A Wilting Petal
BOERNER, MARGARET
A Wilting Petal How not to revive the modern novel. BY MARGARET BOERNER During the second half of the twentieth century, readers complained that the "postmodern" novel—that dark, deconstructing...
...Meanwhile, in a twist of British history dubbed "The Empire Strikes Back," it is often British descendants of colonial peoples who win British awards for their fiction— written in English...
...But it too easily degenerates into fiction that is all plot, all detail, without any examination of character, let alone symbol, allusion, or organization...
...A layer of pink paint...
...Since the author has made his characters completely opaque, we cannot predict, except to be sure that our plucky heroine will prevail...
...A triangle of canvas...
...Earlier writers did not produce greater works by virtue of living in a golden age in the past when art was uncorrupt-ed...
...Milton is not greater than Shakespeare, Dickens than Austen, solely by virtue of having written later...
...Thus, Peter Ackroyd writes about Dr...
...We are only halfway through this book...
...The postmodern novel has turned into the "new historical" novel...
...And the contrary is also surely true...
...But wait...
...Pat Barker writes about a family in World War I. In Atonement, Ian McEwan writes about a family in World War II, and in The Child in Time about a family on the eve of a possible World War III...
...The Japanese expatriate Kazuo Ishiguro writes The Remains of the Day about an English butler in the days of World War II, and W hen We Were Orphans about a child in the Far East during the thirties leading up to the war...
...Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...
...pissing alleys...
...At the end, the narrator cheerily tells us, "It's over...
...Sugar and William have no such scruples, and during the eight hundred and thirty-eight pages of this overblown novel, we learn that Sugar is just the woman that William should have married...
...Indeed, the most prestigious of the prizes, the Booker, "aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland...
...Sugar shows him how the products of soap making and scent bottling can be made fashionable through modern business practices and tactful letters to suppliers...
...Have we encouraged this kind of comic-book adventure plotting...
...William had generously set Sugar up in her own house in Maryle-bone with a monthly allowance so that he alone could enjoy her...
...It would seem the contemporary historical novel's examination of the "other" merely gives an excuse not to examine ourselves at all...
...To the rescue comes William's crazy wife, Agnes (a lineal descendent of the "madwoman in the attic" familiar from Victorian novels...
...To round out the family, Faber gives William a pious, tormented brother, Henry, who battles his sexual urges at exhibitions of (amazingly suggestive, not to say prurient) Victorian nude paintings...
...In prose no better than it should be, he hopes he "satisfied all your desires, or at least showed you a good time...
...How to fill the second four hundred pages...
...caustic spermicides...
...Sugar is the perfect new governess for Sophie, and at her own urging she soon moves into the Rackham household, where she has a small, cold room and wears virtuously drab clothes...
...But so able is Sugar to deceive a man into believing she is totally sympathetic that she can make his loins quiver with a single glance...
...But Crimson Petal does not end with "Reader, I married him," and William is always the Victorian rich john who would throw her over in a minute were he inconvenienced...
...Of course, what Northrop Frye called the "romance" plot, the series of adventures culminating in one big adventure, is everyone's favorite plot and shows up in works from the Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn to Star Wars...
...For a triangle of inanimate canvas he is willing to risk his immortal soul...
...Sugar rescues Agnes from the asylum and Sophie from her new governess, and they all live happily ever after...
...She has taught herself to read, and she can carry on heated discussions about Swift and Shakespeare in an educated accent while engaged in her sex work...
...In the last twenty or thirty years, however, novelists in English have returned to their public and have started giving readers what they had been asking for—novels that are determinedly not symbolic, formal, or allusive...
...Listed for this year's Booker are a novel by a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, William Trevor, and another by a descendant of Caribbean immigrants, Zadie Smith...
...And too few these days do so...
...Novels now have protagonists who live in a material world and experience events in traditional plots formed by beginnings, middles, and ends...
...noisome privies...
...In England, this change has been accompanied by an effort to get rid of novels about "middle-class adultery in the suburbs," as the British designate their much despised novels of the postwar period...
...We are now seven hundred and fifty pages into the book, and this bodice ripper for the chattering classes must conclude...
...Byatt, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan serve up plenty of trash in their historical novels...
...BY MARGARET BOERNER During the second half of the twentieth century, readers complained that the "postmodern" novel—that dark, deconstructing offspring of the novel as perfected by Henry James and James Joyce—was becoming so stylized, formal, and allusive that it lost its audience...
...Further, Sugar is able to gain knowledge of the invisible Agnes when she rescues the diaries Agnes has thrown into the garden in a rage...
...Agnes herself becomes more and more an embarrassment when she ventures into London society, and William guiltily agrees to send her to a lunatic asylum...
...Douglas Adams writes about the exploration of Earth by aliens in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as does Doris Lessing in Canopus in Argos: Archives...
...Even such accomplished stylists as John Fowles, A.S...
...These two developments come together in Michel Faber's historical novel The Crimson Petal and the White, now on the New York Times bestseller list, highly praised by a number of critics, and a sensation in London where it was partially serialized in the Guardian before it was published this October...
...The book is presided over by an eighteenth/nineteenth-century type of omniscient narrator coterminous with the author, a voice who knows everything about all the characters, what they think and how they feel, including much they themselves do not know about the other characters or even themselves...
...The most pernicious effect of such a novel as The Crimson Petal is that it allows us to feel superior to those in the past without raising up any fear that we might be like them...
...William is married to a wife so sexually disturbed that she will not acknowledge she has given birth to their daughter, and he needs a healthy sexual outlet from a nurturing woman...
