Epilogue.

I finished The French Lieutenant’s Woman tonight and felt numb. I tried to remember why I bought the book in the first place. Did somebody recommend it? I didn’t think so. And then I recalled going into the second hand book shop in Uttoxeter, looking for the next bit of cosy fireside reading to keep me amused through a few dark winter’s nights. Nothing took my fancy except The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which jumped up and down on the shelf, waving.

I don’t recall a novel ever leaving me feeling numb before. Take tonight, for example. Charles has found Sarah and they’ve engaged in their final, anguished conversation. I had to put the book down at one point. It was getting too tough and I needed to summon the wherewithal to see it through. Too familiar. Too many rattling skeletons, gibbering ghosts, snarling gremlins – call them what you will. It was never cosy fireside reading.

We leave Charles probably heading back to America, there to live out his fractured life and end his days. I wonder where I’ll end mine.

This topic is now closed. Off for some light relief, courtesy of barley juice and Japanese phantoms.

Losing Sarah and Discovering America.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has entered its last lap. Soon the tape will be broken and I shall have to find something else to fill the daily post. But for now…

Charles is disgraced and Sarah has disappeared – gone to London, apparently, and London is a bit bigger than Lyme. Months of searching prove fruitless, and so Charles begins an impromptu Grand Tour of Europe. It fails to lift his ennui, so he changes direction and heads off to America.

He does it the hard way – by ship from Liverpool to Boston, then onto Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington, Virginia, the Carolinas, and finally New Orleans. And in this there is yet another parallel:

I, too, have been discovering America and Americans, but the easy way – mostly via this blog – over the past four years, and Charles’s changing perceptions of it and them echo mine very closely. In his case, he being rich and it being 1869, the transformation comes from personal contact. In my case, I being poor and it being the new millennium, the transformation has come from written contact passing through the ether, and by talking on Skype with a rather special American from Philadelphia (or as near as makes no difference.) Charles hears the famous joke:

First prize: a week in Philadelphia. Second prize: two weeks in Philadelphia.

He doesn’t believe it, and neither do I. I even wrote a fairytale set there, remember? He becomes aware of a refreshing directness of approach to life, especially from the women, as I have done. And he witnesses the extremes in a land of contrasts. ‘It has the best of people, and the worst of people,’ as I once wrote to this blog. Hey ho…

But then he gets a telegram from his solicitor friend in London who has been charged with continuing the search for Sarah:

She is found. London. Montague.

He is now about to take ship for a return to the mother land, but I decided to leave discovering our final destiny until another day. My heart was thumping so hard that I felt ill.

Unflattering Mirrors.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has gone beyond a joke now. Little did I know when I started this book how much of my own nature I would see reflected back at me, and how many of my own experiences paralleled.

I reached the point tonight at which Charles breaks off his betrothal to Earnestina, and admits in so doing that there is another woman involved. It depressed me; the inner fever was all too familiar. We even engaged the same half truths and evasions. (And Earnestina saw through them, of course, as women almost unfailingly do. Tactics which might work perfectly well in politics and the boardroom fail hopelessly when man and woman go head-to-head in matters of the heart. This is one situation where intuition beats logical manipulation hands down.)

Maybe there’s nothing terribly odd or interesting about Charles and I being so similar; maybe we’re just examples of some not uncommon archetype: wretches cursed with the albatross of high conscience hanging around our necks, yet still driven to follow the road to imagined perfection until the innocent get hurt and we bathe in the boiling brine of guilt and self-loathing.

We’re not bad people at heart, you know, and we can’t even use the excuse of weakness to justify our actions. It isn’t that simple. It’s more about riding the irresistible wind and regretting the unintentional damage.

That wind has fallen light for me now; I can only imagine I’m still 32 as long as I don’t look in the mirror. Charles really is 32, which is why I’m not so sure I want to finish the book.

Revealing Sarah's Motive.

My apologies, but there is to be as yet no relief from The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

After the Great Revelation, the angry response, and the turning on the heel to walk away from the still enigmatic but now seemingly flawed Sarah, Charles takes himself off to an empty church and does what I do frequently:

He splits himself into two people, an upper and a lower self, and then engages in a discourse in the hope of coming to a New Revelation at the end of the argument. (In my case, the upper self usually takes the form of something like an Isis figure; in Charles’s, it’s the figure of Jesus hanging on a cross a little way beyond the rood screen. Changing times, I suppose.)

