Alice Munro – Dear Life

I bought my copy of Dear Life, the last collection of short stories by the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, right about when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013 (one of the first times a writer of short stories had received that honour). I must have read a few of the stories then, not enjoyed or understood them, and set the book aside. On a whim I brought it back with me to Germany, hoping that being a bit older and wiser might help me understand things, and sure enough devoured it in a week.

It’s a hard thing to write about, though. Munro’s stories seem technically simple compared to other writers, where I’m always dotting the pages with marginal notes. Despite this simplicity, you read one page at a time with the ease of a bird gliding and then suddenly, probably at the end, she tries to leave you devastated and usually succeeds.

There are even few images to get excited about. The only one I remember, of “evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears”, I did not like.

Instead, one of Munro’s key skills on a sentence-by-sentence level seems her ability to find a sharp way of phrasing those moments that change a life: “”Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry but now is not going to marry me.“ Or “That was one of  the few times that I saw him act like a father.”

With such sentences, you get the impression that she has worked hard at her stories, unlike others who mask relative laziness with sheer talent or genius. It takes a lot of effort, hours of chiselling and sanding, to make such unobtrusive workaday prose. Or rather, prose that we cannot distinguish from other simple prose except when it is too late, and it has already delivered its broadside against the unprepared soul.

My favourite of the stories here is “Amundsen”, from which the bear image comes. Its story goes as follows. A young woman arrives to teach at a clinic for children with diseases like tuberculosis, out in rural Canada. She falls in love with Alister, the director, and they arrange to get married. Something happens, however, and they do not. The narrator is set on a train and leaves. Years later she sees Alister again, but barely has time to say hello.

Taken as a whole, “Amundsen” reminds me a little bit of Chekhov’s “House with the Mezzanine” with its sense of a relationship that does not go anywhere. Chekhov’s realist innovation (one of them) was that he translated his observation of unfulfilled promises within individuals’ lives into his fiction. Munro, often called the Canadian Chekhov, gains much of her own atmosphere of reality from this same thing. She is, like Chekhov, a great writer of the fudged life.

The pivotal moment in “Amundsen” is the scene when, having left the clinic to get married in a far off town, the mood suddenly shifts between the couple and they head back, acknowledging that everything is over. Here is that shift in mood. The couple have just eaten, and now the narrator has plucked up the courage to put on a nice dress she had saved especially:

When I come out Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty.

We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the car door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Shovels for snow removal are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says skates can be sharpened inside.

Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them.

The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a runningboard and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bouncing in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along?

“Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.”

We. He has said we. For a moment I cling to that word. Then I think it’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his we.

It’s not the “we” that matters, that is not what tells me the truth. It’s his male-to-male tone to the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I could wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then had been terrible but his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van.

And a moment later I would be glad even to go back to that time, when he craned his head to see behind him. Better that than driving—as he is driving now—down the main street of Huntsville, as if there is no more to be said or managed.

I can’t do it, he has said.

He has said that he can’t go through with this.

He can’t explain it.

Only that it’s a mistake.

The first time I read it, I was shocked by the news that everything was over. (Shocked by the suddenness, but also because I wanted the marriage to happen.) Yet when we look back over the extract, there are no clues that things are going wrong of the sort that another clever short-story writer might feel compelled to leave. Even going back further, the occasional unkindnesses of the story, such as when the narrator and Alister skip the play of a school-aged friend, Mary, are not “gotcha” moments that we can use to explain what comes later. Adults preferring to spend time together over a meal to watching a performance that will probably be no good is hardly a cardinal sin we cannot ever imagine ourselves committing.

Instead, though we do have words like “stiffly” and the perhaps insufficiently thoughtful “pretty”, the passage before the revelation strikes us by having nothing to do with the marriage at all. We have a “wooden house” and the “hardware store.” It takes us until the man tapping on the window, and the knowledge that Alister is “talking so earnestly”, for us to realise that the reason we are focusing on everything else but what is taking place within the car is that the narrator herself wants to focus on anything else but that. Rather than the text reflecting the narrator’s internal voice, a la free indirect discourse, instead, we have the text reflecting the narrator’s very thoughts. It’s pretty cool, but also the kind of unflashy trick typical of Munro which it took me a second pass to notice. 

