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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Frances Hardinge – The Lie Tree

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Book Review, Frances Hardinge, Gothic Fiction, The Lie Tree, Victorian set fiction, Young Adult Fiction

“Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies”

Frances Hardinge’s YA book, The Lie Tree, with its angry, highly intelligent, discounted central character, fourteen year old Faith Sunderly, is set in 1868, with a central theme involving scientific enquiry, fossil hunting, Darwin’s theories, their impact on faith, and the deepening realisation for the central character, that her life is unlikely to be what her character and abilities should fit her for, due to the unfair opportunities closed to her gender.

There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too

Hardinge won the Costa Children’s Book Category Prize with this – and, in fact, the Costa Judges also awarded it the Costa Book of The Year, the outright winner over the other category winners. And it is easy to see why

Firstly, she is a wonderfully rich literary writer, taking pleasure in rich language, gorgeous imagery – and giving huge pleasure to the reader. She has created a brilliant central character – awkward, fierce, resentful, loving, frustrated, and far more intelligent than most of the other inhabitants of her world, male and female, her contemporaries and the adults.

Faith is absolutely believable as an educated, intelligent, individual middle class girl on the edge of womanhood in Victorian England and she also stands for what it might have been like for many young girls of similar intelligence and independent thinking, rammed into the corseted embrace of narrow opportunities and confined expectations

For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though. Girls don’t know about sailing, he would say suddenly. Girls don’t know about the moon……Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of expertise breaking apart like an ice floe

So Hardinge’s book inhabits a real society at a certain time, but is also very much a fantasy historical novel, and a kind of detective story. It’s a mash-up which for the most part works very well indeed, and has much to absorb and fascinate the adult reader as well.

Faith, her winsome, eyelash batting, flirtatious mother, her far less intelligent younger brother, Howard, and her austere, secretive clergyman fossil hunting father leave their Kent home under some sort of secret cloud of impending disgrace. The Reverend Sunderly has achieved fame (and in fact, notoriety) around the discovery of a fossil which appears to verify the existence of the biblical Nephilim. Sunderly and family decamp to Vane, one of the Channel Islands (an invention which seems as if it must in fact exist!) which is a hub of archaeological interest.

Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her, vast cloud patterns rolling and colliding above while she watched

There are darker matters afoot, and this is much more than a working out of Victorian reality – Hardinge injects dark Gothic fantasy into the mix, including a search, by several interested and fanatical parties, for a fabled and curious tree, The Mendacity Tree, which grows in complete darkness, has frightening hallucinogenic fruit and may even possibly be The Tree Of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is even a beloved pet snake.

Along the way, murder, suicide, good old fashioned lust for riches, thwarted passions, revenge and a small society turning on those who flout its conventions flicker in and out of view. Hardinge also skilfully exploits that favourite crime-fiction trope, the country house murder – in this case, as the shenanigans which are going on happen against the background of a small island, the list of suspects, and the motives for the various mysteries which will need unravelling, are dizzyingly busy.

My only reservations about this glitteringly absorbing book came in the last 40 or 50 pages, where the pace of plot, ravelling up and being unravelled, became a bit too much for me, and the sense of galloping towards the tie up, the reveals, the explanations for the first time made me realise that I was reading a book for a younger market, perhaps one more desirous of fast, dynamic, dramatic action

The Lie Tree Amazon UK
The Lie Tree Amazon USA

Sarah Moss – Bodies of Light

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Bodies of Light, Book Review, Feminism, Pre-Raphaelites, Sarah Moss, Victorian set fiction

Let us not forget the sisters who struggled before us

I’m at a loss to know where to start to adequately praise this excellent, layered novel from Sarah Moss, who has the stunning ability to write novels ‘about deep and complex stuff’ , engage with both the heart and the head, create real, properly dimensional, complex characters, write beautifully and unindulgently, and do all this within the discipline of a pacey narrative drive

Moss’s territory is the complex lives of girls and women, caught between their own personal identity, their calling, vocation and creativity, and the counter-pull, whether of a society which limits and curtails women, or the counter-pull imposed by the biology of mothering and the fierce demands of children

I read, some time ago, Moss’s last book, Night Waking, which I found brilliant, distressing, disturbing, but for me, there were some irritations, which pulled me back from 5 stars. Night Waking concerned a professional couple, with 2 small children, engaged in their work on a Scottish island. There was the tension of the children, affecting, differently, the mother and the father, with the mother least able to ‘follow her own star’. That book also twinned a long ago thread from the nineteenth century. And in fact, that thread skeins back to Bodies Of Light, her latest book. Though there is no need to have read the previous one. Except, you might later want to. Or indeed, as I shall do, revisit the earlier one.

