by JULIET WATERS

“Watch your step” the narrator of The Crimson Petal and the White tells us as he brings us to a street in Victorian London. “It’s an ashen hour of night, blackish-grey and almost readable like undisturbed pages of a burnt manuscript.” It’s a street “where people go to sleep not at a specific hour but when the gin takes effect, or when exhaustion will permit no further violence… where people wake when the opium in their babies’ sugar-water ceases to keep the little wretches under. Where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.”

A little over 800 pages later, this book will end on the same street with the image of a woman disappearing into the night, her body “blotted into the unreadable darkness.”

It’s appropriate that The Crimson Petal’s central villain, William Rackham, is the heir to a perfume business. Author Michel Faber uses smell often. We travel from the wretched streets of the first chapter, where “the sleet has left great gobs and trails of slush, like monstrous spills of semen,” to Regent street and its “overbearing stench of perfume and horse dung, freshly-baked cakes and old meat, burnt mutton fat and chocolate, roast chestnuts and dog piss,” to the relatively odourless house of Rackham, which near the end of the novel smells of “nothing much, except cigar-smoke in the study and porridge in the school-room.”

Moreover, the book reads like a magical distillation of 19th-century novels. To a base of Dickensian drama and squalor, Faber has added some torturous drops of Hardy, some smokey Bronte feminism, and a fruity high note of Trollope’s satire.

But the irresistible core of the novel is Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute. Though she has the body of a teenage boy, a terrible case of chronic eczema and a voice made hoarse one night by a customer with a knife, she’s already a legend when the novel begins. In something akin to the Rough Guide to Prostitution, Sugar is described as an “eager Devotee of every known Pleasure.” So taken with her talents and intelligence, Rackham makes her his mistress.

The Sugar Rackham knows is an accommodating, grateful slave to his endlessly raw ego. The Sugar we come to know is much more complex.

Is she a serial killer? In the novel she’s writing, The Rise and Fall of Sugar, there’s enough torture and murder to make the Marquis de Sade blanch. Is she a victim? Of relentless abuse, certainly. The madam of her house is her mother, who initiated her into prostitution by telling her a nice man was going to be getting into bed with her to keep her warm. But like many victims she’s turned her trauma into insatiable masochism. Is she an independent, wild heroine who will save herself from despair? On her good days. But she seems just as likely to undermine her survival.

Finally, is she the whore with a heart of gold? She tries, but sometimes with tragic results. One night she rescues Rackham’s wife, Agnes, who in true Victorian form, is going mad. When Sugar finds Agnes one night, alone and shivering in an alley, she forces an unwilling vendor to sell the shawl Agnes wears. But the vendor is killed within minutes for the money.

This incident is one in a large collection of horrifying miniatures of women’s lives. The Crimson Petal is filled with wonderful writing and terrible writing. Though, the bad writing is that of its characters: Sugar’s violent purge of a novel, Agnes’s deluded ramblings and Rackham’s moronic attempts as an essayist. Part of the novel’s hypnotic power, however, is that “unreadable darkness” that haunts it, the sea of small lives lost during that century, that Faber does much to commemorate. :

The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber,
Harper Flamingo, hc, 833pp, $39.95