We never learn the reason that things collapse between them. Ultimately, it does not matter. Perhaps this is another thing Munro has the right to allow herself – a lack of an explanation. As in relationships, often the only explanation for a break-up is the one that we come up with, alone at night.

Another trick worth borrowing is the use of dialogue without quotes, as at the end of the extract. By placing it in the text in this way the finality, the unchangeability of the fact is emphasised, as against the dialogue within quotation marks which still has this element of hope. I think this is important to note because it can be easy to get sucked into quite a conservative way of thinking, particularly on “realistic” things, which considers that every innovation has already taken place. I know I’m guilty of it. But dialogue is more than just words in quotes. (Just as, for the Sally Rooneys and James Joyces of this world, it can be more than words without quotes!) Dialogue can be silences, like “…”, or shock “!?”, and so on. This may seem rather dreadful to some of my readers, but I think that such a way of writing “dialogue” could be more effective now than the more traditional “She went silent”. Show, not tell, we are told, after all.

Reading the stories in Dear Life is at once a joy and a sadness and a consolation for this blogger. A joy, because they are damn good. A sadness, because I know how vastly far ahead of anything I could ever notice, let alone write down, Munro’s knowledge of human nature is. And a consolation, because that previous statement is at least a little silly. More and more, whether as a psychological defence (you will still be a good writer, don’t give up!) or as a rational position, I’m coming to see how challenging it is to write good stories when you are young. I felt this many years ago, when I literally could not write any kind of time gap in my stories – not even, really, a week – because it felt like I hadn’t lived long enough to perceive time in that way. But still now, when I have lived long enough to allow for a changing of the seasons, I see that I have not seen enough of life’s stages to really write the kind of modern story that rolls itself out slowly, in fits and starts, like modern lives do.

Of course, there remain plenty of stories for the young, but not ones about whole lives. And it is precisely this kind of story that Munro chooses for her own in most of Dear Life. At around eighty when these stories came out, she was certainly entitled to it. But it’s still a surprise, and a powerful one, when we read in a story that began in the time of the Second World War, the news that characters are reaching out to one another over “email”.

I think I might have to live a lot longer to write something like that.

Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth. 

Strange Ways of Making Real – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel that I cannot imagine leaving any of us cold. It is a bag of tricks with multiple endings and a chatty modern narrator who refuses to let his characters be. Yet from its title onwards we are also led to expect something Victorian. That John Fowles delivers something much stranger than just another bulky Victorian monster is the cause of either our joy or our dismay. At first, I was in the latter camp, bothered by references to Henry Moore, taxpayers, and public loos that did not at all make sense with the novel’s 1867 setting. Later, the only words I had for my readerly experience were “breathless”, “excited” and “inspired.” The novel does something any writer can be grateful for – it shows that novels can still be novel, and that there are new games to play with readers while telling important stories.

For this post, my interest in the novel concerns its relationship with character and reality construction. Fowles takes some major risks with his storytelling, pulling us out of the narrative repeatedly through epigraphs, a digressive narrator who isn’t sure of his characters’ hearts, and through being inconclusive by providing readers with a choice of conclusions. Yet though Fowles is clear that this is a work of fiction, he is also clear that these characters are no less real for it. Our own lives, he points out in one chapter, are full of delusions and fiction. Yet we are sure they are real.

I want to argue that Fowles achieves the extraordinary here. For me, the artifice of the novel, with its postmodern flourishes, makes its story and people more real, at least to me. While spoiling much of the novel’s plot, I hope to explain what I mean.

The Story

First, though, the plot, so that I might contextualise at least somewhat the games and tricks of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Lyme Regis, gentleman Charles Smithson is spending time with his betrothed, Erestina Freeman, when they come across Sarah Woodruff, a “fallen woman” and the French lieutenant’s woman of the novel’s title. (He seduced her and then left her). Charles falls in love, though it takes him time to know it, and has several coincidental and then less coincidental meetings with Sarah, before finally breaking his engagement with Ernestina.