...And Faber seems almost a multi-culti parody of children raised in the shadow of the British empire...
...drunken mothers in St...
...Vikram Seth, born in Calcutta and educated at Oxford and Stanford, writes about a modern Indian girl choosing a husband in A Suitable Boy, and about American yuppies in San Francisco (what could be more exotic...
...Thus Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan-Canadian, writes about World War II in The English Patient...
...For not only is she perfectly amiable and responsive to every demand made upon her sexually by William, she makes a businessman of him, though he is "a socialist by inclination...
...Crimson was not eligible for the Booker Prize this year because it was published too late, but it fulfills the criteria mockingly set out by Booker judge and professional comedian David Baddiel: "Set it in the past, preferably the 19th century," and "make your narrator an artist, a writer or an academic who can spend a lot of time thinking very deep thoughts about art, writing or academia...
...Giles's Church Lane (what Hogarth knew as "Gin Lane") just south of New Oxford Street, where our heroine is raised...
...In the midst of this crisis, William suddenly finds out Sugar is pregnant (by him, of course...
...He gradually comes to depend upon her as a business adviser, so perceptive is she...
...They are eyes that promise everything...
...But Henry is an educated man and asks himself what he is "really staring at...
...We get a thrill, but little sustenance...
...He repudiates her immediately, saying she is unfit to teach his child...
...rats, mice, lice, vomit, feces...
...As reading turned into a tedious exercise in symbol scavenging, readers gave up on "literature," and used movies and television to satisfy their hunger for fiction...
...Her cure is attempted by a doctor who is constantly probing her vagina to learn whether her uterus has wandered out of place and thus made her "hysterical...
...Sophie comes to love Sugar, and William comes to need her...
...tubercular children begging for food...
...A whore with a mind of gold, so to speak...
...What has happened here...
...Indian expatriate Salman Rushdie writes about the formation of India and Pakistan in Midnight's Children and about the formation of Islamic consciousness in The Satanic Verses...
...Streets filthy with horse manure (so that's what all those child street sweepers in Dickens are doing...
...How to end it...
...A proto-feminist, Sugar is writing a novel in which she depicts the awful lives of prostitutes who, like the hero of her favorite Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus, extract gory revenge from selfish clients...
...The preposterous plot that wanders through this muck involves the dilettante son of a rich perfume manufacturer, William Rackham, who finds he cannot do without Sugar and agrees to join his father in the business in order to set Sugar up in the style which she so richly deserves by virtue of her doing "anything" for her customers...
...When she first meets William, Sugar is a nineteen-year-old prostitute who was forced into "warming up" her mother's "friends" when she was thirteen...
...Crimson Petal is the story of Sugar, a prostitute in Victorian London...
...Have we made a terrible mistake in repudiating the modernist novel...
...Byatt in Possession...
...Agnes has kept a diary since her school days...
...in Golden Gate...
...Like all fiction, the historical novel needs to hold a mirror up to ourselves...
...Naturally, she is able to educate the child from her own reading—not that Victorian ideas of what young girls should know are particularly ambitious, and Faber has fun with contemporary schoolbooks...
...After graduation, Faber immigrated to Great Britain, where he now lives in Scotland with his wife and her children...
...Dee and Hawksmoor in early modern London and about Milton in America...
...At the Royal Academy, Henry hopes that "the other gallery visitors must take him for a connoisseur— or perhaps they perceive perfectly well that he's ogling rose-nippled breasts and pearly thighs...
...But the usual rules of the adventure story apply...
...How this is worked out it would be indiscreet to say...
...But those who reject the idea of a golden age of the novel must wonder how it is that this important genre now embodies scandal and exhibitionism, not to mention sloppy prose...
...Henry James, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen—all is forgiven...
...She is ferociously intelligent and determined...
...The nastiness of Victorian household life is detailed—one is reminded of the recalcitrant house on the English TV show 1900 House...
...There is no progress in the arts," declared William Blake, and he was surely right...
...A layer of dried oil covered with varnish—and he'll stand before it, for minutes at a time, willing a silvery wisp of drapery to slip from between a woman's legs, wishing he could grasp hold of it and tear it out of the way, revealing—revealing what...
...Has Faber been bamboozled here in his reading about "the other Victorians...
...How do we know all this...
...They are "naked eyes, beneath a fringe of soft hair, glistening like peeled fruits...
...Agnes is the stepdaughter of an evil lord who has forced her to give up the Roman Catholicism of her dead parents for the arid Anglicanism of respectable London society...
...The solution is nothing short of remarkable...
...He was born in Holland of Dutch parents who emigrated to Australia, where he spent his teens and began this novel some twenty years ago when he was at the University of Melbourne, studying Victorian literature...
...And Sugar delivers everything...
...But Sugar becomes even more useful as William's business adviser and a real mother to Sophie...
...She has been so repressively raised that she thinks menstruation is a curse for her having been evil, and she does not know she has given birth to her daughter Sophie who is now seven years old and needs a governess...
...John Fowles writes about a Victorian liaison in The French Lieutenant's Woman, as does A.S...
...But she is not the usual lower-class type...
...The "other" is just that—exotic, strange, fascinating, and entirely without relevance to the way we are, merely a mistake our ancestors made...
...The narrator invites us to come with him while he lards the book with all the seamy detail of Victorian London that historians in the twentieth century have excavated (and that Faber has swallowed whole hog without much discrimination...
...Rather than explore contemporary mores, the novel in England turned to stories about the "other"— with all its "race, class, and gender" implications...
...Such fiction often and quite naturally results in the "historical" novel—set in another country, in the past, or sometimes in the future...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 12