And then, just like me, he finds the New Revelation. He presumes insight into Sarah’s mind and motive, and knows that her motive was entirely honourable: she was merely using deceit as a means of showing him the love he had for her – to which knowledge he was a stranger, courtesy of the rigid class system and a rich, pretty young bride-to-be called Earnestina. Unfortunately, Charles appears to be overlooking something, as those of us who have revelations are wont to do:

Sarah’s deceit had been to tell Charles that she had disgraced herself with the French lieutenant. He now 'knows' that she lied in order to provoke sympathy and reveal the latent sense of connection in him. But this doesn’t explain why she made the story of her disgrace a matter of public knowledge in Lyme long before Charles came on the scene. If this were me, I would find a way round the objection (in fact, I already have.) In Charles’s case, time will tell. Less than 100 pages to go.

But here’s something a little perplexing: As Charles is exulting in his realisation that he can have Sarah after all, we come across the following sentence:

Another scene leapt unbidden into his mind: Lady Bella faced with Sarah.

Who is Lady Bella? I recall no character of that name being heretofore mentioned. Who is she, and why does she suddenly appear as an adversary whom Sarah will handle better than Earnestina could? This is a damnably odd coincidence, and like all damnably odd coincidences, it’s probably entirely meaningless. But it’s still damnably odd.

Sarah, the Stain, and Alternative Entertainment.

Anybody familiar with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and who has been reading my recent posts on the subject, must have been smirking up their sleeve and waiting for me to get a shock. Sarah, it seems, is not who (or what) we thought her to be. Sarah has been deceiving us (by which I mean Charles and me) with her finely tuned feminine wiles; the stain on the undershirt was proof enough.

Being a lot older than Charles, and having been the victim of similar wiles myself, I should have seen it coming. I didn’t. Charles was shocked; I was shocked. Charles got angry, and I got angry. Charles turned on his heel and stormed out. I closed the book and refused to read the next chapter.

I will, of course, finish the book. I can’t leave poor Charles to face his uncertain future alone, can I? We’ve been through too much together, and we’ve both been hoist by the petard of an overactive conscience. Besides, Sarah remains (for me at least) a beautiful and enigmatic creature; I want to know why she did it just as much as Charles does. She’s declined to give him an explanation so far, but I expect all will become clear eventually.

*  *  *

Change of plan, therefore. Having been shaken to my undershirt (figuratively speaking) by Sarah’s involuntary (though entirely predictable, as she would have known) revelation, I decided to lighten up by watching the Wizard of Oz remake, Tin Man. I only managed half an hour. It was all too frantic and messy, and I found the obvious superficial allusions to both Star Wars and LOTR irritating. Besides, Dorothy’s looks, mannerisms and facial expressions reminded me so much of somebody I know that I was becoming increasingly uneasy.

*  *  *

So then I progressed to listening to On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring by Frederick Delius. I thought of making a post about the music and what it evokes, and maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll decide it would be too tedious even by my standards.

Sarah Gets the Nod.

Oh, Charles! What have you done?

‘Precisely what you would have done in the circumstances, old chap. No more, no less.’

He’s right, you know. He is.

*  *  *

But to go back a little way:

I was aghast with shock, dismay and disappointment. Charles, my literary doppelganger, reneged on the kindredness of our spirit tonight. He took the safe road, the conventional road, leaving poor beautiful, benighted Sarah to vanish into oblivion.

Only he didn’t. I said Sarah was irresistible, didn’t I, and I meant it literally. Mr Fowles cheated. Two chapters down the line he admits his little game:

‘What you just read in the last two chapters isn’t what happened at all. That was only what Charles imagined might happen as he was taking the tedious train journey from London down to the West Country. He did break his journey at Exeter, and what actually happened was this…’

I’m sorry I doubted you, Charles. Blame your author. He thinks you’re just a character he invented, but we know differently, don’t we? Only one thing now troubles me (though I don’t suppose it should, since the deepest shadow is the natural corollary of the brightest light.) This has to end in tears, doesn’t it? It always did for me, sooner or later.

*  *  *

This post will only make sense to those who’ve been reading this blog diligently for the past two or three weeks and know of my current preoccupation with The French Lieutenant’s Woman. How different my posts about this novel have been from those I wrote about Dracula and Frankenstein. That’s because they deserved to be lampooned, being mostly populated by implausible characters and situations. This one’s different: I'm in it...

On Discovering a Difference.

I’m not blind to the fact that I’m labouring the matter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman at the moment, but it really is proving to be a tome of some significance.

