Book
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber is a 2002 epic postmodern novel set in Victorian era England. The main characters include William Rackham, the unwilling heir to a perfume business; Agnes, William's brittle, long-suffering "mad wife in the attic"; and Sugar, a decidedly unconventional and strong-willed young prostitute whose intense affair with William gives her the opportunity to climb to a higher perch in the rigidly stratified class system of the time. Other characters include Henry Rackham, William's pious brother who wants to be a clergyman and his friend Emmeline Fox, a widow who works in the Rescue Society that tries to reform prostitutes. The novel is told from the perspective of all of the main characters, and the omniscient narrator occasionally addresses the reader directly. There is also a metaliterary aspect, as Sugar is working on her own novel, Henry writes sermons, and Agnes keeps a diary. The novel was generally well-received by critics.

Canongate published The Apple, a selection of short stories based on characters from The Crimson Petal and the White, in 2006.

The title is from a 1847 poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson entitled Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, the opening line of which is Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white.

Author
Faber was born in The Hague, The Netherlands. He and his parents emigrated to Australia in 1967. He attended primary and secondary school in the Melbourne suburbs of Boronia and Bayswater, then attended the University Of Melbourne, studying Dutch, Philosophy, Rhetoric, English Language (a course involving translation and criticism of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) and English Literature. He graduated in 1980. He worked as a cleaner and at various other casual jobs, before training as a nurse at Marrickville and Western Suburbs hospitals in Sydney. He nursed until the mid-1990s. In 1993 he, his second wife and family emigrated to Scotland, where they still reside.

Faber wrote seriously from the age of fourteen, but did not submit his manuscripts for publication. Many of the short stories that appeared in his debut collection, as well as earlier drafts of The Crimson Petal and the White, were completed during the 1980s and stored away. Another novel completed in this period, A Photograph Of Jesus, remains unissued. During the 1990s, with the encouragement of his second wife, Eva, Faber began entering – and winning – short story competitions. This led to him being approached by the Edinburgh-based publishers Canongate Books, who have published his work in the UK ever since.

Faber's first published book was a collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, issued in 1998. Of these stories, the title piece had won the Ian St James Award in 1996, Fish had won the Macallan Prize in 1996, and Half A Million Pounds And A Miracle had won the Neil Gunn Award in 1997.

The first of Faber’s novels to be published was Under the Skin (2000), written in, and inspired by, the Scottish Highlands. Like much of Faber’s work, it defies easy categorisation, combining elements of the science fiction, horror and thriller genres, handled with sufficient depth and nuance to win almost unanimous praise from literary critics. It was translated into many languages (17 by 2004) and secured his reputation in Europe, as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. A film version of Under The Skin, to be directed by Jonathan Glazer, has been in production for some years, but no release date has been set.

Faber’s second published novel was The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001), set in Whitby. The original hardback edition included digitally manipulated colour photographs; these were absent from subsequent reissues. Radically different from Under The Skin in tone and theme, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps attracted mixed reviews.

Faber’s third published novel was The Courage Consort (2002), about an a cappella vocal group rehearsing a piece of avant-garde music. It has been adapted for radio twice, by the BBC (UK) and the ABC (Australia), and is currently in development as a film.

In 2002, Faber's 850-page The Crimson Petal and the White was published. Set in 1870s London and principally concerning a 19-year-old prostitute called Sugar, it was described by some critics as postmodern while others echoed the assertion (made in an early review) that it was the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely. Twenty years in the writing, the book showed Faber's admiration for Dickens's prose and George Eliot's narrative architecture, but its themes were informed by feminism, post-Freudian awareness of sexual pathology, and post-Marxian class analysis, as well as by unrestricted access to Victorian pornographic texts that had been suppressed until the late 20th century. The Crimson Petal and the White was a bestseller in the USA, Italy, France, Holland and Belgium, and a steady seller in most other countries.

[source: wikipedia.org ]