The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

I read John Fowles’s third novel (after The Collector and The Magus) in the ‘70s. I might have seen the Oscar-bait movie that came of it too, with Meryl Streep. The only thing I remembered when I was coming back to The French Lieutenant’s Woman recently is that it’s more genteel than the first two, but comes with its own bag of literary stuntwork. Fowles attempts a 19th-century Victorian gothic romance, set in 1867. He gets the stuffy language down reasonably well and manages to keep it readable too (though not as well as Susanna Clarke would do some decades later). The narrative voice—seemingly standard third-person omniscient—often slips the reins, letting us know he is writing a century later, implicitly and even explicitly comparing the eras. A revelation to one character, for example, is likened to a nuclear strike on a city. Eventually, John Fowles himself climbs down off his narrative perch and injects himself into the story, telltale beard and all. It’s done gracefully enough but you have to wonder to what purpose, beyond showing off. The novel is surprisingly effective and absorbing. Both times I read it I didn’t want to put it down. The story is about a governess, Sarah Woodruff, in a seaside port who appears to have been deranged by a failed illicit love affair with, yes, a French lieutenant. He appears to have abandoned her. You have to use the word “appears” a lot with this one because many things are not as they seem. Fowles never entirely escapes his idea that life is better now (that is, in 1967), which is not entirely convincing even though I’m inclined to it myself. A gentleman shows up, with likely a rank to inherit and engaged already, and falls in love with Woodruff. She is fiercely independent, perversely protecting what we now (post-1967) would call her personal agency. The story takes a lot of twists and turns. Fowles has created a complex and interesting character in Woodruff and a good supporting cast with the rest. The ending is a model of ambiguity and a little frustrating for the cold calculations of it. I’m not wild about the trickery—I like my omniscient narrators anonymous and out of the fray. After that it's closer to a romance that’s too close to cheesy. But it’s never cheesy, only close, and it’s always compulsively readable. But here my adventures with Fowles ended. I think I attempted but never finished Daniel Martin and that was it. But now I’ve read both The Magus and this one a couple times each. Has to mean something.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Magus (1966)

John Fowles's thick slab of high concept now seems rather more pulpy than literary, playing more successfully to the obvious tropes of a thriller than to the finely wrought conundrums of human psychology that it seems to be after (let alone the kind of literary pyrotechnical sleight of hand Fowles would attempt later in such fare as The French Lieutenant's Woman). Its gender politics are both central to the story and outdated, likely a permanently fatal problem for it now. Nevertheless, it makes for a fun and baffling romp through a confusing world of illusion, paradox, and deception, the kind of big fat story into which one simply falls. Inspired, according to Fowles, by the strangely alluring novel Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, it tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young and dourly unpleasant Oxford graduate student, who finds himself washed up with a teaching assignment on an isolated Mediterranean island. There he meets a mysterious wealthy recluse, Maurice Conchis, an older Greek man with a shrouded past, an intellectual bent, and sadistic tendencies, who has a predilection for staging scenes from something he calls "The Godgame," elaborate and often cruel set pieces designed to teach its target, usually Nicholas, some kind of lesson. As the games become more and more oppressive for Nicholas, they grow from a strange diversion that preoccupies him while he is on the island to a consuming, potentially traumatizing obsession that even begins to have dire effects on his life back in England. For the most part Fowles plays fair here. Even as the action remains as straightforward as it is weird, the real motivations behind it—who is who, who knows what, and why these things are even happening at all—remain an enthralling mystery that carries all its own momentum. The first time I read it, in my early 20s, I had a copy that was missing the last 120 pages, which about drove me batty and which I wasn't sure for some time wasn't just another trick engineered by Fowles. The second time through, more recently, I made sure ahead of time that I had a complete copy (recommend that you do too), and while it remained as diverting as ever I found it more difficult to enter into the fantasies whole. The resolution is not entirely free of disappointing cheats—mostly the kind of "you decide" ambiguities that more typically indicate an author who couldn't. Still, if the payoff is a bit of a letdown, the trip there tends to be anything but.

In case it's not at the library.