John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

It's 1867. Charles Smithson (note 'everyman'-type surname) is engaged to a rich young woman, Ernestina Freeman (note 'everyman'-type surname), who is as earnest as her name in her belief in moral decency. The engagement is one of the by now commonplace alliances between the fading aristocracy (Charles's heirless uncle is a baronet) and the wealth of trade (Ernestina's father owns a chain of department stores). Charles feels the wrongness of the emotionally stunted age in which he lives -- despite the intellectual powerhouses of Darwin, Marx et al -- but he can't quite think himself out of his natural chauvinism. Oh, he also visits prostitutes sometimes, and has some really twattish friends, but we're not meant to mind that too much, because that was just, y'know, the 1860s. Charles is just a Victim of Circumstance.

On a visit to Lyme Regis, Charles meets 'the French Lieutenant's Woman', also 'the French lieutenant's whore', Sarah Woodruff. She is also a Victim of Circumstance. She has a lot of hair which is frequently loose and she likes looking out to sea, because she's Deep. More specifically, she's sad because she's unable to be sexually and intellectually free, because she's hampered by the oppressiveness of Dorset society and the knowledge that if she goes to London she'll probably end up exactly what the Lyme residents think she is. She likes to walk in the Undercliff, a very beautiful strip of land west of Lyme, which is full of ancient woodland and fossils, and equally full of canoodling couples (mostly also Victims of Circumstance).

Ernestina is young, pretty and reasonably clever, with no apparent interests or individuality except her determination to marry Charles. She is obviously also a Victim of Circumstance.

OK, it's easy to criticise the slightly cardboard characters, but the real trouble comes from the narrator. Fowles is desperately trying to do that postmodernist thing where you repeatedly call attention to the fact that this is all fiction. He playfully puts himself in and out of scenes as an observer, toying with the characters' fates, telling you forcefully how to interpret their thoughts and actions, linking each to some generalisation about the Victorian age. He's aping the classic Victorian omniscient narrator, but he's way more dictatorial, and not half as funny, as Charles Dickens or George Eliot, and he gets in the way. The characters stop being characters and become allegories. We lose interest in what happens to them: if all outcomes are equally possible, then somehow all outcomes become equally unimportant. (I have the same problem with Borges, who frequently doesn't engage me emotionally at all.) The final scene fragments in all sorts of directions, but unfortunately I had pretty much stopped caring which one might be the 'real' ending.

Meryl Streep as Sarah in the
film version (1981)

Although Fowles clearly loves postmodernism (he places himself proudly in the age of Barthes), it's kind of like your grandfather trying to do postmodernism. He questions, but he doesn't question enough: the Victorians were all like this and we can see that in how this character behaves in this story I've written. This woman (Sarah) was unusually clever, but she was still very feminine and passive and had a very nice body. This woman (Ernestina) is a shallow idiot, but, poor little thing, it's because she's so young and hasn't been taught any better. This woman (Mrs Poulteney, a local busybody and sort-of-philanthropist) is very religious and therefore is a bitch because that's what Victorian notions of piety made you into.

One thing which really stops it coming to life is simply a lack of individualising detail. Ernestina could be any rich young woman from trade. Charles's only distinguishing character traits are his interest in Darwinism and his emotional confusion, which are hardly enough for the protagonist of a 470-page novel. Ernestina's Aunt Tranter is a classic generous-hearted, generally ignorant spinster. The novel seemed to me the worst kind of allegory, where the author is so busy making the characters illustrate the Conflict of Ideas that he forgets to make them into real people. The only place this lets up is Charles's manservant, Sam, who is a real Cockney dandy, wants to open a haberdasher's shop, and falls in love with Aunt Tranter's maid, Mary. He's accidentally the most interesting character in the book, and my heart warmed to him.

Fowles peppers the novel with references to contemporary sources, including a lot of Hardy, Tennyson, Clough, and Matthew Arnold, as well as Darwin, Marx, Malthus and other social commentators. Each chapter has two quotations set against one another, clearly designed to undercut the beautiful image the Victorians had of themselves with the socio-economic reality. This gets old very quickly. He does a pretty poor parody of Henry James (at least compared to Max Beerbohm's priceless 'The Mote in the Middle Distance'), and chats vaguely about Christina Rossetti being a raging hysteric so blithely that it made me really quite cross.

