Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Watch your steps.  Keep your wits about you; you will need them.  This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before.  You may imagine from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flatter you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is you are an alien from another time and place altogether...

Picking up books abandoned in cafes, hotels and guesthouses seems to be an excellent practice.  Doing so has led me to several books I would never have bought, never have even noticed in a shop, including this strange one, and this stranger one.  This time, I was in a guesthouse in Granada, Spain and, having finished the spectacular Spanish novel I brought with me to read on my travels, I rummaged about the common room in search of something to read.  The only English-language book in the place was a massive thing with a fairly gaudy title, The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.  It hardly looked like something of interest, but just as I must eat daily, so too, I must read, so I picked up my cup of tea, and opened the cover.

The writing of this epic is so lively, so humorous and dark and compelling (and sexy -- at times very sexy) that I was rapidly drawn into the story, and its setting of 19th-century London.  The book begins with a string of red herrings, following characters for a few pages and then dropping them just as they become interesting (somewhat in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler), so that it is not immediately clear who the book will really be about. Until we meet Sugar, so utterly, clearly, magnetically the star. We find her as a prostitue in the foulest slums of London, but it is clear form her intelligence, and equally from her naked and unabashed ambition, that she will fight her way out of them with any means she can.

This is a book about prostitution, about industry and guts and sex, about the relationship of power and money, and it handles all these subjects masterfully, but it is also a book about writing.  Several of the characters spend time writing texts of various sorts.  Of course, this being a period piece, there is considerable letter writing, but there are also books being written by characters major and minor, none more significant than the violent revenge-fantasy-pseudo-autobiography Sugar is writing, titled "The Fall and Rise of Sugar."

The style of narration is unlike that of any other novel I have read. The narrator acknowledges from the start (quoted above) that we are modern people, reading a book set over a hundred years before we have lived. This anonymous, omniscience narrator speaks directly to the reader, offering to take our hand, to guide us through this unfamiliar and dangerous world, at one point even breaking in to say:

If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.

And, indeed, there is.  The book as a whole is thick with emotion, evoking disgust as often as sympathy and more rich with unsympathetic characters than likable ones.  But I dare you to start it, and then try to stop.