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512 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
Like Golding, Fowles uses time to great effect, clashing past with
present across centuries or across a character’s memories. His novels
play with the imagination of the reader, just as much as they revel in
the creative imagination of the writer. What remains, therefore, can
divide critical opinion more than almost any other writer. Fowles can
be fascinating and irritating at the same time – a treasure trove for
academics, an enjoyable storyteller for those who simply want to read
for pleasure. Several of his works have been filmed, notably The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, for which the dramatist Harold Pinter wrote the
screenplay.
Michael Frayn – novelist, playwright, translator and philosopher –
brings a note of comedy and philosophy together in such novels as The
Trick of It (1989), A Landing on the Sun (1991), and Now You Know
(1992). He is one of the most wide-ranging intellectual writers of his
time, tempering the intellectual challenge of his ideas (on the nature of
artistic creation and love, for instance, in The Trick of It) with some of
the brightest comedy in the modern novel. His farce Noises Off (1982)
enjoyed huge worldwide success in the theatre, and was later filmed.
NOVEL SEQUENCES
Several writers in English have followed the French writer Marcel Proust
in writing multi-novel sequences, of which Proust’s A la recherche du
temps perdu (1912–27) – in English, Remembrance of Things Past – is
the prime example (1922–31, revised 1981 and again in 1992 by the
poet D.J. Enright with the title In Search of Lost Time). Anthony Powell
set his twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75)
among the upper and middle classes, following a wide range of
characters, including the hero Nicholas Jenkins and the ambitious
Kenneth Widmerpool, through the period leading up to the Second
World War and its aftermath. It presents a panorama of the period,
echoing Evelyn Waugh at some stages, but preserving its clear-sighted
view of the unfolding tragedy despite frequent passages of high comedy.
The same vein of tragedy and comedy distinguishes Simon Raven’s
sequence of ten novels Alms for Oblivion and seven novels in The First
Born of Egypt (both series begun in the 1960s), whose strong narratives
frequently touch on homosexual themes and give a more rumbustious