While breaking it off, however, Charles loses track of Sarah and struggles to find her for the next two years while drifting around the world as a social outcast himself. Eventually, he does – the former governess is now an artists’ assistant, and has given birth to Charles’ daughter. Depending on the reader’s preferred ending, Charles and Sarah either make up, or Charles leaves to continue with his wandering. The novel’s other ending, some time earlier, is the one where Charles breaks his relationship with Sarah to be with Ernestina and has a boring domestic happiness, or thinks he has, anyway.

Less an Unreliable than a Poor Narrator

Writers claim, from time to time, that their characters get away from them and do their own thing. (Iris Murdoch, I think, said charmingly if tellingly, that she kept them locked up and deprived them of even the slightest freedom from her plans). John Fowles seems the only writer to claim it from within the bounds of his own story – for The French Lieutenant’s Woman has a strange narrative voice. Or perhaps “startling” is a better word. The narrator is speaking to us of 1867, but from the perspective of 1967, talking freely about the sexual revolution ongoing in his own time, mentioning artists and other figures born long after the novel ends. How, we might wonder, can such a voice create characters who feel real, when it so openly notes that they are fictional, and does not even pretend to be from their own time? (“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.”)

Certainly, we know that these are fictions, just as we know that we are reading fiction. But what is true of all the techniques I mention in this post is that somehow they work in a way contrary to what we might expect, by bringing us closer to the characters and making them more real. The narrator claims he does not know what Sarah thinks at key moments. He leaves blanks and decides which of the final two endings we read first by a coin flip. He seems, on the whole, out of control.

So, who is in control? If it is the characters, that only makes them more interesting and real to us – they then have their own lives, their own emotions driving them. Even if we disagree with the narrator’s assessment of his abilities, the whole novel seems like it has been ripped open so that the inner machinery is visible to us. Instead of reading from afar, we are made to identify with the narrator as we too try to construct the story and its world inside our heads. We can think of there being three layers of participation in a story – one is as a character, one is on the level of the narrator, within the story but yet also with a certain distance and perspective, and the final layer is of a disinterested observer who can leave at any time. This is the reader. Therefore, if we are with the narrator, we are already closer than we normally would be.

We might think that we are closer to the story when we just read a straight narrative. It might seem more like it actually happened, if it is written well and we are of a believing bent. But only here do we feel close enough to it that the narrator can reach out and tap us on the back. Only through an honesty about the story he is telling – a piece of historical fiction with his contemporary narration – and by making the fiction obvious as he constructs it, does the narrator put us beside him. At the same time, by relinquishing obvious control over the characters’ destinies, he does make it seem as though they are acting for themselves – fictional beings, yet with real autonomy. With readers getting so close to him, we are more likely to trust his words about his lack of control, compared to if he were just pretending to lack control at one key moment. It feels more authentic.

Epigraphs

Each chapter in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is headed by at least one, and quite often two, epigraphs, a practice I most associate with Middlemarch, but which is by no means unique to it. Fowles quotes poets and writers like Hardy, Tennyson and Arnold, and also thinkers like Marx and Darwin, and social documents and historians. Such epigraphs set the tone of the chapter, for example by informing us that this one will be about duty, that one about the pressures on young women to marry, and still the other about Darwin’s theories of evolution. They show, undoubtedly, Fowles’ deep knowledge of the period – never amiss, when trying to write a kind of historical fiction.

But how does this relate to creating real characters? After all, you can research all you want, but that does not always mean you have the faintest idea of the true soul of a period or a people. If anything, at first glance at least, the epigraphs are a problem. They draw us out of the fantasy by reminding us we are reading a novel every time we start a chapter, rather than letting us race along with the narrative, and by giving us some guidelines on how to analyse the story (with Marx, for example, encouraging a Marxist reading) rather than just leaving us to it.  

