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You know in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind they've invented this brilliant device for erasing specific memories and the whole plot revolves around people who meet each other after they've had their memories of each other already erased, so they re-meet and re-love and it's all poignant and kind of whoah and oops I kind of gave the plot away - well, you should have seen it by now, come on, it's years old. Anyway, I'd love that particular invention to be true true true so that I could hustle down to the memory doctor's office and after having ALL of my romantic entanglements DELETED from my brain, obviously that would be the very first thing to do, then I'd present the doctor with a list of books to delete; and The Crimson Petal and the White would be right there in that little list, and it would, of course, be just so that I could have the pure unsullied delectable pleasure of reading it for the first time - again.

This is such a corking good page turner like if some giant Dickens and The Quincunx and The Worm in the Bud (great book about the Victorian sexual underworld) and some other stuff were shoved in the blender and then written up by a guy who really knows what he's doing.

Now, the ENDING of this huge novel was criticised greatly as being NOT AN ENDING at all but merely a dribbling away. So please note that there is a book called THE APPLE which is short stories accounting for the rest of all the characters' lives, and that's great and essential too.

I envy you people who have not read this.

And I'd also ask for my memory of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be deleted too, that would just be a little bit of post modern humour to share with the memory doctor. Oh, and the memory of writing this review.