The French Lieutenant's Woman (Vintage Classics) (original 1969; edition 2004)

I love how the narrator steps out from behind the curtain in this faux Victorian novel to comment on society, culture, and protocols in novel-writing. Very fun read, even if I never fell in love with the characters. ( )

On Goodreads five stars is for amazing, and this novel earns it, even if some aspects maddened me. I knew two things about this novel going in. One, it was pointed to me as one of the most masterful examples of the omniscient point of view written in the 20th century, which made me eager to read it, and second, that it had alternate endings, which put me off. (A device I hate, hate, hate--it seems such a cheat.) Actually, having before this read Fowles' The Magus, I could add I knew he had a masterful, enviable prose style, and that he loved messing with the reader--and that's on display here.

Fowles does pull out all the stops in that omniscient point of view--it fits his Victorian setting, and his Victorian theme. The novel seems both homage to the era's novel and a critique of the age. Each chapter is headed with quotes about the Victorian age and by Victorian authors such as Darwin, Marx, Tennyson, Hardy, Arnold. There is plenty of commentary by the narrator about not just the characters and plots, but has the author breaking the fourth wall with statements in first person as author and on the process of writing. It's a technique that is labeled by many post-modern in its self-consciousness, but harkens back to Fielding and Thackeray; it's not just a 20th century thing--read Tom Jones and Vanity Fair some time. And Fowles knew his Victorians and his setting of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. He wrote two books on Lyme where he spent decades and one on "Thomas Hardy's England." Fowles would interrupt the narrative to tell you one character lived to nearly a hundred and that another would be the ancestor of a noted contemporary actress. There are even footnotes! All in all that playfulness makes up for a lot--I even forgive Fowles his alternate endings. Plus, his style is just so beautiful, so readable. The man is a master storyteller that makes you want to quickly turn the pages to find out what happens and yet linger over the shapely sentences.

With the Magus it was the mysterious Godlike figure and his God Game that had me pulling my hair. What left me feeling almost exhausted trying to figure things out in this novel is its title heroine, Sarah Woodruff. Fowles at one point refers to her as his "protagonist" but it's really Charles Smithson who feels as if he's at the center of the novel. He, at least, I felt I had a handle on. But Sarah? All I can say is she's the most frustrating, inexplicable, maddening heroine I've read since Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. For the life of me I can't figure her out. Although a friend who read and loved the book told me that's rather the point. I found the women in The Magus rather unreal too, and am not sure if Fowles just is making at root a feminist point about the unreality of the women men construct in their mind, or just doesn't get women. (Although Ernestine Freeman and other minor female characters did feel more real.) At the very least, Sarah does leave a reader with something to chew on. ( )

I didn't expect to like this very much. A post-modern take on the Victorian novel? Victorian novels are awkward enough, sometimes, without adding post-modernism -- and besides, I'm not a fan of post-modernism. All that stuff about alienating the reader annoys me; why would I read something to be alienated from it? Fiction, for me, tends to go firmly in the escapism category, not the "making me think" category.

But John Fowles wasn't too heavy-handed about it. I didn't find it a chore to read, and it didn't take me very long at all. It's a kind of modern comment on Victorian sensibilities. The main characters are interesting enough. Mostly Sarah, since she's mostly kept an enigma.

The fact that it has the author as a character would mostly annoy me (see also: Money by Martin Amis), but actually, the intervention isn't all that annoying or alienating. The multiple endings are interesting, and even though I don't really like that device, I appreciate the point it makes about storytelling.

I'd probably have much more clever things to say about this if I waited until I started studying it, but... honest first reactions. ( )

John Hurt is The Narrator in John Fowles' tale of forbidden passions in Victorian Dorset. ( )

John Hurt is The Narrator in John Fowles' tale of forbidden passions in Victorian Dorset. ( )