Review: The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

At least I know how to spell 'lieutenant' now...?

I think I'd heard of this book before, in the vague way that a book's title is occasionally ingrained into the public consciousness, without any understanding of the content or theme of the novel. Such was The French Lieutenant's Wife. I'd heard of it, but what did I know about it? Nada.

(EDIT: And apparently I've still learned absolutely nothing as I keep calling it by the wrong title... )

Plot summary: Of all John Fowles' novels The French Lieutenant's Woman has received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, The French Lieutenant's Woman is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

I bought this after spotting it (and eleven other books - oops) in a charity shop, despite being completely unenlightened by the vagueness of the synopsis above. Even though I knew absolutely nothing about the plot, I simply had to read it based on how much I'd loved The Collector the year before. I'd adored John Fowles' formal yet chatty narrative, and the way his characters (although dislikeable) were brought to life. I knew at the time that I had to read more of his work. All of it, if possible.

And here we are. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a simpler plot than The Collector, at least prima facie. The book is set in Lyme Regis in the 1860s, and revolves around a young, recently engaged couple, Charles Smithson and Ernestina Freeman. In the same town, there's a young woman by the name of Sarah Woodruff who has been scorned for a scandal involving, you guessed it, a French lieutenant. 

That's it, really. That's the story. The beauty with this novel, however, isn't the plot, it's the beauty and ingenuity of the prose. It's sort of meta, or it would be if that didn't seem an inappropriate word to use regarding a setting of 1867. Instead of the dark, stream of consciousness narration present in The Collector, the narrator spends a lot of time talking directly to the reader, with phrases such as 'you'll have to excuse Charles, he was merely a product of his time.'

It has a similar tone to The Crimson Petal and the White, come to think of it. It's very much as if the narrator is guiding you along, nudging you to keep up and follow the characters. The author actually pops up as a minor character at one point, just to sit there and muse about the nature of novel-writing. It's odd, but not jarring.

It's balanced very well though, and stops short of becoming abstract. There's a definite story here and it's not difficult to follow, despite the frequent musings of the pecularities of the Victorian Age. If anything, that was my favourite thing, and it seems to be what has earned The French Lieutenant's Woman its glory.

She was a ploughman's daughter, fourth of eleven children who lived with their parents in a poverty too bitter to describe, her home a damp, cramped, two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak Eggardon. A fashionable young London architect now has the place and comes there for weekends, and loves it, so wild, so out-of-the-way, so picturesquely rural; and perhaps this exorcizes the Victorian horrors that took place there.

I hope so; those visions of the contented country labourer and his brood... were as stupid and pernicious a sentimentalization, therefore a suppression of reality, as that un our own Hollywood films of 'real' life... Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls the most when they are made by literature and art.

I can't find the quote that I actually wanted to share, but the frequent and direct comparisons between the Victorian era and the current time (well, the 1960s) are so naturally inserted into the text, and are so imminently readable, that I just devoured them.

Honestly, without them the book wouldn't be half as interesting. The plot is simple and the main character is profoundly irritating. Charles Smithson is just awful. One minute he loves Ernestina for her little quirks, the next he can't stand the exact same little quirks... ugh. And his attitude towards Sarah Woodruff also doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The ending is... odd. You're provided with an ending in the natural course of the novel, obviously, but then the author pops up and says 'but because I'm a writer, I can explore what also could have happened,' and then we're provided with two other endings. It doesn't state which is the 'real' one, but then that's sort of the point - Fowles states that because the whole thing is a work of fiction, each ending is as real or unreal as the next.

He's right, I suppose, but I do really prefer a fixed ending. 

It's fine though, my enjoyment of The French Lieutenant's Woman wasn't spoilt by Charles Woodruff nor John Fowles. Read this just for the prose, which reminds me quite a lot of The Crimson Petal and the White, with a smidge of The Collector. It's so, so well-written in such a unique manner, that I really do recommend that everybody pick it up.

Read my review of The Collector.

