The world is changing, moving away from him. He is a man in terminal decline, both emotionally and financially. In Medicine, the most inward-looking of The Apple's seven stories, we encounter Rackham in his study, drinking heavily, still tormented by Sugar's disappearance, still desiring her, but transforming his frustrated desire into hatred and blame. The remainder of the stories do not so much extend the novel as inhabit its margins, although they do exhibit a continuity of theme in the way they pick up its concern with the repressive social expectations placed upon women in Victorian England. It is a compromise of sorts: a sequence of short stories featuring characters from The Crimson Petal and the White, the two most substantial of which revisit William Rackham and Sophie, respectively, many years after the events of the novel. True to his word, The Apple is not a sequel. And then there is the woman whose missive begins with the words: 'How dare you!'įaber still maintains there will be no sequel. Their letters ranged from sincere expressions of concern for the wellbeing of Sugar and Sophie, to the fellow writer who informed Faber that novels had no business being as inconclusive as life. It is an ending that does not simply leave open the possibility of a sequel it seems to demand one.Īs Faber reveals in the foreword to The Apple, many readers were dismayed at the novel's lack of resolution many took the trouble to write and tell him so. As a conclusion, it is a deliberate tease: a seemingly calculated attempt to frustrate the formal expectation that a narrative will answer the questions it raises. Not only are their prospects uncertain, the novel ends without revealing whether they succeed in escaping. Its heroine, a prostitute-turned-governess named Sugar, is last seen fleeing the house of her wealthy employer, William Rackham, taking his young daughter Sophie with her. The most tantalising feature of The Crimson Petal and the White was its ending. It was also the kind of historical novel that projects contemporary preoccupations into the past, most noticeably in the way it sought to emphasise the socially unenlightened assumptions of some of its characters and the sexual hypocrisy of Victorian society. Set in London in the 1870s, it was big, 800-plus pages, and very readable.

Despite being less edgy and original than some of his other work, it was widely (although not universally) acclaimed and went on to sell about 250,000 copies in Britain alone. Michel Faber's breakthrough book was The Crimson Petal and the White.

The apple crimson petal stories