Throughout his literary career John Fowles has been a seductive and ingenious writer whose books have appealed to a wide audience. The reasons for his popularity are, I think, twofold. He is not only a master storyteller, with a keen sense of narrative drive and timing, but also a thoughtful, reflective man who uses his fiction to pose moral questions and state philosophical conflicts. Thus Fowles manages to satisfy both the reader who is simply looking for a smashing, suspenseful tale and the reader who prefers something deeper and more intellectually stimulating. Some critics have contested this, however: they have said that Fowles is frequently more pretentious than profound and that his work somehow lacks the resonance, density, and subtlety we associate with truly major art.
Almost as if to counter these judgments, Fowles has produced Daniel Martin, a mammoth volume which is filled with detailed character portraits and lengthy meditations and reflections, and which pretty much dispenses with the narrative strategies of the earlier books: the aura of mystery, the suspense, the creation of strange, not quite realistic worlds. In fact, the only prolonged suspense is generated by the renewed relationship between the title character and the woman he loved in his youth: will they get together again or will they simply drift apart? Though the novel is, for most of the way, entertaining and a pleasure to read, it cannot be mistaken for an entertainment. Paradoxically, its one major problem is that it is sometimes just too serious for its own good.
Comments