Kelly's review

The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/760658.The_French_Lieutenant_s_Woman?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The French Lieutenant's Woman" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178127707m/760658.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/760658.The_French_Lieutenant_s_Woman?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The French Lieutenant's Woman</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10039.John_Fowles">John Fowles</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/9652298?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 4 of 5 stars I think the greatest strength of this book is the utter uniqueness of it. I don't think I've ever read a book like it. It is set in the Victorian year of 1867, and yet, the sensibility of the book is thoroughly grounded in the 1960s (when it was written). The language, metaphors, and focus of the book all come from the 1960s, and the actions of the characters are all given the lens of the highly visible author- who is in fact one of the major characters of the book (much in the style of Thackeray, though more personally done here, I think).
 
 The plot itself starts off as a flimsy Victorian melodrama, if one were to remove everything but the bare skeletons of the action from it: boy meets girl, boy is engaged to girl, boy meets mysterious amazing girl, boy suffers crisis of love, moral dilemmas abound... and then it develops into something else much more modern with modern situations and dilemmas. But it is how it is described that is the best p art of the book: the focus is on the philosophies, the problems, the context of the era. Fowles is deeply involved in trying to explain the actions of his characters with pages long meditations and research into the Victorian pysche, based on thinkers, papers, popular opinions and events of the era. For example, the main character, Charles, is an amateur scientist and is a very strong Darwinist. Fowles gets involved with class issues, capitalist society, poetry, the suffrage movement, feminism, and of course, the overarching focus of the book: sexuality and its repression and unrepression.
 
 (It is here that comes my only real criticism of the book: that at times the book is very dated to the 1960s in its utter obsession with sex and bohemia and "fuck the system!" kind of rhetoric. Which still rings with many today, so perhaps it isn't a problem for all. I just found it sort of threw me out of the magic of the story when he tried to make his characters 1960s type heroes.)
 
 Another large and fascinating part of the book is that John Fowles allows us to see him at work. He shows us the road not taken in statements like (but much more eloquently put than this): "Well... I could do this.. but that would betray the character.. but it is the formula.. where shall I go from here?" He lets the reader see behind the curtain, and see his process, lets them know that he recognizes what he is doing and what he could have done or should have done by convention. He muses on what the character might want, or what he might want, and the various conventions that an author has at his disposal to most effectively display what he wants to convey. I did not think that it threw me out of the book at all. It made it even more interesting, actually. 
 
 I'd recommend this book for even people who don't usually like Victorian literature. It has so modern a voice and discusses so many issues that we find of relevance today that perhaps your eyerolling can be kept to a minimum. 
 
 Ed Note the 2nd: This is really. really. good. What a unique perspective to put upon a Victorian novel: the 1960s sensibility. I'm loving this.
 
 Ed Note: I said this would go to the top of the to-read list, and so it did. I'm psyched to get to this. 
 
 Original: How is it possible that I have not read this book or heard of it? I am shocked and appalled. This moves up to the top of the to-read list. 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/94602?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Kelly's review
rating:

bookshelves: brit-lit, fiction
status: Read in January, 2008

I think the greatest strength of this book is the utter uniqueness of it. I don't think I've ever read a book like it. It is set in the Victorian year of 1867, and yet, the sensibility of the book is thoroughly grounded in the 1960s (when it was written). The language, metaphors, and focus of the book all come from the 1960s, and the actions of the characters are all given the lens of the highly visible author- who is in fact one of the major characters of the book (much in the style of Thackeray, though more personally done here, I think).

The plot itself starts off as a flimsy Victorian melodrama, if one were to remove everything but the bare skeletons of the action from it: boy meets girl, boy is engaged to girl, boy meets mysterious amazing girl, boy suffers crisis of love, moral dilemmas abound... and then it develops into something else much more modern with modern situations and dilemmas. But it is how it is described that is the best p art of the book: the focus is on the ph...more I think the greatest strength of this book is the utter uniqueness of it. I don't think I've ever read a book like it. It is set in the Victorian year of 1867, and yet, the sensibility of the book is thoroughly grounded in the 1960s (when it was written). The language, metaphors, and focus of the book all come from the 1960s, and the actions of the characters are all given the lens of the highly visible author- who is in fact one of the major characters of the book (much in the style of Thackeray, though more personally done here, I think).

The plot itself starts off as a flimsy Victorian melodrama, if one were to remove everything but the bare skeletons of the action from it: boy meets girl, boy is engaged to girl, boy meets mysterious amazing girl, boy suffers crisis of love, moral dilemmas abound... and then it develops into something else much more modern with modern situations and dilemmas. But it is how it is described that is the best p art of the book: the focus is on the philosophies, the problems, the context of the era. Fowles is deeply involved in trying to explain the actions of his characters with pages long meditations and research into the Victorian pysche, based on thinkers, papers, popular opinions and events of the era. For example, the main character, Charles, is an amateur scientist and is a very strong Darwinist. Fowles gets involved with class issues, capitalist society, poetry, the suffrage movement, feminism, and of course, the overarching focus of the book: sexuality and its repression and unrepression.

(It is here that comes my only real criticism of the book: that at times the book is very dated to the 1960s in its utter obsession with sex and bohemia and "fuck the system!" kind of rhetoric. Which still rings with many today, so perhaps it isn't a problem for all. I just found it sort of threw me out of the magic of the story when he tried to make his characters 1960s type heroes.)

Another large and fascinating part of the book is that John Fowles allows us to see him at work. He shows us the road not taken in statements like (but much more eloquently put than this): "Well... I could do this.. but that would betray the character.. but it is the formula.. where shall I go from here?" He lets the reader see behind the curtain, and see his process, lets them know that he recognizes what he is doing and what he could have done or should have done by convention. He muses on what the character might want, or what he might want, and the various conventions that an author has at his disposal to most effectively display what he wants to convey. I did not think that it threw me out of the book at all. It made it even more interesting, actually.

I'd recommend this book for even people who don't usually like Victorian literature. It has so modern a voice and discusses so many issues that we find of relevance today that perhaps your eyerolling can be kept to a minimum.

Ed Note the 2nd: This is really. really. good. What a unique perspective to put upon a Victorian novel: the 1960s sensibility. I'm loving this.

Ed Note: I said this would go to the top of the to-read list, and so it did. I'm psyched to get to this.

Original: How is it possible that I have not read this book or heard of it? I am shocked and appalled. This moves up to the top of the to-read list. ...less

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