Word: faber
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...trilogy might seem a daunting task to most authors, but by now Ayckbourn knows his craft inside out. So much so that he has just published a how-to book, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (Faber & Faber). "I don't exclude the muse," he says. "But just letting the inspiration take you is a very risky way to write. You need rules to motor that inspiration." Scholarly in tone, the book provides what he calls 101 "Obvious Rules" for successful writing and directing. Having laid down the law, how well do his own plays follow them? Pretty closely...
Books may not be as popular as movies or TV or music these days, but you have to hand it to them: they're still our filthiest medium, God bless 'em. You can get away with things on paper that you could never sing about or show onscreen. Michel Faber's colossal, kaleidoscopic new novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (Harcourt, 838 pages), tells the story of a prostitute in Victorian England, and if it's ever filmed, it'll be rated around an NC-45. But it also hints that reading and sex have a lot in common...
...White now, while it's still a living, laughing, sweating, coruscating mass of gorgeous words. Don't be put off by the setting--London, 1874--or the length, or that unfortunate, overlong stuffed shirt of a title. Don't worry about its author's ominously French-sounding name (Faber is actually a Scot by way of Holland and Australia). Ever since last fall readers have been watching for another knockdown, breakout book on the order of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. It's here...
...name is Sugar," Faber's heroine tells us, "or if it isn't, I know no better." Sugar's body is for rent, but her mind is entirely her own. Nineteen, tall and flame-haired, she's an intellectual prodigy who charms her johns with inspired conversation and uninhibited bedcraft, then scribbles away at a novel while they snooze off their drink in her bed. (Faber's descriptions of lovemaking in an age of abundant undergarments and no antiperspirants are admirably frank...
...deal with Rackham's dysfunctional family, including his half-mad mystic wife Agnes and his devout but lustful brother Henry, while at the same time concealing her shameful origins and making sure her sugar daddy stays sweet on her. Sugar seduces us because Faber lets us see both sides of her at once, the magnificent sexual schemer and the angry, damaged teenager whose mother sold her to a stranger at the age of 13. When she holds Rackham's little daughter Sophie, the only innocent soul in the whole book, Sugar feels "more physical joy than she's felt...