Two Novels: Notes on the Work of John Fowles

Extract

Even in our present state of enlightenment it is relatively uncommon to find a novelist who can treat the physical climax of a love affair so brusquely—‘A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.’ It is the more remarkable if the girl stretched on the bed has not only engineered the loss of her virginity and purchased a small Toby jug —now in the author’s possession—but is actually a divine enigma. Place such a episode in the shadow of a West Country cathedral in the middle years of Victoria’s reign and it becomes as ironic as it is pleasing.

It has been my recent experience on belatedly reading The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman to realize that there is something to be said for not reading books when they first appear. There is the chance that one may more easily recognize the development of a coherent attitude, and it is the essence of my discovery that John Fowles is writing a more unambiguously religious novel than has been generally appreciated. Primarily, his treatment of his material differs in a marked degree from the methods of such writers as Graham Greene, Salinger or Mauriac, in that he creates in his characters a dimension of allegorical potential which cannot be precisely distinguished from their ordinary humanity. It appears to be a new approach, and one that stands—if at some remove—in the line of Bunyan and the medieval Morality. Throughout The Collector, Fowles’ first book, the allegory is implicit and muted; and this, I think, is an attitude one would expect in a writer who had still to establish his narrative powers and was perhaps less than fully aware of the ultimate direction of his abilities. In his preface to the new edition of The Aristos Fowles tells us that his purpose in The Collector was to ‘attempt to analyse through a parable some of the results’ of what he sees as a ‘confrontation’ between ‘the Few and the Many’.