Donna Tartt: The Secret & Michel Faber: The Crimson Petal and the White

These are two very different types of novel with the only element they have in common being their considerable length and their page-turning abilities.

While Donna Tartt’s wonderful and dark story is set almost exclusively in a small liberal arts college in the modern USA, Faber’s book is set in a richly evoked Victorian London that swoops from the social heights of Belgravia and higher down to the vilest lower depths of humanity and society with much being made of the desire and ability of some people to move between these very different worlds. The plot is elaborate and complicated but gripping, while although the scale of Tartt’s is smaller as it is considerably less event-driven - although one major event and its ramifications is the crucial trigger for the whole work.

I thuoght it worth putting these two together as looking at them again I felt that the readers of one may well not be readers of the other; if they were on display in a Waterstones, I am sure they would not be on the same table - unless tbey had a very imaginative salesperson to so do. But Waterstones are considerably more likely than almost any other shop to have that I think.

In one sense thuogh they are very dissimilar as Faber is almost entirely event-driven but with some very fine descriptive writing whereas Tartt is considerably more profound in the ideas that are examined through gthe telling of this tale.