The French Lieutenant's Woman (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Sarah is one of the most remarkable female characters of modern literature. She's a mixture of Jane Eyre, Hester Prynne, and Ophelia, a woman who has experienced much hardship, yet is strong and steadfast, like a sad statue, and slightly mad. Although, I'm torn, is it inaccurate to call Sarah mad? I suppose one could write a whole academic paper on that topic alone. She's not crazy to the Ophelian point where she belongs in a mental institution; perhaps, today we would just label her as having depression, which causes one to act a little illogically from time to time when our emotions are out of balance. Yet, I digress because the most important aspect of the novel (to me) is not whether or not Sarah is crazy, it is its ability to transport myself to another world, 1860s Southwest England on the coastal line, dotted with rocks and cliffs, deep woods, farms, a barren area, and a small town of provincial folk. You must read it. John Fowles has a knack for describing the scenic and has a loquacious ability to describe history in an enrapturing and oftentimes humorous way.What's remarkable about this book is how keen Fowles is in describing people. I would be greatly surprised if in his life he didn't spend hours of the day simply watching people and observing their mannerisms. (There is one part of the book where Charles is sleeping on a train, and a stranger watches him in a much perversely violating way, which gives me the gut feeling Fowles may admit to have done the same.)Unforgettably, in just the second chapter there is a notable scene where we see Sarah for the first time. This is one of my most favorite parts of the book, and I'm willing to share you this one because it happens so early on."She turned to look at him—or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favored feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert."Great Scott! That passage remarkably describes a simple look, but it does so so poetically that it becomes unforgettable. It is the moment we see Sarah for the first time, and without the narrator describing specific physical features, he allows the reader to envision her spirit with utter clarity, with just the ghost of her face staring back at us, just hovering there, and of course there is the natural sadness of it all. Also, I love that there is a lack of madness in her face; it forces me to believe that she is not mad; she is simply situated so close to the cliffs and the sea, the environments that really are mad, so much so that others mistakenly perceive that she is so too. It's really all quite incredible.I strongly recommend reading this book. I easily rank it in my top ten books of all time if not top five. The book is oftentimes hilarious too because it describes extremely silly, conservative people, who cause me to roll my eyes back because their societal mores are illogical to the 9th degree. Heaven forbid if men and women congregate together in a building that is not a Church.What else is remarkable is there are two endings to this novel. There I said it, and perhaps this spoiled it for you, but it's incredibly interesting in my mind. Perhaps there are even three endings in this novel, but I'm not sure if one would count the third. Sure, why not? The third seems equally important, so there are three endings and if that in itself does not capture your attention, I am not sure what would.Fowles speaks not only to my literary heart, but to my spiritual heart. It does not seem hard for me to imagine that time is an illusion and the future is elusive. It is constantly changing with every action of our daily lives, and it stands to reason that there can be infinite endings of our own lives, and each of these paths play out on separate dimensions, which only God or an author can see play out. I mention an author because is not an author like God? An author creates a world on paper, and he or she creates the people in it, and has control over their actions and lives, but does God have control? Is there not free will?The narrator of the story describes this bit fluently midway through the novel. He, the narrator, or Fowles alter-ego, describes how the characters themselves have gained control in the novel by coming to life. He can no longer tell them what to do, but they are telling him how they are to act. This side-note in the story is rather remarkable, and is all part of Fowles genius. To break the fourth wall by addressing us with his thought-process in the writing of his novel, and with such ease, and with such profound importance, this is a skill not to be taken likely. It makes the literary nerd inside of me giggle in delight, and I hope, if you have an appreciation for literature, that it does the same for you.Read it! Please do!
