John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

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Book Review, God-Game, John Fowles, Omniscient narrator, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Victorian set fiction

Class and gender politics, Darwin and god-game narration

I have read and re-read John Fowles’ The Magus, roughly every five to ten years, since first reading it in my early twenties, finding it (and still finding it) a powerful book. Yet, curiously, I had never re-read the very first Fowles I encountered, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, although this was also a book I valued highly. A simple matter of probably being a library read, rather than bought, so not on my shelves and able to be easily re-read.

Fowles was always a thinker, as much as a writer of novels: philosophy, politics, psychology, history, science, sociology, ethics, natural history, as well, of course, as the arts, he is always writing ‘about stuff’ as well as inhabiting the craft of narrative literary fiction, the understanding of characters in place and time, and the relationships between them. Still, well thumbed, on my shelves is The Aristos, sentences and paragraphs about some of the topics which interested him, many of which were explored in his novels.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman was of course made into a successful film, one indeed which in filmic terms managed to explore some of the ideas about the novel itself which forms a part of the book.

And what a very satisfying book it is. We are of course well used to writers writing about writing in the course of their novels, trying out different forms, books within books, mind games, sophistication, but at the time of publication (1969) this was far rarer, particularly in a book which was both literary and popular

                             The Cobb, Lyme Regis

The setting is Lyme Regis, and the time, potent in that place, 1867. Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published 8 years earlier. Fossil hunting was a pursuit eagerly taken up by amateur scientists, male and female, of liberal persuasions. Palaeontology was verifying Darwin. And Lyme Regis, part of the Jurassic Coastline, was the perfect place for such searchers.

                      The Undercliff, Lyme Regis

Charles Smithson is such a gentleman. He comes from aristocratic lineage, though his fortune is not quite what it was. He has recently become engaged to Ernestina Freeman, the grand-daughter of a moderately successful draper. Two generations later, the Freemans are extremely wealthy. Fowles is exploring many things, but class and its aspirations and the evolution of a society which had been fossilised, and is now rapidly changing, is one of them. So is, particularly, women and sexuality a major theme. Smithson and Freeman have come to Lyme to stay with Ernestina’s aunt on a holiday. Into the settled world of the happy couple comes a catalyst – The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sarah Woodruff is the daughter of a farmer who wished to better himself. She was educated beyond her station and became a governess. But a mystery, and shame, is connected with her, and her reputation has been compromised through an unfortunate connection. Impropriety may or may not have happened, but the suspicion of improperness, in that generally closed society, is enough to cause shock and prurient interest.

So…….on the one hand, what we have is a kind of triangle, with a historical setting. Into which, Fowles inserts himself, as novelist, reminding us this is a story, making comments from a twentieth century viewpoint, on both his own society and the Victorian one – asking us to see our society through Victorian eyes, to constantly weigh and balance what our society and that society also, has lost and gained, compared to each other. He interferes further, showing the reader other possibilities, different trajectories for his fiction

Micraster decipiens fossil

There is a wonderful push and pull of the immersion of narrative literary fiction, particularly as Sarah’s character is a particularly fascinating one, and the push and pull between Charles, Sarah, Ernestina also has another relationship linked within it – Sam, Charles’ manservant, Mary, Ernestina’s aunt, Mrs Tranter’s, maid – there is a lot of mobility of class, a lot of stagnation resisting change, going on, and it all has echoes with evolutionary theory.

Of course to us any Cockney servant called Sam evokes immediately the immortal Weller; and it was certainly from that background that this Sam had emerged. But thirty years had passed since Pickwick Papers first coruscated into the world. Sam’s love of the equine was not really very deep

Fowles playfully, successfully, also involves the reader in the dichotomies between immersion, and a novelish version of Brechtian alienation – reminding us this is fiction, taking us into identifying and empathising with character, caught up in journey, only to make us question again what is going on.

The tensions between immersion and the new novel (nouveau roman), both debunking and revealing the omniscient god narrator really work. Fowles feels as if he talks directly to the reader, not talks down to them, and there is a curious sense of the invented characters being both real, and not real, literary creations. Head, heart, viscera all engaged

The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman Amazon UK
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Amazon USA

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John Fowles – The Magus

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Archetypes, Book Review, God-Game, Heroic Journey, John Fowles, Mythology, The Magus

We shall not cease from exploration……………

John Fowles’ The Magus has come at me again, demanding to be re-read, from several directions.

A while ago I was asked to guest write something for another blog about literature and place. The Magus came immediately to mind as the book with such a powerful setting that it prevented me from visiting Greece, specifically island Greece, for decades, because it had set up such a vision that I was afraid reality could not possibly deliver the transcendent quality of light and landscape promised:

When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was extremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile. It seemed to corrode, not cleanse. It was like being at the beginning of an interrogation under arc-lights; already I could see the table with straps through the open doorway, already my old self began to know that it wouldn’t be able to hold out. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell head over heels, totally and for ever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived……..this sinister-fascinating, this Circe-like quality of Greece…..in Greece landscape and light are so beautiful, so all-present, so intense, so wild, that the relationship is immediately love-hatred, one of passion.

