The Crimson Petal and the White
Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st  century,"The Crimson Petal and the Whiteis anything but Victorian. The  story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours  composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling  second novel dares to go where George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Flossand the  works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices  that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about  the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she  can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the  perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial  security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and  hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led  as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment  of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on  class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that  Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The  language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward  opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage  performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving  sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the  house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and  subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its  pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages,The Crimson  Petal and the Whiteturns out to be a quick read, since it is truly  impossible to put down.--Regina Marler