I have now read the first three books written by John Fowles, in the order of publication, without even trying. I love when things like that happen.What I adore about Fowles is that he wrote these novels that seem like mere novels on the outside, but on the inside they are filled with art and beauty and some incredible genius. At first I thought this one would be straightforward in comparison to the first two books (The Collector and The Magus), and initially I had some trouble getting into the story (though ultimately it turns out that I was just coming down with a plague that didn't let up until... oh, whatever, it's still sort of going on). But when I did get into the story, it's when I started to realize that the genius of Fowles was just more subtle in this story.The most obvious fact is that this is a Victorian novel written in 1969. But it's not just historical fiction by a traditional definition. The narrator is omniscient and references anachronistic tidbits (like Nazis! and computers!) and at first I was sort of bugged. Like what is Fowles doing, getting lazy on me? No! That's his genius, dammit, he snuck up on me.The other stuff that blows my mind are sort of complicated and totally spoilers, so I won't go into all of it here because that would be jerkface of me. But the ending is totally worth it, I didn't see any of it coming to the conclusions that it did, and I love the sense of ambiguity that the reader is left with by the last page.I haven't seen the movie yet, though undoubtedly I will bump that up on my Netflix/library queue, and will be back with my thoughts on it. Right now I cannot imagine that it could be done as artfully as the book, though the fact that Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep play Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff respectively speaks highly of the film and I can't imagine it sucking exactly. I just wonder how the ending will come across.So the non-spoiler-y things that I can talk about are all the same sorts of nerdy stuff that attracted me to The Magus specifically. Fowles knew art and beauty which makes me all squirmy because I love seeing references (and smart ones) about my favorite artists, paintings, museums, whatever. It's like Fowles had a map of my brain and my heart and pulled pieces out and put them into his stories, well before I even was born, because that's the sort of postmodernist writer Fowles was. If anyone could do something like that, it would be Fowles.There is a painting by Pisanello in the National Gallery that catches exactly such a moment: St. Hubert in an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of Nature's profoundest secret: the universal parity of existence.(p191)He also plays with time and memory in this book, which is sort of fascinating to me under normal circumstances. Fowles recognized that we all create our own realities, whether how we perceive the world around us or how we behave and/or how we portray ourselves to others so they have a specific perception of us and, in turn, our reality. All cool stuff because, of course, he was exactly right about all of it.Sometimes, in some cathedral or art gallery, he would for a moment dream Sarah beside him. After such moments he might have been seen to draw himself up and take a deep breath. It was not only that he forbade himself the luxury of a vain nostalgia; he became increasingly unsure of the frontier between the real Sarah and the Sarah he had created in so many such dreams: the one Eve personified, all mystery and love and profundity, and the other a half-scheming, half-crazed governess from an obscure seaside town. He even saw himself coming upon her again - and seeing nothing in her but his own folly and delusion.(p336)We all have these creations in our mind of the people around us which are only partly true based on our own thoughts and beliefs and wants and needs. Essentially we're all lying to ourselves, but I guess it's okay because everyone does it. Not out of malice, by the way, just out of human nature. That's just how our minds work because it's the only way we can live with ourselves.
What do You think about The French Lieutenant's Woman (2009)?
I tried resisting this. It has its occasional heavy-handedness and there are some stretches (the Rossettis, for example, please!), but the prose is so wonderful, the story(ies) is rich like cake and the intrusive author with his Victorian reflections so companionable that all I could do when I finished was lift the book in both hands and say WOW.There are such landscapes here:“From the air it is not very striking; one notes merely that whereas elsehwere on the coast the fields run to the cliff edge, here they stop a mile or so short of it. The cultivated chequer of geen and red-brown breaks, with a kind of joyous indiscipline, into a dark cascade of trees and undergrowth.” (p. 66)“The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe...” (. 67)Such reflections on the age, for example, when Charles is made melancholy by the beauty of nature:“… that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutally destructive. His statement to himself should have been, “I possess this now, therefore I am happy,” instead of what it so Victorianly was: “I cannot possess this forever, and therefore I am sad.”I knew the book was one in which the author intrudes to shatter the reader’s illusions about the story being in any way “real,” and I was trepidatious that might spoil things, but it did not. I loved, for example, when the author jumped into the train with Charles and watched him while he slept. Or when Charles receives a secret note from Sarah, he writes:“But the folly of the procedure, the risk!The French! Varguennes!... a vision of her running sodden through the lightning and rain momentarily distracted him from own acute and self-directed anxiety. But it was too much! After such a day!I am overdoing it on the exclamation marks...”I had to laugh. And even while the author is reminding you the characters aren’t real, he lets you know they sometimes seem to have their own will. And what good characters they are. Charles and Sam and Mary and Mrs. Poulteney and Ernestina and the doctor, and Sarah, who turns out not to be any French lieutenant’s woman, or anyone’s woman at all.(p.s. I disliked the movie, and am so glad that didn't keep me from reading the book.)
