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Sugar is the kind of character who arrives fully formed and refuses to leave. A nineteen-year-old prostitute in 1870s London, famous in her trade for never refusing a request, she is the engine of Michel Faber's enormous neo-Victorian novel, and she is the reason its 800-plus pages turn as quickly as they do. The book opens with a now-famous gambit: a narrator who addresses you directly, takes you by the elbow, and warns you to keep your wits about you because the city you are entering is not the one other stories have flattered you into thinking you know. It is a bold piece of stagecraft, and it works. Within a chapter I was thoroughly inside this world and reluctant to climb back out.

What Faber does best is atmosphere. The imagery is immediate and physical, the icy wind, the sleet, the smells of spirits and dung, and it does not let up. This is a Victorian London rendered from below, with the soiled underwear and the open sewers left firmly in frame, the squalid underside that the actual novelists of the period were never permitted to show. And yet the prose itself is decidedly modern. Faber makes no attempt to ape nineteenth-century ornamentation; the sentences move briskly, the present tense keeps everything alert, and there is a knowing, faintly satirical intelligence playing over every scene. The result is immersion without pastiche. You feel you understand the 1870s rather better by the end than you did going in, which for a book this long is a meaningful return on the investment.

The plot, on its surface, is simple. Sugar attracts the attention of William Rackham, an egotistical heir to a perfume fortune, who becomes so infatuated that he buys her out of the brothel and installs her as his mistress. From there her ascent through the strata of Victorian society begins, and she draws an entire cast into her orbit: William's wife Agnes, whose mental decline is charted with real and unsettling care; his pious brother Henry, tormented by desire; a parade of socialites, journalists, servants, and other women of the streets. The characterisation is the novel's great strength alongside its world-building. These are people who leap off the page rather than illustrate a point, and Agnes in particular lingers long after the final chapter.

It is not a flawless book, and pretending otherwise would do it no favours. The most common complaint is also the most justified: the ending. After such an enormous commitment of time, the story does not build to the climax its structure seems to promise. It stops rather than concludes, leaving William broken and waiting fruitlessly for a cab while loose threads dangle in every direction. There is an argument, and I have some sympathy with it, that this ambiguity suits both Sugar's character and the messiness of real life. But there is an equally fair argument that the abruptness feels less like artistic restraint than like an author deciding that nine hundred pages were simply enough. Faber later published a collection of stories, The Apple, that gestures at some of these unanswered fates, though by most accounts it satisfies no one who wanted real resolution.

The other reservation is tonal. The novel swings between blunt sexual frankness, sermonising, and grim social documentary, and some will find the register exhausting rather than bracing. Henry's storyline, in particular, never quite earns its place; for a character given so much room, he resolves into surprisingly little. And there is a contingent of readers who finish the book feeling that, for all the pages, comparatively little actually happens: Sugar rises slightly, falls slightly, and the curtain comes down. I do not share that view, but I understand it. This is a novel that asks for patience and rewards immersion rather than incident.

Where does that leave us? With a flawed but genuinely remarkable book. The comparisons to Dickens that trailed its publication are not entirely earned, Faber lacks the older writer's structural command and his appetite for a satisfying finish, but the comparison is not absurd either, which tells you something about the ambition on display. This is a novel best approached the way you would a long European train journey: surrender to the duration, stop demanding to know exactly where you will be set down, and let the landscape do its work. Do that, and Sugar will stay with you for years. Insist on a tidy destination, and you may close the final page feeling cheated of one. Both responses are reasonable. Mine, for what it is worth, falls firmly on the side of the journey.