Tonight we find Charles in London, first at his club with his rakish old school friends, then at a place we might term ‘an amusement emporium’ purveying amusements of a distinctly dubious nature, then in a dingy garret with a young prostitute. Throughout it all Charles is prey to a battle raging inside him. On one hill are ranged the forces of sexual arousal; on the other, a natural disgust at the levels to which the desperate, the debauched and the socially disenfranchised are prepared to descend. And if you’ll permit one more indulgence of my fondness for alliteration, the denouement to Charles’s dissolute adventure is that he vomits onto the prostitute’s pillow.

This reminds me of that strange night I spent in a room above a Soho restaurant where I went with some actor friends one Christmas, the room with the subdued lighting, exaggeratedly opulent fittings, and an oversize bed on which I lay talking with a strange woman (in both senses of the term.) I remember feeling confused about what everybody else was doing, and what the hell I was doing there in the first place. The drink and whacky baccy had flowed freely that night, and the resultant perceptual haze seemed to act as a barrier to full cognisance of the finer details. I can attest, however, to the fact that nothing but words passed between me and the strange woman. Whether or not I was betraying the script, I shall never know.

And it reminds me of another night spent at a colleague’s stag party at Trentham Rugby Club, at which the strippers eagerly demonstrated that the twin forces of legality and moral rectitude have no dominion at a private engagement. You take my meaning, I assume.

My response to both events echoed Charles’s response almost perfectly, with one exception: I, too, found myself in the middle of the same battle, but the outcome was a resounding victory for the forces of objection. I never made it to the prostitute’s garret, and so there is, mercifully, no demeaning memory of vomiting onto anybody's pillow.

The mirror continues to reflect, however, with remarkably accurate resonance.

Still Being Charles.

In the matter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, our flawed hero, Charles Smithson Esq, has just had an interview with his future father-in-law and been offered the reins of the wealthy entrepreneur’s burgeoning business empire. You’d think he’d be pleased, wouldn’t you? Instead, he’s horrified. Few things could be more tedious to a man like Charles than having the reins of a burgeoning business empire strapping him to a dull commercial environment, and he’s in a state of near panic at the prospect. Me to a tee.

Meanwhile, our flawed but irresistible heroine, Sarah Woodruff, has followed Charles’s advice and decamped to a hotel in Exeter. She’s bought herself a teapot (Staffordshire, no less) which she unwraps and regards with pride and delight. She isn’t used to having things of her own, you see. (That sort of thing gets to me. It does.) And I can’t help thinking that Charles must surely soon begin to question the value of his betrothal to the pretty, rich, but relatively insubstantial Earnestina when there's a woman of Sarah's calibre still breathing in the world of mortal man. I know I would.

Being Wound Around Sarah's Little Finger.

The matter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is gathering pace. I read four chapters tonight and am now at about the middle of it. It’s bothering me just a little because the similarities between Charles Smithson and me continue to present themselves ever more certainly as the plot progresses. The same predilections, the same delusion of a duty well done, the same naïve belief in the capacity to remain aloof, the same malleability in the hands of a truly enigmatic woman, and the same uncharitable drive for self-protection. In short, the same flaws and weaknesses. I’m almost afraid to finish the damn book for fear of reading my own destiny there.

And what of Sarah Woodruff, with whom poor, smug Charles is now experiencing the kind of difficulty with which I can entirely empathise? She is, I think, probably the most alluring, unfathomable, complex and completely observed character I’ve ever read. And isn’t it interesting that the author occasionally reminds us when he comes out of the story and goes into commentary mode (most unusual for a novel) that these are not real people, but merely characters of his own creation? Frankly, I’m not so sure. And, fortunately, only those with a good knowledge of the book will have a clue what I’m talking about.

Finding the Familiar.

When I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it seems that instead of holding a book, I’m holding some sort of magic mirror that reveals not my face, but fragments of my nature, my imagination, and maybe some recurring but forgotten dream.

I’ve just read the passage in which Sarah Woodruff follows Charles secretly through the woods of Ware Commons, there to confront him with a restrained but inwardly impassioned request: that he permit her one hour to tell her story, since no one else in Lyme could be trusted to understand it. He describes her face thus:

Sarah had one of those peculiar female faces that vary very much in their attractiveness; in accordance with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood. She was dramatically helped at this moment by an oblique shaft of wan sunlight that had found its way through a small rift in the clouds, as not infrequently happens in a late English afternoon. It lit her face, her figure standing before the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful, exquisitely grave, and yet full of an inner, as well as outer, light.