The Undercliff in Dorset, which is
actually really nice and worth a visit

I think, basically, the novel hasn't dated very well. Some of the social assumptions Fowles portrays in the 1860s, such as gender essentialism, were still fairly prevalent in the 1960s, and he unthinkingly reproduces just as many social conventions as he satirises or attacks. Women are either spinsters or objects of sexual desire. At points it's sickeningly complacent and misogynistic, and even leering. In one scene that sticks out a mile, he shows Sarah sharing a bed with another maid in the house in Lyme. BUT DON'T WORRY, he says, YOU MUSTN'T THINK THEY'RE LESBIANS. Phew, I thought, wiping my brow which was already beaded with anxious sweat. Thank goodness for that. (Actually, I genuinely was quite relieved, because I didn't want to see the excruciating mess Fowles would probably made of a real lesbian plotline.)

The novel is dry and sometimes funny, but not consistently, and neither the 'meta' bits nor the actual narrative are successful: the former seems dated even for the 1960s, after the much more interesting challenges that modernism made to Victorian prose fiction; and the latter is just plain lacklustre. The Magus and The Collector are not without their intellectual pretensions, but at least you want to know what happens at the end. Read them instead.

AS Byatt, Babel Tower

I've read this rather long novel, the third in Byatt's Frederica Quartet, twice now. The protagonist, Frederica Potter (=, more or less, Antonia Byatt), last seen in Still Life shortly after the sudden death of her sister Stephanie, is now married with a son, although her choice of husband (Nigel Reiver) has turned out to be an unwise one. Nigel is manipulative, violent and chauvinist, refusing to let Frederica put her prodigious mental capacities to use in any kind of paid work. He resents her for having mainly male friends (a natural consequence of being at Cambridge in the 1950s), and is deeply suspicious of books. So when Frederica decides to leave for London, and her son Leo decides quite firmly he's coming with her, it's no surprise that Nigel is desperate for her to return, and even more desperate to regain custody of their child. A lawsuit ensues.

Meanwhile, Frederica gets involved in the world around the Samuel Palmer School of Art, teaching literature classes there (and also extra-mural ones). Through this she meets Jude Mason, a repellent, troubled and charismatic writer whose book, Babbletower, is published and then immediately prosecuted for obscenity. It's a pivotal, symbolic event, with the memory of the Lady Chatterley trial still fresh, and in the midst of debates about the teaching and value of language and literature in schools (intersecting with the traumatic bullying at a fictional boys' public school, presumably Eton), as well as the rapidly diverging discourses of science and art. Frederica battles like a wildcat to stay connected to the intellectual arenas where she feels most comfortable, to sustain connections to her family, and to try to forge new friendships and relationships as a single mother in London.

AS Byatt has always been great at portraying the intellectual life. I read somewhere that it's impossible to create a character who is cleverer or better-educated than you are, and if that's true then Byatt must have a phenomenal mind and have read and remembered sheer mountains of books. Yet she's never, ever cold: the characters are deeply and fiercely emotional, sexual, physical beings, and I always come out the other end of a Byatt novel (for it is a tunnel-like experience) desperate to read more, write more, and talk more to people I love. The second novel in the series, Still Life, made me cry like a child, and Babel Tower wasn't far from achieving the same effect.

The book was published in 1996, and is set in the 60s, and there are some parts of it that either haven't dated well (this is certainly true of the first in the series, The Virgin in the Garden) or were slightly monochrome to begin with. Nigel, his sisters and his housekeeper are all really loathsome upper-class idiots, and I did wish at times that Byatt could be more impartial. As a consideration of the emergence of postmodern discourse in the 60s, it is sporadically successful and a bit irritating: in one rather "look-at-me-i'm-being-all-meta-now" passage, Frederica cuts up a lawyer's letter and rearranges it, pace Burroughs, to form a new and disorientating nonsense-text.

But for me the overwhelming impressions is of a novel about people who enjoy thinking deeply and passionately about life and art. One of the cover-quotes uses the word "heady", and that seems accurate to me -- the book sweeps you into a world where everyone can quote Rilke in German, if they want, or effortlessly write Tolkien-esque novels for their children. It's not quite realist, but it's exciting, and heart-rending, and that's what I read Byatt for.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair; Ali Smith, How To Be Both; Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

It's been a while since I posted, but it's the beginning of Lent and I'm trying to replace Facebook with  reading, so I thought it'd be a good time to start blogging again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

A set text for the 'Ludic Literature' module I'm taking this semester, this short novel is narrated by Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré businessman in Berlin who unexpectedly meets a man who appears to be his perfect doppelgänger. He concocts an elaborate plan to secure him and his wife financially, the details of which gradually emerge as he tells his story.