Review: The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury

I'm not sure how many of you watched David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive TV programme around New Year's, but if you didn't, you should. It was brilliant - David Attenborough wandering around the Kensington museum as various exhibits came to life. That prompted a conversation with a historian friend of mine about Richard Owen, the man that set up the museum in the first place... which led to me dragging this book down from my TBR.

Summary: In The Dinosaur Hunters, Deborah Cadbury brilliantly recreates the remarkable story of the bitter rivalry between two men: Gideon Mantell uncovered giant bones in a Sussex quarry, became obsessed with the lost world of the reptiles and was driven to despair. Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist, gave the extinct creatures their name and secured for himself unrivalled international acclaim.

First off, this is not really a book about dinosaurs. Obviously they feature significantly, but the focus of the book is about the key players in the fossil and bone discoveries (the titular hunters of the dinosaurs, one may assume). It's about their squabbles, outrages and hysterical fits as new scientific discoveries challenge the previously held Creationist views.

There are two camps - those who believe in evolution (although not necessarily referred to as such) and those who believe that view is blasphemous and some creatures are extinct because they were wiped out by the Deluge (Noah's flood). I should clarify that both of these groups are scientists. Educated men. All scientific schools of the time taught that God created the Earth as if it were Fact, so suddenly claiming that this may not be quite true was almost earth-shattering.

What amazed me was the many attempts to alter science to fit in with religion, not the other way round. Theories were dismissed by leading scientists, simply on the basis that it didn't fit in with the Bible. Not because they didn't want to create an uproar, but because they believed the Bible was fact. 

I'm not saying these things so we can all have a hearty laugh at religion - it just shocked me that there was such a huge backlash. Apparently the very fact that the dinosaurs had carnivorous teeth contravened God - theoretically reptiles were Created before Man (in Genesis), but meat-eating and killing only began after Adam sinned, so therefore the dinosaurs (pre-Adam) should not have needed meat teeth!

Buckland was concerned to explain why the Creator chose to fill the primitive world with evil carnivorous beasts. His very own evidence showed that the reptilian carnivores were furnished with 'organs for the purpose of capturing and killing their prey, instruments formed expressly for destruction'; Nature was hideously red in tooth and claw. He accepted that this was 'inconsistent with a Creation founded in Benevolence and tending to produce the greatest amount of enjoyment to the greatest number of individuals.' Nonetheless, he sought to reconcile even this to God's wisdom.  

Obviously I find this quite interesting... but I still had a problem connecting with The Dinosaur Hunters. It's written well, but very formally and with a huge amount of information-dumping. There's a lot of discussion about different rock types that I didn't understand but also had zero interest in. It's a heavy book that was occasionally difficult to follow.

I do appreciate the thoroughness of the research, quotes and discussion and perhaps it isn't aimed at a person with only a casual understanding of geology. The fact remains though that I struggled to want to pick up the book after I'd put it down. I wanted to have the knowledge it offered - I just didn't want to go through trying to read the damn thing.

To be fair, it does liven up towards the end, when both scientists are academically established and have moved on to a rivalry over actual dinosaurs instead of squabbling incomprehensibly over rock types. I was actually genuinely irate about Richard Owen's behaviour towards the work of other scientists. I know we have him to thank for the Natural History Museum, but that doesn't mean I have to like the man.

The end chapter which introduces Darwin, and therefore the downfall of Richard Owen, is wonderful. Natural selection and the concept than men evolved from primates was hugely shocking to Victorian England, especially as scientists like Owen had worked hard to ensure that God was still prevalent in Natural History.Deborah Cadbury paints a perfect picture of a desperate old man, scrabbling to keep hold of the reputation he forged by belittling others. It's actually quite moving and I felt the dredges of sympathy for him.

To conclude, this is a fairly heavy and frequently dry explanation of the rivalry between Richard Owen and Gideon Mantel. It is very, very thorough and yet still assumes that you already know a certain about about geological strata (as an example).  It becomes slightly easier towards the end and it's worth reading just for the last third of the book, which is very good indeed. This isn't a casual book but it is interesting.

 Visit The Natural History Museum, London, to learn more about Richard Owen.