The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

I can’t say this was a terrible book, parts of it were interesting, but I will say it seems a pretty pointless book as far as I could tell.  I have read one other book by John Fowles , The Collector, and if you care to read something by him I recommend that book much more highly than I would this one.  I remember it as being rather well written and a compelling story.  In this book, Fowles insists on a number of pretentious devices.  The first one, starting each chapter with a quotation from another literary source was at times puzzling and more often just annoying.  The second device was inserting himself into the story as the author of the story.  He makes a couple of appearances and writes and rewrites what happens in the story.  I found no reason for this, but I’m sure he thought he was being clever or something.  I did not find it so.

One of the themes of the book also seems pretty heavy-handed in that there is some point about English gentlemen in the Victorian age and how the lives they lead are becoming obsolete.  There is a need for them to adapt to the changes that are happening around them if they are going to survive and thrive.  The “hero” of the story, Charles Smithson, is an amateur paleontologist, interested in fossils.  Get it?  Yeah.  He also is very interested in Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, again really subtle.

The French Lieutenant is a sailor who ends up in England
after a shipwreck and never actually appears in the
story at all.

The “heroine” of the story, I guess is, the title character, Sarah Woodruff.  I really hate to overuse the word annoying so let’s see what else I might come up with to describe her – irritating, disturbing, pathetic.   That is a good start.  I’m so annoyed by her as a character I don’t feel the need to put myself through providing more details about her here-- if you are that interested read the book. 

I remember when this book was made into a movie with Meryl Streep.I think it was kind of a hit.  I can’t imagine the movie being in anyway good if it follows the book closely.  Don’t know, haven’t seen it and don’t intend to.  I can remember being annoyed with Meryl Streep for two movies I’d never seen (this one and Sophie’s Choice came out about the same time I think) mostly because the trailers had her looking unbearably long-suffering.  Two more pathetic characters you could not hope to find but at least in Sophie’s case she had very good reason – surviving the Holocaust, having a crazy boyfriend, etc.  The FLW bit gets really old, really fast. 

 Okay, so maybe I need to reassess my statement at the beginning of this post.  I can’t recommend you read it or even find a reason why it would be on the list at all.  Even though it was 93 on Radcliffe’s Rival list, Kipling’s Kim (95) and Lewis’s Main Street (99) are far superior to this one.

Next week:  Ernie finishes his personal reading list with A High Wind in Jamaica