by John Fowles

isbn: 0316291161
subject: Fiction and Literature
finished: 3/17/2002

Good historical fiction vividly evokes a different time. The French Lieutenant's Woman is like that; Fowles is a very good writer, and he must have spent an awful lot of time learning about Victorian England to be able to pull this novel off. It's about Charles and Ernestina, a young, happy couple, engaged to be married. Of course there's a catch: Charles becomes acquainted with Sarah, a woman who was disgraced by her relationship with a Frenchman. At first he only pities her, but he inevitably becomes more deeply involved.

Fowles' books espouse a particular view of the path to enlightenment (one that is much more explicit in The Magus), that it cannot be accomplished through normal experience but rather requires deception and betrayal. Although this book is nominally about the title character, it's really about Charles, the society that produced him, and the process by which he comes to know himself. The narrator even says as much, and he is a particularly obtrusive narrator: for example, there are constant, erudite discussions comparing Victorian society to our own (or rather, to the time at which Fowles wrote), and the book has three different endings -- one imagined by Charles and the other two supplied by the narrator. Furthermore, that narrator at one point goes so far as to put himself into the story -- a pretty bizarre metafictional device. Fowles takes a big risk by playing all these tricks, but the novel still works, and I'm sure it's worth a second, more careful read.