Books: Imminent Victorians

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THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN by John Fowles. 467 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

Despite dialogue from today's cocktail parties and themes from tomorrow's headlines, too many contemporary authors still make convention do the work of invention. They are rewriting the 19th century novel without meaning to. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles rewrites the 19th century novel and means every word of it. But his is a resourceful and penetrating talent at work on that archaic form. The result is more truly inventive and contemporary than a whole shelf of campus comings-of-age or suburban wife-swapping sagas.

Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel—with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom.

Less Conclusive Conclusions. Like all parody, his is ultimately a critique of the conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional endings, then backs up and unwinds them again in tangled, less conclusive but more believable alternate endings.

The real object of Fowles' bifocal vision, though, is not so much the Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical currents of their time.

His hero, Charles Smithson, a young model of Victorian gentility redeemed by intelligence and irony, is an amateur naturalist and a postulant for the new faith of evolution. But he is still pledged to old pieties through his engagement to the shallow daughter of a rich London merchant. Fowles' strategy is to bring the contradictions of Charles' situation—and, by implication, of the Victorian age—to a crisis.