John Fowles, British novelist, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Here’s the obit in the New York Times. Well worth reading.
I loved the description of what it was about French Lieutenant’s Woman that made it so … startling:
The book, set in 1867, tells the story of Charles Smithson, a gentleman geologist (as was Mr. Fowles) in Lyme Regis and a budding adherent of the theories of Charles Darwin. Engaged to a young woman of his class and station, Smithson finds himself drawn to a willful governess who has been wooed and abandoned by a French sailor. On the surface, the story seems classically Victorian, with elaborate 19th-century language, highly wrought plot twists and extensive epigraphs introducing each chapter.
But the book’s narrator is straight from the 1960’s, and it is his all-knowing voice – constantly interrupting the narrative with mini-lectures on extra-textual subjects, freely discussing people who haven’t been born and historical events that haven’t yet happened – that makes “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” so unusual. Along the way, the reader is treated to the narrator’s – that is, Mr. Fowles’s – views on Victorian England, Freud, Marx, the dilemma of the modern novelist and 20th-century existential despair.
Exactly. If you’ve read the book, you know that there’s really nothing quite like it. Fowles is imitated all the time now. But he was the first one there.
I love this too:
As much as it frustrated some of his readers, Mr. Fowles always believed he had done the right thing by leaving the endings of his most celebrated novels open-ended. But he was not above bending his own rules when the occasion called for it.
He once told an interviewer that he had received a sweet letter from a cancer patient in New York who wanted very much to believe that Nicholas, the protagonist of “The Magus,” was reunited with his girlfriend at the end of the book – a point Mr. Fowles had deliberately left ambiguous. “Yes, of course they were,” Mr. Fowles replied.
By chance, he had received a letter the same day from an irate reader taking issue with the ending of “The Magus.” “Why can’t you say what you mean, and for God’s sake, what happened in the end?” the reader asked. Mr. Fowles said he found the letter “horrid” but had the last laugh, supplying an alternative ending to punish the correspondent: “They never saw each other again.”
If you’re a Fowles fan (and I am) really what you should read is Anne’s brief comments on him, and the one comment (so far) to her post.
Anne writes:
my dad always struck me as glamorous. He read a lot of Fowles, and seemed like a Fowles hero: curious, perhaps a bit naive but struggling toward knowingness, having some kind of UK-inflected post-adolescent sixties hangover, and enthralled by the mysteries of women.
And from the one comment to the post:
To this day, “The Magus” remains among the two or three books that made my life better, both as a writer and a man.
Rest in peace.
