Books & Poetry

Michel Faber’s doorstop of a Victorian novel, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ (2002), has attracted a mass of fans who just can’t get enough of its bawdy whores and sordid backstreets. Excerpts from their letters litter the foreword to Faber’s latest collection of short stories, ‘The Apple’, which features characters from the novel. ‘You must write a sequel,’ implores one distraught reader. ‘How dare you, sir? What an ending!’ exclaims another.

Faber insists rather haughtily that ‘The Apple’ answers none of these pleas directly, but devotees will find some satisfaction. The darling teenage prostitute Sugar is here, as is the foolish Rackham and his young daughter Sophie. A few of the novel’s incidental characters provide some more saucy action, too.  Faber is a talented writer, but after the 800-odd dense pages of ‘Crimson Petal’, ‘The Apple’ feels insubstantial and expensive at £12.99 – a money-spinner aimed squarely at fans (although fans will surely know that two of the stories have been published elsewhere already). If you haven’t read ‘Crimson Petal’, you will feel as though you’ve not been invited to the party: despite Faber’s promises to the contrary, the characters we meet in ‘The Apple’ are only really fleshed out in the host novel.  Perhaps Faber should put away the fan mail and work on some fresh material? In fact, he could heed his own narrator’s instruction: ‘You’ve been among prostitutes and strange children for too long. Come away now.’ Quite.