Bodies of Light is set primarily in Manchester and London, between the mid-1850s to the 1880s The central family is that of Alfred Moberley, an artist and craftsman, and his increasingly successful circle, and Elizabeth, his wife, an idealistic Christian woman with a passionate commitment to female rights, to the burgeoning movements to achieve equality of opportunity for women in the field of education, primarily, and also to expose the vicious hypocrisy of the sex trade, criminalising prostitutes but not their clients. Elizabeth and Alfred have two daughters, Alethea and May, whom Elizabeth effectively sacrifices to the cause.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, first UK female doctor

This book is primarily the story of Ally, Alethea, who is raised to do her duty, by a mother who effectively resents and dislikes her, except she is the one who is raised to be the sacrificial victim for the better rights of future generations of women. Ally is one of the first groups of women to train to become doctors, so that women, particularly poor women, should be treated by members of their own sex, respecting their modesty, respecting their vulnerability.

Elizabeth is a deeply unpleasant, sadistic woman, but as a clear demonstration of Moss’s subtlety, we meet Elizabeth as she is on the eve of her marriage to Moberley, with his much more expressive, but weaker, nature. What Moss does is to show us Elizabeth’s own, steely upbringing, child of another mother wedded to fierce ideas. So one strand which returned for me, again and again, is how difficult might be the lives of the children of idealists, who are prepared to sacrifice, not only their own lives, but also the lives of others for the sake of ‘the future generations’ These are people implacable, made of steel, sometimes without the softness of empathy. Hard people to be around, often, but the people who forge beneficial and forward movements (as well, at times, as retrograde ones) The believers in isms, the ends-justifies-the-meansers.

And I believe that generations of our sisters yet to be born will thank us for what we give. And indeed what we take from others. There is no principle worth having that does not exact a price. We must recognise the cost of our principles and take responsibility for that cost. We must not deny the consequences of our own actions

Ally is a complex, damaged character, at times terrifyingly fragile, but she too, has steel. In her case, the steeliness is visited against herself. Her journey is at times unbearable, as is being reminded of the real struggle many made in order to win rights of opportunity for those who came after.

Just occasionally, she feels herself on the crest of a wave, the weight of water bearing her along. She herself has only a small role, but the fellowship of women is a tide, and it cannot be turned

But I don’t want to make this sound too worthy a read – Moss’s craft is that she is a superb novelist, and for the most part paints her characters and her story with complex and beautiful shapes and colours, rather than in big bold cartoon strokes of black and white.

Berthe Morisot; The Cradle, 1870

Perhaps nowhere did I get this sense more strongly than in the character of Elizabeth Moberley. I was reminded, in some ways, of the horrible Mrs Jellaby in Dickens’ Bleak House, who sacrifices her own children’s well-being because she is more concerned with doing philanthropic works. Dickens makes Jellaby one of his enjoyably ‘love to hate and poke fun at’ figures. But we never really see her as a real person, and understand her psychology from the inside. We stand outside, watch, judge and, in superiority, laugh at her. Elizabeth, by contrast, hateful as she is, came from somewhere, and Moss makes us empathise and understand the terror of the young mother who did not want to be a mother, and was terrified of her own feelings.

She woke up thinking of knives, took only porridge for breakfast, because even a butter-knife seemed a bad idea. She is still thinking of knives. The baby is still crying…

She is weak. She is slovenly. The baby has defeated her. If she goes out she is afraid she will buy laudanum, and if she stays in the house, there are knives. And fire, and the staircase. And windows high under the gable. The baby cries. She cannot pick it up because of the windows and the staircase, and she cannot walk away because of the knives and the laudanum

I particularly liked the structure of this book, each chapter illustrated in the description and later provenance of a piece of artwork, either painted or crafted by Moberley, or his artist friend, Aubrey West. The painting or crafted object is a capture of the story and subtext of the ensuing chapter.

