The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber

(Harcourt Brace) $26

There are a few theories about the current resurgence of interest in Victorian times, and they mostly sound like arguments we've heard before. The New York Times, in an article about the return of the corset, quotes someone as saying, "The world has become... a harsher place. Victorianism conjures up images of embellishment, comfort and seduction, all of which are increasingly lacking in our daily lives"--in other words, the usual language of retrograde trends, in which we invoke a nostalgia for simpler times. We are also reminded that the era we thought of as stuffy and uptight was actually as obsessed with sex as our own (it turns out that it was Prince Albert who was shy and priggish; Victoria herself was quite sensually amorous).

My own most favorite theory, arrived at after spending a solid day reading all 838 pages of Michel Faber's surprise bestseller The Crimson Petal and the White, is that it's not opulence we miss, but continuous narrative and dedicated wit. Why wouldn't we crave the sly articulation of someone like Oscar Wilde when we have a president who can't string a sentence together?

Crimson, which took Faber the better part of 20 years to write, is tremendous--a Victorian sweep of a novel as seen (as it inevitably would be) through the long lens of retrospect, otherwise known as postmodernism. He's not the first novelist to write in the very physical and temporal Victorian mode (as Peter Carey did in Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs), nor is he the first to give voice to silenced and marginalized characters (as Jean Rhys did for the first Mrs. Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea). But Crimson is more irresistible than either Carey or Rhys, more smarty-pants, in a way that makes a reader feel clever but not overwhelmed. So much so that, again, according to the New York Times, a number of New York bookstores recently found themselves with nary a copy on their shelves. (Hence, the corsets. You can't have a bodice-ripper without a bodice to rip.)

It's mostly the story of Sugar--a London prostitute famous not only for never saying no, but also for her conversational skills--whose luck takes a turn when William Rackham, an industrial heir, falls in love with her. She's introduced to us (lest a nervous reader, stomach dented with the weight of this enormous tome, give up too quickly) by a gently teasing omniscient narrator, one who promises, when things get a little morose and introspective, "there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death." This narrator flirts and guides, disappears and pops back in to see how we're doing, avails itself of dramatic irony (only we know the secret to Agnes Rackham's madness), and decides who and how much we need to know and tells us so. Another tiresome burden removed; perhaps an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator is exactly what we've been missing... in these harsher times.

Sugar's luck takes her to an unexpectedly boring freedom, and then to the Rackham's home in the guise of a governess. It's like Moll Flanders becoming Jane Eyre, but fully aware of the sentimental risks. In a novel that Sugar writes between clients, she resists an easy escape for her heroine, "Otherwise, this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks becoming one of those 'Reader, I married him' romances she so detests."

Instead of pretending to be a more innocent book, Crimson flaunts its hindsight, commenting on the progresses and victims of the industrial age, knowingly punning (when an English gentleman utters an ejaculation, it's clearly not just a cigar), and reminding us of its own awareness. This so easily could have gone tiresome, but it doesn't, partly because Sugar--not exactly a hooker with a heart of gold, nor with alabaster skin (she suffers from psoriasis)--drives the book forward like a steam engine. Eventually the postmodern scrim becomes mostly transparent, and you allow yourself another perhaps retrograde happiness: You just enjoy it. A simpler pleasure, like the corset, earned from the spoils of knowledge.

Michel Faber participates in a discussion entitled "Victoria's Secrets: The Continued Appeal of 19th Century England," Sun Oct 20, 4:45 pm-5:45 pm, at the Hugo Stage.