I wanted to read The French Lieutenant’s’s Woman because A. S. Byatt mentioned the book so often in her essay collections. While I like the book, I’m not sure I see it as the wonderful, great novel that many people believe it to be. Part of the reason, undoubtably, is that my exceptions were very high. A. S. Byatt likes it, so it’s going to blow my socks off. I loved the narrative structure of book, the constant presence of the writer character’s voice was well done. It made what would have otherwise been a non-interesting book, interesting. To took me a little to get into the book. In fact, it wasn’t until Fowles description of Sarah that I got into the book. “It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or taste. It’s sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, nor hysterias, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert”. Fowles has a wonderful touch with language and irony; take for instance Charles’ thoughts on Tina, “All would be well when she was truly his, in his bed and in his bank . . . and of course in his heart too”. In some ways, though despite the ending, the book seems to go on too long with its conceit. It became wearing after a time.