So wrote Nicholas Urfe, the first-person narrator of Fowles’ god-game, roman-a-clef mysteriously powerful, iconic second novel.

I had been primed for Greece, since childhood; Greek (not Roman) mythology, the Greek Pantheon had obsessed me from the age of seven. Mary Renault’s books about Ancient Greeks, which I read in my early teens, continued a sense of longing for a land I had never seen, but one with a mysterious, awe-inspiring, curious combination of powerful light which revealed and yet mistily, dreamily, hid, at one and the same time. My teens also exposed me to Alain Fournier’s melancholy, lost-Eden, elusive Le Grand Meaulnes. And somehow these all had a connection with each other. The mist of the Fournier, the lost domaine, somehow linked to the light of Greece.

In a foreword to a revised version of The Magus, which Fowles wrote some years later, he explained how influenced he had been by the Fournier. The feeling I had had, all along, of the French book behind the Greek set one, though so very different, was real.

So…….to Greece, or not, we must go (or not go)

In the end, I did, though not to Spetses, the island which was the springboard for The Magus’ setting, Phraxos.

And MY island, another one of the many which is the visiting place for rich Athenians with second homes and within-Greece holidays, remains un-named here, my secret place, to be returned to I hope one day. Suffice it to say it is one of the many small islands which is by all accounts sacred to Aphrodite, and has history going back thousands of years, though it had not (when I was there) become a developed tourist destination.

Flicr, Commons: Spetses – Peter Levi’s Photostream

The transformational power of the light and ancient potency of Greek Islands is not, however, the only profound engagement with landscape within this book. Another, central section involves a darker engagement with a transforming experience of ‘the living god’ (whatever that might mean) in the isolation and darkness of Norwegian forest

Fjord, Tromso, Wiki Commons

The Magus is undoubtedly a book which is going to be most potent for a reader who embarks on its journey when young and unformed, when the sense of the possibility of not only choices to be made in the HOW you will live your life, but WHO you are to live your life, are potent. And it is (possibly) a book of even more resonance for a young man than it is for a young woman, as the selfish, cynical, faux-existentialist decadent central character, the narrator, is male.

But (I think this is probably the fourth or maybe fifth time I have returned to the book) it is one which still has the power to allure, to puzzle, and to bear re-reading again.

In brief, the well written story concerns the disaffected Urfe, a man with a wayward and careless, though unrealistically Romantic attitude to women – locked in an idea of The Woman, so that he cannot stay within what a relationship with a real woman might mean, what loving, as opposed to in love, might mean. Urfe is a product of the stultified 50s British class system. An Oxbridge graduate, a teacher at minor public schools, he takes a post teaching English at a school on ‘Phraxos’, an isolated Greek island.

Botticelli – Birth of Venus

There he encounters a mysterious Greek, an older man, urbane, wealthy, steeped in the arts, philosophy, a degree of learning which is more ancient than Renaissance. A man who fulfils the roles of guru, trickster, enchanter, and through whose mind-games Urfe learns. It is almost impossible to explain the power – cerebrally, emotionally, viscerally of this book. The reader, over and over, like Urfe, is stretched, deceived, seduced, puzzled – and within this story Fowles is also creating transformations for reader as well as his central character.

He (Fowles) either displays a certain arrogance towards his reader (no spoon-feeder he), or he expects reading to BE something to work to transform, not merely to entertain, and instead RESPECTS the reader’s capacity to make that journey. Untranslated passages of Latin, French, Italian, Greek, are casually strewn through the text, not to mention many allusions to artistic, musical and literary classical pieces. Reading Fowles in a Google world is fairly easy, with the ability to search for, and translate, the quotes, the references, but, at the time of writing, if you did not have that wide learning more work needed to be done in order to better understand.

Kali by Piyal Kundu. Wiki Commons

In its time it was unlike anything I had read. Now, the novelist as trickster, the novelist who twists and turns the reader, making them work, whilst they unfold their fabulous immersion, is using devices we are more used to. But in the unfolding story in The Magus, time and again the reader is NOT given answers, any more than Urfe is, all is ambiguity – and even when Urfe does unravel answers, he will say ( for example) in the solving of a crossword clue how someone felt/reacted to the solving of the clue – but the reader is not given the solution, and left to work it out. These various little stings are devices to make the reader participate in what they are reading.

Perhaps nowhere does Fowles throw the refusal to ‘black and white’ to ‘wrap’ to tie up and produce a fixed narration more, than in the deliberate ambiguity of the end.

Many anguished letters to Fowles via his publisher, many student dissertations, over the years, were produced, arguing and debating the ‘what happened’

Fowles deliberately left this open. ‘Life’, unlike Hollywood, does not have wraps

Despite the fact there are always an infinite number of new must-read books, this is STILL one I will return to again, even though this last re-read has broken the back of my paperback, replete with its many, many underlinings, each added to on subsequent re-reads. Judicious use of sellotape will be needed for the NEXT read through. And, NO this is never one for the Kindle, since there is something so potent in the measure of each of my reading journeys, viewable by changing pens in underline

Despite (of course) some of the flaws due to the ‘of its time’ this remains an unusually potent, astonishing reading experience.

The Magus Amazon UK
The Magus Amazon USA