Rating: 
Summary: Living in the Moment
Review: This novel is at once a retrospective and a prospective, a narrative that ultimately erases the temporal boundaries between the Victorian era and the modern reader's present moment. Fowles goes considerably beyond a novelist such as A. S. Byatt and even most historians in painting the portrait of an era and its citizens as well as evoking the multifarious "Victorian sensibility," with its ambivalence about social class, morality, progress, science, religion, and, of course, sex. The affair between Charles Smithson, amateur gentleman paleontologist, and Sarah Woodruff, alluring, forbidden "outcast," is, in many respects, no more than a ruse (readers who express disappointment at the ending have no doubt swallowed too much of the bait, reading the novel as conventional romance). The epigraph to the final chapter, Matthew Arnold's "True Piety Is Acting What One Knows," can be taken as a key to the story's compelling theme and purpose. The narrative is a variation on the quest pattern, with the salvation of the story's everyman-protagonist at stake. Moreover, his progress from ignorance to self-knowledge, contrary to Marxist theory and, for that matter, inexorable Darwinian laws of natural selection, requires that he separate himself from his "age," the very culture that has formed him, defined him, and threatens to deform him. The climax in the story is not Charles' meeting with Sarah in the home of the Rossetti's but his epiphany, in Chapter 48, while viewing a Crucifix in the sanctuary of a church. At this moment he sees his preoccupation with fossils as representative of his society's fixation on custom, externals, and respectability at the expense of the interior self and its own priorities. Charles and Sarah find their heart's bliss "through" but certainly not "with" each other. I read this novel at the same time I was reading "The English Patient," Michael Ondaatje's poetic novel that challenges spatial boundaries much as Fowles' narrative does the same with temporal ones. Ondaatje takes fewer chances, constructing a fantastic, impressionistic narrative that makes very few mistakes and admittedly casts a lingering spell. Fowles', on the other hand, risks a lot, especially with his frequent, self-referential intrusions into the narrative--potentially alienating some readers, whether on grounds that he's violated the implict author-reader contract or that he's naively "postmodernist." Regardless, Fowles' novel is the richer, greater achievement, and ultimately the less contrived and pretentious as well. "The French Lieutenant's Woman" is capable of satisfying at many levels. It offers a comprehensive history of the Victorian era, a Dickensian gallery of characters, an dramatization of the faith-doubt struggle found in the poetry of Tennyson and Arnold, a critique of Victorian and modern cultural malaise, a postmodernist literary conceit, an archetypal journey with an existentialist twist. Above all, the attentive reader of this allusive, multi-layered, yet remarkably focused story will be rewarded with a unique understanding of narrative and the reader's place within it. The narrator's offering the reader a choice between two endings has the effect of "liberating" the narrative and relating it to the examined life of the reader's own present. It's difficult to see how a triumph such as this could be excluded from any short list of greatest novels written in English during the second half of the twentieth century.
Rating:
Summary: The genuine article
Review: Yep, this is it: a true twentieth century masterpiece. The first time I read this at the age of 16, I stayed up most of the night to finish it, as I had with _The Magus_. I got the heroine mixed up in the personal mythology of my mind with my high school girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, Anais Nin, and all that is eternally mysterious and wonderful about women. Having read the book three or four more times, I am much better able to appreciate the ideas -- existential, Darwinian, Marxist -- that fit into the web of a rollicking good story. This is a novel that punches the head as unerringly as the heart. And don't forget the element of PLAY: Fowles has said this novel was written by a man who was very tired of novels and the usual constraints under which they were written. So there are THREE endings: a false, everything-tidied-up-as-it-would-have-been-in-a-true-Victorian-novel ending about two-thirds through the book; and two opposing endings at the finish. Fowles reportedly even wrote a farcical chapter in the style of Alice in Wonderland in which the narrator chases after the hero with an axe ... but his wife and other advisors made him leave it out. I hope we will someday get to see that one. Why did the latest publisher put a cute blonde on the cover! (I'm assuming she is NOT meant to depict the secondary love interest, Charles's fiancee.) This is almost as bad an aesthetic decision as casting Meryl Streep in the movie version, though she made an admirable attempt to be Sarah. Try to get a copy with the original cover art -- a choppy woodcut of a brunette with a distant gaze -- and that will get you launched into the story in the right mood.
| 
