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Fowles and Frayn
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gods did not live on that mountain, they did in fact, in real fact,
live somewhere, in some other mode, on a far greater mountain?
It was too much for me. I did not speak out but kept silent,
veiling my head completely.
Golding’s fictional search for a truth of humanity ties in with A.S.
Byatt’s idea of a post-Darwinian attempt in fiction to replace or
substitute the faith that has been put in question.
FOWLES AND FRAYN
The novels of John Fowles use magic, artifice, the very self-conscious
fictionality of writing to carry on that search. They have enjoyed great
academic and commercial success in Europe and the USA: they are
intellectual, self-conscious experiments with theme and form, and carry
warnings for the reader about the nature of the reading experience. In
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), for example, the Victorian
novel form is used and then questioned while the reader is left with a
choice between two possible endings. For many readers and critics,
this is the post-Modern novel par excellence; innovative while using
traditional form, subversive while telling a good tale, authoritative but
questioning. It is, indeed, a major achievement, although its playing
with time is not wholly original, and the ‘alternative ending’ idea had
been tried out as early as Thackeray’s The Newcomes in the 1850s.
Fowles’s The Magus (1966, revised 1977) plays with reality and
myth on a Greek island. Fowles is not associated with any one trend
in the novel, moving with ease from the psychological thriller of
imprisonment and obsession, in The Collector (1963), through short
stories, to the Laurie Lee-like evocation of growing up in Daniel Martin
(1977). Always a writer to keep the reader from falling into
preconceptions, his narrator in A Maggot (1985) asserts:
. . . the retrospective we have of remembering and asserting a past
age by its Popes, its Addisons and Steeles, its Johnsons, conveniently
forgets how completely untypical artistic genius is of most human
beings in any age, however much we force it to be the reverse.