Book- The Crimson Petal and the White

This is a book that I should have loved. A huge sprawling novel...set in Victorian England, mainly London...involving the different classes, a wealthy family, the Rackhams, and the lower classes, embodied in the main character Sugar. And to top off its appeal to me, Sugar is a prostitute, so there is sure to be lots of sex in the book...in fact, many reviews about the book talk about its eroticism.

I should have loved this book, but I didn't. I did not hate it, to be fair, but never embraced it at all, not really once through its 900 pages. Sugar is a prostitute in the lower depths of 1850's London, and she is known for doing "anything" for her clients. And that brings William Rackham to her...he is the son of a perfumer who has a pretty good business going. William does not want anything to do with the business until he meets Sugar. When he gets involved with her, he decides he wants more money so he can keep her for his own mistress, so throws himself into the business, taking over for his older father.

Rackham has a wife at home, half mad when we first meet her, and totally crazy by the end of the book. And a neglected daughter.

For me there was no emotional connection to any of these characters, and part of that was the style of narration the author, Michael Faber, starts off with. His narrator in third person omniscient, and when I say omniscient, I mean it. Comments from the narrator like, "Things like this may not seem shocking nowadays, but back in this time period, they were quite shocking," and "Now we will leave this character because they are no longer of interest to this story, and follow this new character because they concern us," kept me emotional distant. he drops this narration style about 200 pages in, but by that time the damage is done (though he uses it on the last page once again).

And I never really felt like I knew the characters. Their actions never quite made sense to me. Sugar is placed in a house all on her own, with a great allowance. Now one of the things that set Sugar off from the other whores of London was that she was well read and could converse with her clients on literature and the arts, etc. So she has all this, but decides to become the Rackham's governess, pretty much giving up any material gains she had made. It did not make sense, and I don't think Faber made the case for her making that decision emotionally either.

And that is the thing...you can buy it if a character does something that does not make common sense if it make emotional sense, but when it fails on both those levels, the story fails. And that is what happens in this book for me. There is never enough common or emotional sense for the decisions these characters make throughout this long story.

The Crimson Petal and the White can paint a great backdrop of London in this era...the grime and the grit, as well as the upper crust gilt. But the backdrop cannot fill the emotional void I felt from these characters. I do not think there was one character that I felt was well rounded and filled in emotionally, and took actions that made emotional sense for who they were. The back drop, though skillful, cannot make up for that.

I was disappointed in this book.