The title of The French Lieutenant's Woman used to summon up a kind of generic image in my mind, love in the time of war, separation, long years bathed in tears, reconciliation. You know the type? It was the 'Lieutenant' at work in these subconscious conjurings, possibly. Be that as it may, it was a book that I thought would be an elegantly-written bland little novel that would possibly have languished indefinitely in a corner of my bookshelf had Tito, whose taste in literature I greatly respect, not praised it to the skies.
Let me just say at the outset that having read it, I now think that The French Lieutenant's Woman is an exquisitely written book. Whip-smart, full of literary Easter Eggs that should make it a delight to revisit, and extremely humane. I am impatient of the kind of writing that sacrifices characters and their inner lives at the altar of Quip. I had suspected Terry Pratchett to be of the same school before having read him, and absolutely charmed to find myself mistaken. The French Lieutenant's Woman is avowedly postmodern, the narrator revealing himself in sudden insertions to refer to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes. He does, then, have a more well-travelled air than Sir TerryP's kindly funny voice. He sees through his protagonists' momentary weaknesses and more entrenched streaks of folly with a more unrelenting eye. But throughout the book runs his narratorial flourishes, as if to say, 'Now that you have seen the trick, let me show you how I did it. This, reader, is how I pulled the wool over your eyes. But now you see me pulling it back.' It is an exhilarating, exasperating experience. It never quite lets you settle down. An unreliable narrator who proves himself the most conscientious, never quite letting you forget that these fallible characters, they are but one possibility thought up by one mind, and there might be many more possible beginnings and ends.
What is absolutely surprising is that while your illusion is broken, time and again, none of the pleasure is lost. It is not as if a traditional plot has suddenly been ruptured, and you have the sense of a feast interrupted by a cook intent on telling you the recipes. Fowles breaks the illusion of time, of space, of reality - repeatedly weaving away to wonder who and how Character X or Y might have been in a different time. But the digression concluded, he lets you sink back into the very narrative that he undercut just a moment back. Strangely enough, he succeeds. You smile at the cleverness of the narrator, tip a hat at his erudition, and are again rapt in the acts of these fickle little 'characters' very soon.
These characters inhabit the years 1867-1868, and it is no mean feat that you come away from a postmodern novel having understood the Victorian age a little better. At least, so I thought. I had wondered sometimes at The Odd Women, a novel I really liked, at whether the actions of the characters were quite 'realistic'. The French Lieutenant's Woman makes the notion of such wondering quite redundant. Yes, we might think they behaved in absurd ways, but here are the particulars of their circumstances - Fowles lays out. And the pieces start falling together. How they loved, how they courted, how they shamed, how they prayed - nothing is redundant if one is to truly attempt to understand. But how does one understand a time separated by the gulf of a century? Can one ever?
Fowles seems to try. But he is too deft a practitioner to not know where his craft falters. However keen be the vision, omniscience is always out of reach. We try to reach out to each other. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes the weight of all that we are required to be make us veer maddeningly out of the course of the happiness, or the closure, we think we deserve. Do we give up? Not necessarily, if Fowles is to be believed. For 'life...is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly...endured.'
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