Books of the Week

Today's books of the week are recommended by Freddie Hammond Giles.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey, completed by Jane Austen in 1803, was her first fully finished novel. Austen always features ironic, sometimes mocking undertones in her works, and this novel is no different, featuring Gothic satire, particularly referencing the works of Ann Radcliffe. 

Following Catherine Morland, and her visit to Bath, during which she meets several new acquaintances, who are not what they first appear, Northanger Abbey has been praised most of all for its realism, as all Austen’s works are, but also its surprising twists and turns. This book is one of the most interesting and vivacious Austen novels, unique in its both amusing and suspenseful mock gothic intrigue, and I enjoyed it immensely, mostly due to its more difficult, but expressive language, its interesting, well-developed characters, and most of all its wry, embellished gothic scenes.

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a 1969 postmodern novel by John Fowles, follows a typically Fowlesian main character, the not entirely likeable Charles Smithson, as he struggles to bear his improbable, but all consuming desire for Sarah Woodruff, the antithesis of a respectable Victorian woman. 

Functioning as a parody of the Victorian novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is best enjoyed alongside the authors whose work Fowles attempts to build upon, notably Austen, and particularly Persuasion, as well as Thomas Hardy. Fowles writes in a distinctive narrative voice, including asides which puncture the carefully crafted world of the Victorian novel, lamenting the difficulties with which he controls and directs his characters. Reading this novel most clearly evokes a palpable sense of the randomness and ultimately uncontrollable nature of the world and humanity, with an overriding sense of frustration and helplessness, combated only by the piercingly different air imbued by the eponymous woman. This book certainly has its deficiencies, mostly in its indulgent length and slightly difficult, confused air, but love it or hate it, it is 'curiously attractive' (as Roger Sale, one of the novel's original reviewers put it), and in the end irresistible.

'You are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them failed to write.' - John Fowles on The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier

Part autobiography, part invention, The Lost Estate, or Le Grand Meaulnes, is the only work of French writer Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the first world war just a year after its publication. 

Dreamy, psychological and ephemeral, difficult to pin down but deeply affecting, The Lost Estate is a story of long sought love which suffers through its fictionalisation and restriction, the story of a boy, Augustin Meaulnes, imbued with some peculiar magnetic, awe-inspiring quality, the nature of which is never quite made clear. A book which contains only forlorn memories of now long lost moments, a novel in which the narrator knows only too well the irrevocability of the tragedy contained within. I found this book particularly enthralling due to its opaque nature, never making anything obvious or easy, but providing insubstantial, ghostly echoes of the past in which dreams at times seem to merge with reality.