Yet what this ultimately does is help the reader to become more involved. If we see the epigraphs and know we can use them to analyse, we will start analysing as we read. As we will see in this post, all of Fowles’s tricks we can understand as aiming at making the reader get herself engaging with what she’s reading. Instead of blindly turning the pages, now we are forced to think – about class, about gender, about duty. This focusing of attention means we get closer to the characters. They become more real to us as we question their motives and their correspondence to the epigraphs provided. Just as at school, reading a book closely for an exam means that often years later, sadly or joyously, parts of it will remain with us, so too does Fowles repeat the exercise in miniature by ensuring we do our own close reading for him.

There is another point here, related to the historical quotes and Fowles’ reading. He points out at one point that his goal is not to make the reader believe their narrator is from 1867, merely that the narrative is set then. By showing his reading, and being honest about his modern perspective looking back, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is marked by a kind of authenticity that other historical fiction lacks. It is a small point, sure, but not entirely immaterial that when reading it we do not have that sense that we are reading a pretence or lie, which we may do, in the backs of our minds, as we read something else.

Multiple Endings

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has three endings, and this too, strange to say, seems to add to its verisimilitude. In the first ending, Charles receives the address of the hotel Sarah is staying at in Exeter and chooses, as he passes through that town, not to see her. In the second and third endings, Charles does see her for a night of passion, has his years of wanderings, and finally meets her again. In one ending he and she reunite in love, in another he condemns her and leaves her alone.

Within the novel Fowles’s narrator is keen to stress his lack of control, even at times his lack of knowledge. The use of multiple endings only furthers this point. Placed in the position of the narrator, readers do not know what the characters will do. Normally, disengaged, we trust the writers to lead us along a logical path. But by presenting us with three endings, readers are forced to place themselves closer to the action as they determine which ending they consider more likely.

Reading is an active process, unlike watching a movie, because we have to imagine the characters. But where much of the time we can get away with merely visualising action, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman we are forced to imagine motive. Not from what is said explicitly, but from the cumulative impact of so many chapters. We must decide for ourselves whether Charles surrenders to the pressures of his age and chooses to marry Ernestina, whether he and Sarah come together, or whether he finally rejects her. To come to such a decision, we need to think and imagine. It is a gamble, as everything in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is. If we do not care for the characters, we will dismiss it as a trick. If we do, however, then suddenly we are placed in the same position as the author who finds his characters acting in ways he does not expect. And if the characters seem real to the author, they will seem just as real to us, in his position.

The pair of ultimate endings, where Charles and Sarah meet again, is interesting in another way from the perspective of characterisation. Here we have an explicitly doubled chapter, where the characters behave in opposite manners which are yet consistent with their prior depictions. The emphasis, inevitably, is on Sarah, and why she does not reach out to Charles after he puts so much effort into tracking her down. Unlike Charles, who the narration mainly follows, Sarah is the central figure of the story, whose image at the pier in Lyme first inspired Fowles to write it – and whose character is something of a mystery. Generally, we might think that consistency makes for good characterisation, but real people are anything but consistent. Sarah’s two behaviours in the epilogue make her more mysterious and inconsistent, yet more curious to us, more real.

It seems that using multiple endings like this is not a cheat for establishing an interesting character or someone real, but rather a way of emphasising certain types of figures beyond what is possible in a novel’s normal bounds. It makes them, the mysterious ones, more real. But readers must first be engaged, otherwise playing with endings will sooner leave them enraged.

Conclusion

If the thoughts here can be summarised simply, that’s more a reflection on how much sleep I am getting, and not on Fowles’s novel, which is really exciting. Fowles is far from the only writer to understand that making your reader work works brilliantly, provided they can be bothered to put the effort in, in creating a more engaging narrative. By making us choose endings, analyse the text with the help of the epigraphs, and fill in the gaps in characters’ motivations when the narrator claims not to know, readers play a far more active role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman than I am certainly used to doing.

Still, none of this would mean anything if the characters did not themselves have a baseline of realistic characterisation, and characters worth knowing about. What we see in this novel is not a replacement to all that, but a way of bringing us still closer to the fictional world – but only once we’ve first written it and written it and its people well.