The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michael Faber.

One of my book clubs is reading this 900 page tome this month. Because of the length of the book, and to adjust our schedule for the upcoming holiday season, we're giving ourselves an extra week to read it.

It's extra strange, then, that I'm already done with the book, more than 4 weeks early. It took me 4 days to read.

We can thank my employer for some of that. I just got back from an incredibly useless (for me) business meeting, at which I spent a fair amount of time waiting around for packages to arrive and so got a lot of reading done. There was also a full (part-time) work week of time spent in airports and airplanes, prime reading opportunities.

But since I can't talk to my book club for nearly a month, I must vent here.

How unfair of Faber to introduce these characters, share with us intimate details of their lives and thoughts (and I do mean intimate; the book is narrated from a second person POV) and then drop us when he's "done."

What happens to these characters? Are they dead or alive? If they survive the 900th page, what happens to them next? Few clues in the text, few clues. And while I don't need everything wrapped up neatly with a bow, it doesn't seem too much to ask to know if the various POV characters are living or dead, and, if living, healthily and safely at the end of a novel. Too much to ask? Surely not.

I was thinking that the ending looked pretty grim. But reading the interview with the author (link above) it seems that there's hope. Good.