The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

I really, really, really tried to like this book, but I woke up this morning with a strange feeling of oppression, and realised that I had been having nightmares about it all night, and moreover, the thought of having to face another day with it was making me very unwilling to leave my bed. So I gave it up a little over a third of the way through (it's an 800+ page monster). It's a clever book, it might even be a good book, but it's just not my thing. It starts by promising a view of Victorian London the reader is utterly unfamiliar with, but I haven't studied Victorian literature and history for nothing, and I don't need a tour of the Victorian underworld and anyways, a little would have been enough. But there's just so much detail, it's utterly unnecessary and exhausting. I don't actually need to know what colour the dado rail is, or what material some knick knack is made of. A lot of the things that happen are very interesting, but just the amount of useless detail was so oppressive, it was driving me insane. I also really didn't like the style, it was too plain, like a realist novel to the power of a million. I was getting increasingly annoyed with the characters too, who were either repulsive or hard to sympathise with. The dialogue is very well-written, and a lot of it is very cleverly executed. For example, I read somewhere (I can't remember now who this theorist is) that in the past, scent was a crucial marker of class divisions, and that the eradication of unpleasant smells was a marker of the upper classes. Scent and perfume is a pervasive theme in the book, since one of the central characters is a perfume manufacturer, and as the prostitute Sugar moves up the social scale, the unpleasant scents that dominate her life become lessened, which often confuses her. The book also cleverly ties commerce and sex together, until the two become inextricable. But it has such a horribly bleak outlook, and all the relationships in it are so twisted and upsetting. It's very unpleasantly explicit, and often made me quite disgusted and ill reading it. I was also annoyed at the fact that the book seems to be endorsing that myth some buy into about the Victorians that they were just weird about sex, half-repressed, half complete animals with insane and gross desires. Reading it, I felt like I was just plunged into some alternative universe run by revolting sex; seemingly respectable men craving bizarre acts, women so ignorant of their own bodies that they don't understand what menstruation is, abusive doctors, etc. etc. I'm pretty sure that the Victorians, even though they didn't talk about sex the same way we do, were actually not these weird creatures deformed by repression, there were probably as many normal, healthy sexual relationships as there are now (obviously, more of them were within marriages, but not all). Anyways, I respect this book, I acknowledge that it's a well-written, well-researched (too well-researched perhaps) book, but it's just not for me.