Set in 1870s London, Faber’s second outing is a brilliantly plotted chronicle of the collision between high and low, as played out in the complex relationship binding would-be writer William Rackham, heir to a perfume-maker’s fortune and an inveterate whoremaster, and a cunning prostitute known as Sugar, whose special erotic talents inflame the smitten Rackham to the extent that he installs her in his home, ostensibly as his young daughter’s governess in fact, as the mistress who distracts his attention from the illnesses and “fits” endured by his frail (and possibly “mad”) wife Agnes. There’s no other way to describe this enthralling melodrama from the British author of Under the Skin (2000). Imagine a Dickens novel freed of the restraints imposed by Victorian propriety.
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