Hermann is a forceful narrator, rhetorically persuasive and severely deluded, much like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, and much of our discussion in class centred around the nature of his delusion. We theorised that he, like Humbert, has tried to use his life as an aesthetic 'laboratory', rather than confining his experiments more appropriately to the page. I wondered if there was a connection between the repeated name and the delusion that he has managed to unify life and art; but perhaps this is far-fetched.

As with several other Nabokov novels, there's a lot of exploration of mirrors, doubling, self-splitting and so on. There's a fair amount of narratorial misogyny. It's a very funny novel, and readable, though not the thing to read if you want to be emotionally gripped. It's not as engrossing as Lolita, nor as dazzling as Pale Fire, but an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Ali Smith, How To Be Both

My mum and I have been great fans of Ali Smith for six or seven years, and this wonderful novel was a reminder of why: her warmth, her playfulness, her fearlessness when it comes to fictional innovation. Sometimes I worry that British literary fiction is too safe, that a vacuum in the highbrow zone is being filled with decidedly middlebrow writing. Ali Smith is a great antidote to this. Her plots can usually be summarised in a few bullet points; the drama is all mental, intellectual, emotional, creative. 

This latest novel was shortlisted for the Booker (her third shortlist -- she's surely due a win soon ...) and won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Costa Novel Award and the Saltire Society Literary Book of the Year Award in 2014. It's in two sections, each titled 'One', and is famously available in two versions, with the two sections in different orders. In my version, the first section focuses around George, a grieving, intellectual teenager in the twenty-first century, and the second on a renaissance painter struggling to establish a reputation despite various (some unexpected) hindrances. The stories intertwine both thematically and, sort of, dramatically, with a healthy dose of magical realism.

My mum and I both agreed that reading the sections in the opposite order would probably have been extremely confusing, so I wonder how successful the conceit of two equal, non-ordered sections really is. (No point in trying to re-read them in the opposite order, of course, now my ignorance has been destroyed.) I also think one section is more emotionally involving than the other, although the other section makes up for this in the way it analyses creative and artistic processes. But there are some wonderful passages in both -- funny, defamiliarising, shocking and thoughtful by turns. Her favourite issues -- art, gender, sexuality -- come up again, though in pleasingly new and ambiguous ways, and there are some others too: the ubiquity of pornography; bereavement and memory; sibling relationships; and so on. 

The prose is not always easy; indeed, sometimes it's not always prose. Read it slowly, sure, but read it all the same.

Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat

Although Penguin cheekily charge £8.99 for this book, it's really a novella rather than a novel, padded out to just over 100 pages by an elegantly large font (not that I was protesting -- my eyes slid through the prose with grateful ease). A woman, Lise, leaves the office to go on holiday, meets a couple of people on the plane, arrives in a 'southern' city where there seem to be a lot of Fiats, befriends an old woman at the hotel who's waiting for her nephew, insists she's searching for her 'boy-friend', assesses who is and isn't her 'type', and eventually reaches a sticky end.

This isn't a spoiler: you're told this very early on. Spark shifts the question from 'What will happen?' to 'Who will do it?' and 'Why?' and, most often, 'Is this woman a complete lunatic?' It's told in a third-person impersonal narrator, in the present tense, as if we're a camera following Lise about, semi-analysing her movements at times, but mostly just watching. We've no idea what she's thinking. Details at the beginning gain their relevance by the end, so she clearly has some kind of plan, but not a rational or sane one. It's disorientating, frustrating, and fascinating. As John Lanchester's introduction points out, we can tell easily enough that she's mad, but then what? It doesn't seem to help us much.

Coincidentally, this week I've been reading about 'poetics of indeterminacy' -- specifically with reference to Rimbaud and John Ashbery, but pretty useful generally -- the idea that a text has no internal coherence, wants to be suggestive rather than cohesive, resists interpretation and simply enjoys its own play. As with Rimbaud and Ashbery poems, individual sentences of The Driver's Seat, or paragraphs, or even whole scenes, seem to make sense, but are almost immediately cancelled out by the next thing. Details that seem to have great symbolic significance, like whether her mouth is closed or open, appear not to resolve into an overall pattern. It's great fun trying to puzzle out what she's planning, whether she cares, what's in her head, and there's a certain amount of pleasure in the knowledge that you probably won't find out. 

For readers who don't like this so much, there are some exceptionally beautiful and comic descriptions -- for instance:

She switches on the central light which is encased in a mottled glass globe; the light flicks on, then immediately flickers out as if, having served a long succession of clients without complaint, Lise is suddenly too much for it.

And, at a brief 106 pages, there's almost no excuse not to read it. I pretty much polished this off in an evening and was left bewildered and excited by it. Highly recommended.