[Marxism] John Fowles

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://ellissharp.blogspot.com/
Monday, November 07, 2005
John Fowles
The death of John Fowles marks the disappearance of one of the great 
idiosyncratic talents of English fiction. I re-read The French Lieutenant?s 
Woman over the summer and was surprised how fresh and compelling it still 
seemed. It?s his greatest book and the one people will still be reading in 
a century?s time, when Fowles?s detractors (e.g. Martin Amis) will be long 
forgotten. But I?m almost as fond of his great ramshackle romance The Magus.

Fowles disobeyed the rule that novelists should avoid ideas. He thought of 
himself as a philosopher, and even issued a volume of his central beliefs. 
But The Aristos hasn?t worn well. It?s when the ideas are keyed to a human 
drama they become alive. Fowles had a great gift for characterisation, 
dialogue and plot. Most fiction I can happily set aside for a few days and 
return to it later. With Fowles I want to forget everything else and push 
on to the end. There is something oddly life enhancing about his two finest 
novels ? they are about loss, and how loss needs to be accepted and endured.

Sadly, Fowles peaked with The French Lieutenant?s Woman. His next novel, 
Daniel Martin, was a crushing disappointment. Only A Maggot came near the 
earlier work. Fowles seemed to lose his creative direction after The French 
Lieutenant?s Woman, turning to non-fiction and all kinds of extra-literary 
activities.

It is to his credit that he came out against the Falklands War, at a time 
when almost the entire country was backing Thatcher or maintaining an 
evasive silence.

His radicalism was also evident in the choice of an epigraph by Karl Marx 
for his greatest novel. It must be the only bestseller in publishing 
history which is prefaced by Marx. Which makes it all the more curious that 
the current British paperback edition of The French Lieutenant?s Woman 
omits it. Why? Is this philistine incompetence on the part of the 
publishers or a crude attempt at censorship?

--

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