.

Through his own conceit, then, is Faber a whore, using ink and paper to exact vengeance on a heartless world? A lesser author might make it so, turning Sugar’s strange rise and defiant intellect into revenge against the establishment. Besides, this book, like hers, would make a considerable weapon (at 838 pages, a useful bludgeon). But Faber resists all such temptation. For with all its terrors, its abundant physicality and richness of plot, The Crimson Petal is a marvel, an engaging whale of a novel that carries on where Emma Donahue’s Slammerkin and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, among recent novels, left off in updating picaresque conventions. Though Faber’s victimized women (including Rackham’s wife, the unstable Agnes) command our attention, his sympathies are more general. Others beside Sugar solicit our concern.

What interests Faber, instead, are the interfaces between these worlds. Wealth enjoys itself on poverty, which gets its own back by seeking payment and returning disease. Women and men share moments of truce before rebounding off into their own delusions. Perception battles perception, even within an individual, as when religion and lust duel for the soul of William’s beleaguered brother, Henry. Throughout, the solidity of the flesh — its rotting, spoiled, luscious corporeality — is set in contrast with the mutability of emotion and fate itself.

This infatuation with the flesh in all its gory detail is not new to Faber. In his first novel, 2000’s vaguely sci-fi Under the Skin, creatures mutilated themselves to appear human, with horrific results. Here the bodies are definitely, defiantly human, but nothing beyond their flesh is solid. Agnes, in her growing madness, understands this fluidity. Against reason, she " doesn’t believe in any such thing as a dream. In her philosophy, there are events that happen when one is awake, and others that happen when one is sleeping. "

It’s an ambiguity Faber capitalizes on throughout the massive novel: a character has a vision of his own fleshy heaven, or perhaps he is merely overcome by smoke. Another is freed from her cruel and lonely life, but does she end up safe in the country or is hers the corpse pulled nude from the river? A third exits in a carriage, bleeding — perhaps fatally — and another is carried off, away from all she’s known. Even Sugar at the last rushes to an uncertain future, a final encounter with a coachman possibly sabotaging her flight into another life. What is certain, then? The cold of night, the wet of the river, and the heat of bodies; nothing more.

Issue Date: September 19 - 26, 2002
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