—S.
I think the greatest strength of this book is the utter uniqueness of it. I don't think I've ever read a book like it. It is set in the Victorian year of 1867, and yet, the sensibility of the book is thoroughly grounded in the 1960s (when it was written). The language, metaphors, and focus of the book all come from the 1960s, and the actions of the characters are all given the lens of the highly visible author- who is in fact one of the major characters of the book (much in the style of Thackeray, though more personally done here, I think).The plot itself starts off as a flimsy Victorian melodrama, if one were to remove everything but the bare skeletons of the action from it: boy meets girl, boy is engaged to girl, boy meets mysterious amazing girl, boy suffers crisis of love, moral dilemmas abound... and then it develops into something else much more modern with modern situations and dilemmas. But it is how it is described that is the best p art of the book: the focus is on the philosophies, the problems, the context of the era. Fowles is deeply involved in trying to explain the actions of his characters with pages long meditations and research into the Victorian pysche, based on thinkers, papers, popular opinions and events of the era. For example, the main character, Charles, is an amateur scientist and is a very strong Darwinist. Fowles gets involved with class issues, capitalist society, poetry, the suffrage movement, feminism, and of course, the overarching focus of the book: sexuality and its repression and unrepression.(It is here that comes my only real criticism of the book: that at times the book is very dated to the 1960s in its utter obsession with sex and bohemia and "fuck the system!" kind of rhetoric. Which still rings with many today, so perhaps it isn't a problem for all. I just found it sort of threw me out of the magic of the story when he tried to make his characters 1960s type heroes.)Another large and fascinating part of the book is that John Fowles allows us to see him at work. He shows us the road not taken in statements like (but much more eloquently put than this): "Well... I could do this.. but that would betray the character.. but it is the formula.. where shall I go from here?" He lets the reader see behind the curtain, and see his process, lets them know that he recognizes what he is doing and what he could have done or should have done by convention. He muses on what the character might want, or what he might want, and the various conventions that an author has at his disposal to most effectively display what he wants to convey. I did not think that it threw me out of the book at all. It made it even more interesting, actually. I'd recommend this book for even people who don't usually like Victorian literature. It has so modern a voice and discusses so many issues that we find of relevance today that perhaps your eyerolling can be kept to a minimum.
—Kelly
I'm considering having t-shirts made.They will either be a hodgepodge of John Fowles quotes that I find tremendously thought provoking and profound, a tour date of the freaky head-trips his books have put me on, or quite simply I (Heart) John Fowles.I don't like this book nearly as much as the other two I've already read this year The Magus or The Collector, and I still think it's better than most everything else out there.Part of this stems from the fact that I, like Fowles, am a Literary nerd and so, adore the fact that in his book about Victorian Romance he both mimics the style of Victorians, while mocking their sensibilities and honoring their break-throughs in philosophy and the arts. At times this hampers his style, confining himself within such narrow paramters is the only fault I find, and, even then he breaks free with such startling regularlity that the only problem is the jarring realization that you have not been reading Dickens, but Fowles the whole time.His meditations on the creative process continue here, as do his criticisms of the idle rich and the foolish hobgoblin of "duty" that so haunts young men trying to do "right" in the world. All of these themes are presented with such candor and sympathetic honesty that Fowles is quite clearly both the young student and the wise counselor he so often choses as his primary characters.Through all of this, his witty turns of phrase and charming honesty create a latter day Wilde in my mind, while the progression of the plot invites the reader to personalize the distant events.It continues to astound me that so superb a novelist should be so absent from American curriculum. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps he's standard reading and I just came from ill-informed systems.Or perhaps I should come home, armed with the books, and a box of t-shirts.
—MacK