That is exactly how I would have described somebody I knew – and who also told me a personal story, cognisance of which was restricted to one who might understand – if only I’d had Fowles’s way with words. And the dynamic is perfectly observed: Sarah’s strength emanating from her inferior position, and Charles’s weakness becoming ever more magnified by his superior one. I understand that very well.

I’ve already remarked on the similarities between Charles and me. His reaction to Sarah’s entreaty is very much what mine would have been (…and Charles had, with that atrocious swiftness of the human heart when it attacks the human brain, to struggle not to touch her.) His outward response is different, of course, since Charles is a Victorian gentleman conditioned by an artificially strict code of propriety. My sense of propriety is not so very different, but at least it’s self-taught and therefore more adaptable.

How glad I am that I didn’t read this book until now, now that I can understand it and gain a little more self knowledge in return. It’s been happening a lot these past few years – finding books that I wouldn’t have understood not so very long ago, but with which I can now engage in an almost perfect state of empathy.

Being Between Worlds.

A bit of unanticipated stress caused the onset of a heavy bout of CFS symptoms last night – pounding heart, crushed feeling in the chest, light nausea and extreme tiredness. There was no point in trying to work at the computer after dinner, so I repaired to the living room to have a quick nap by the fire. It lasted 2½ hours. When I woke up I felt better, apart from being weak as a kitten. No, that’s wrong; I’m always weak as a kitten at the moment. Weak as a wood mouse would be more appropriate, and all the better for being alliterative.

And while I was asleep I dreamt that I was on a hospital trolley, all gowned up and about to go into surgery (for what, I have no idea.) I was given my pre-med, and then I heard a man’s voice somewhere in an adjacent reception area say ‘You’ve lost that girl of yours.’ I felt it had some relevance to me, so I leapt off the trolley and went dashing off to find out who was speaking, who he was speaking to, and to which girl he was referring. I woke up before I got there. Or maybe I collapsed from the effect of rushing off under the influence of a pre-med. Or maybe my subconscious mind wasn’t prepared to be loaded down with a list of all the girls he could have been referring to.

*  *  *

One thing that is giving great pleasure at the moment is The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I’m getting through only two short chapters a night, and it’s going to take ages to read the book. That’s because the prose is what you might call meaty (as long as you’re not a vegetarian and find the word ‘meaty’ a trifle unpleasant.) Every sentence has to be lingered over and savoured, which is a damn fine thing in my opinion. I haven’t found a single example of dubious credibility yet, and it’s as rich as you could wish for in perceptive exposition of human nature. I think I’m going to have to find out a bit more about John Fowles (apart from the fact that he’s dead, which I already know.)

And I’m going to hazard a guess that if Charles Smithson is as much like me as I think he is, it won’t be long before his affections for the pretty but prissy Earnestina will cool, and he will, instead, find himself hopelessly under the spell of the plain but profound Sarah Woodruff.

But now I’m beginning to sound like the soap-obsessed Lucy Moran from Twin Peaks, so I think it’s time I unscrewed the scotch bottle and re-discovered my natural environment.

An Interesting Comparison.

Anybody who has read The French Lieutenant’s Woman will be familiar with the leading character, Charles. Last night I was at the point where Charles’s early life as a young man was being described, and I was surprised to find that we had a lot in common. There was the same inclination to rakishness tempered by short-lived Christian fervour and a veritable nanny of a conscience, the same love of books and nature, the same vociferous objection to fox hunting, and the same tendency to be out of step with the received attitudes of our native cultures.

What seemed odd to me was the fact that Charles was the son of a baronet and grew up in a mansion, whereas I was the son of a bus driver and grew up in social housing. Maybe it just goes to show that style owes no debt to breeding after all.

Engaging with the Tome.

The style of writing in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is fascinating, being an unusual mixture of linguistic formality, complex clause relationships and verbal idiosyncrasies which sit together in a muscular, masculine sort of way. It isn’t the kind of thing you could speed read; it requires some concentration. You either engage with it or you put the book away. It is, however, highly descriptive and well worth the effort.

What’s also fascinating is the insight it gives into the mores and cultural nuances of middle and upper class Victorian society – and some of them are curiously familiar, which maybe I should find disturbing. And then there’s one little personal connection:

The range in the kitchen of the domineering Mrs Poulteney has a bad habit of smoking when the wind is in the south west, which is odd because the fire in my living room exhibits exactly the same fault.