The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber

-
100% yes, an all time favourite.The Crimson Petal And The White (Canons)



Beautiful writing, matter-of-fact / shocking / blunt. I was living in Victorian England there for a while. It takes 40 hours to listen to, which I didn't realise until I'd bought it, and I'm so glad I did. Plenty of direct address to readers and grim irony.

Comments

  1. McMahon352323 December 2018 at 14:10

    One of my all time favourites. Loved Sugar, a self made woman, despite and because of, her terrible mother. William reminded me somewhat of Rose Tremain's foppish character Merivel - spoiled and completely self absorbed, but not unlikeable.
    The detailed descriptions took me to a stinking, dark, dangerous Victorian London, that could have jumped straight from the pages of Mr Dickens.
    This book is a keeper.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Seven must-reads for summer 2019

-
Image
In need of hours of thought provoking entertainment? I reckon I've sorted it for you.  Here they are in order of greatness. Three of them are fiction - IKR!!! Fabulous, entertaining, life enhancing, educating in history, emotion and philosophy type fiction though. So, At joint number one (fiction award) The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber . Powerful, shocking, no-holds barred depiction of Victorian England. Ir's what Dickens should have written. An excellent listen. Here's my original post At joint number one (non-fiction award) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari A great, energetically written philosophical tour of pre human history, human history and some bets on the future. A great great first half, and a good second half. here's my original post   At number three (fiction) BY THE SAME AUTHOR AS THE WINNER Under the Skin by Michel Faber I listened to this on audible and gradually worked out what was going on This...
Read more

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

-
Image
Maybe read it. Lots of ideas and interesting takes on the world. Quite a lot of plot, which said ideas are kind of dumped into. It's a future world where consumption is encouraged with no angst or inkling of the enviromental consequences. So I suppose, in the age of patio heaters and throw away coffee cups, he got that right. Children are conditioned into accepting their social class and their world by the repetition of phrases and some aversion training. Tick again. There's a very interesting idea that women have been conditioned to accept the unnatural. They hate the idea of monogamy and of motherhood. That's an interesting assumption about the natural state of women. The book's not about that though, that's an aside. It's about two men really. One of them is definitely a sympathetic character because he speaks in a lot of Shakespeare quotes, despite being a savage. The real savage are the civilised ones who don't know any Shakespeare. Hmmm. It's...
Read more