AUTHOR: Michael Faber
STARTED: July 27, 2010
FINISHED: August 20, 2010
PAGES: 901
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: Watch your step.
SUMMARY: [From Amazon.com
] Faber's bawdy, brilliant third novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era's secrets and social hypocrisy. William Rackham is a restless, rebellious spirit, mistrustful of convention and the demands of his father's perfume business. While spying on his sickly wife's maid, whom he suspects of thievery, he begins a slow slide into depravity: he meets Sugar, a whore whose penetrating mind and love of books intrigues him as much as her beauty and carnal skills do. Faber (Under the Skin) also weaves in the stories of Agnes, William's delicate, mad and manipulative wife, and Henry, his pious, morally conflicted brother, both of whom seek escape from their private prisons through fantasies and small deceptions. Sin and vice both attract and repel the brothers: William, who becomes obsessed with Sugar, rescues her from her old life, while Henry, paralyzed by his love for Emmeline Fox, a comely widow working to rescue the city's prostitutes, slowly unravels. Faber's central characters, especially the troubled William and the ambitious Sugar, shine with life, and the author is no less gifted in capturing the essence of his many minor characters-the evil madam, Mrs. Castaway, and William's pompous father-in-law, Lord Unwin. The superb plot draws on a wealth of research and briskly moves through the lives of each character-whether major or minor, upstairs or downstairs-gathering force until the fates of all are revealed. A marvelous story of erotic love, sin, familial conflicts and class prejudice, this is a deeply entertaining masterwork that will hold readers captive until the final page. THOUGHTS: Holy epic door stop of a novel, Batman. This sucker was huge. It single-handedly kept me from reading anything else during my beach vacation. Lucky for me, I liked the story.
A 900 page book is a rather tough thing to review because so much occurs. The novel is entirely character driven with a rather whimsical narrator telling the story. In this book, there is no major plot question to solve, no dastardly villian to fight, or happy ending to root for - it's a long story about people. I've never read anything quite like it, so I was shocked how easy it was to fall into the text.
In this book, Faber tells a story about a prostitute named Sugar and her "benefactor," William Rackham. While that is main plot line, there is so much else going on. You learn about the all people they come in touch with including Rackhams wife and friends, Sugar's fellow prositutes, and a host of servants and other day-to-day people. Characters seemed to sprout left and right from this novel and they all fit perfectly into the story. What I like best about Faber's writing is that each individual felt wholly realized; even if the character only appeared for a page or two, it felt like Faber had developed a whole life story for them. No character felt like a set piece or plot device - which was good, because in a character driven novel, that would have broughy my enjoyment to a crashing halt.
Beyond the characters, I enjoyed the writing itself. Faber's style is incredibly (some would argue overly) descriptive. A reviewer called is Dickensian. I call it awesome. Victorian England comes alive in all of its squalid glory. This was no romanticized city; Faber revels in all the layers of poverty and richness available during this era. I love description, so these vivid scenes were fascinating to me.
And the ending, oh my goodness, the ending. It was wholly unexpected, but totally in character with the novel. It was the first I was completely flabbergasted by wholly satisfied at the same time. The Boyfriend had to deal with my vocal outburst and book toss as he was trying to fall asleep. Wow. You have to read this book if only to deal with how it all ends.
A long read, but worth it.
RATING: 8/10 [Terrific]
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