Google Search was, as ever, of interest

A wonderful, rich, book, which is at the same time an easy to read one, challenging much thinking, much feeling, but without any self-indulgence. Just as her central character, doctor in training Ally, was learning how to be a surgeon, and master the arts of scalpel and suture, so Moss demonstrates equally precision with her pen, knowing what to cut out as well as what to stitch together

Bodies of Light Amazon UK
Bodies of Light Amazon USA

Michelle Lovric – The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

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Book Review, Dublin, Michelle Lovric, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, Venice, Victorian set fiction

Story, character, setting and language as ebullient as those flowing tresses

Michelle Lovric’s ‘The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters’ is a book which almost appropriates the adjective ‘fecund’ to itself by way of description, so much does its language teem with rich, sappy, loamy, fruitfulness, even to a glorious abandon of excess.

Set in the mid 1860’s, starting in rural Southern Ireland, then moving mainly between Dublin and Venice, the Harristown seven Swiney sisters are impoverished young girls with a particular gift – each has a seductive, ostentatious, over-abundant cascade of twisty, tumbling, seductive Pre-Raphaelite tresses, reaching, when loose to between 4 and 5 feet long.

This is at a time when women’s hair was bound, confined, and kept private and well-controlled. But, unbound, that hair was the repository of lust and desire, fetishism and secret libido.

Lady Lilith. Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The sisters can also sing. Their lustrous hair and their performance skills are a potential exit from the world of poverty, And also a potential route for them to both exploit and, mainly, be the ones exploited. The sisters are wonderfully named, and wonderfully, richly, characterised. They are the raven haired, dark hearted Darcy, twins Berenice and Enda, violent enemies to each other, Pertilly who would have been happy to stay a homebody in the kitchen, limpid blonde Oona, Idolatry (Ida) the youngest, a little simple and disturbed, with a feel for the violin, and the lustrous, creative, flame haired Manticory, who narrates this rollicking tale and is the writer of the shows they are forced into performing.

This forcing comes initially from Darcy, who rules her sisters with cruel words, slaps and punches and has a fierce quest for riches and power, but also, there are a little cluster of men who find ways, both sexual and financial, to exploit the sisters.

This is a Gothic, operatic book by virtue of the intensity of feeling and opulence, sumptuousness of language, the reaching of heights of ecstasy, the plummeting the darkness of jealousy, violence, betrayal and murder. But the whole is delivered with such vivacity, such joyousness and juicy humour and playfulness of language that it becomes a wild, frolicsome read, despite the savage undercurrents.

And lest the term ‘Gothic’ should fret potential readers who might fear the pages may romp with werewolves vampires zombies and such other silly company – fear not, the ‘Gothic’ relates to the architecture of the language, full of delicious crenellations and furbelows. There ARE monsters within these pages, and they are all of a very human kind, with no need for the agency of magic.

It is (particularly in the earlier part of the book, before the sisters attempt to raise themselves – or Darcy whips them into raising themselves – into society) the richness of Irish rhythms and vernacular, the daily heightened delight in turn of phrase, the lovely wicked language which grabbed me into this book.

Here is the devilish (but caustically FUNNY) Darcy, in a typical insult for insult match with the archest of all her arch enemies, ‘the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt’

May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them’
‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort
‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear’ shouted Darcy’and slap you in its shade’
‘It is yerself that filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’
‘Stones on your meaty bones!’
Then the runt wished black sorrow of Darcy’s guardian angel ‘all red-eyed from shame at havin’ to do wid ye!’

I’m afraid I was snorting and chuckling out loud with periodic bouts of such inventive insulting

The book was inspired by an American group of fabulously haired sisters, at the tail end of the nineteeth century, who had a similar rags to riches and fall from grace journey, linked with exploitation, by men who saw they could be manipulated into being cash cows. They too were clearly eccentric, individual, fascinating, tragic, and lived operatically.

The Seven Sutherland Sisters

Lovric is a crafted storyteller to her bones, and I thoroughly enjoyed this effervescent read

I received this from the Amazon Vine UK programme, as an ARC. Sláinte , Vine!

This is released now in the UK, Statesiders have to wait till August, but it WILL be worth it!

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Amazon UK
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Amazon USA