John Fowles: The Aristos (1964, revised 1980)

The title may suggest "À la lanterne les aristos!", the cry of the French revolutionary mob in The Scarlet Pimpernel. But in fact Fowles is using the Greek word aristos, meaning "the best" without the reference to hereditary privilege it now has in its best known English descendant, aristocracy, or being restricted in application to people, as the same word has it. This is a book which describes Fowles' personal philosophy, which is all about the best (in his view) relative to each particular situation. Most of The Aristos originated when Fowles was in his twenties, but the material was revised for its initial publication and again for this edition.

In the introduction, Fowles - who studied French at university - cites his models as French, particularly Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Chamfort (and also mentioning Montaigne). Having only read Pascal and Montaigne from this list, I can see the relationship, but what The Aristos really reminds me of is André Gide's The Fruits of the Earth, also the product of a university student of great literary ability who was a left-leaning amateur philosopher.

Not that literary quality is particularly apparent here - The Aristos is written in note form. Note form is not unknown in philosophy, obviously, and, true to his influences, The Aristos is much more like Pascal's Pensées than, say, Witgennstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The latter is much harder to read, perhaps because it is even more compressed than the other works. Fowles explains to the reader that the form is used so that it acts as a bald statement of a philosophy, not as an attempt to persuade anyone else through its artistry. This is somewhat disingenuous, as he then almost immediately slips in a rhetorical metaphor, which is perhaps more artistically pleasing than illuminating of his meaning. He says that life is like being adrift on a raft in the middle of an ocean, the point of the image being that there is no way to know the shores beyond the horizon might be like, so likewise there is no real way to be sure about what happened before birth or will happen after death.

Fowles' basic argument in The Aristos is based on his reaction to one of the most famous ideas in Pascal's Pensées. This idea is known as "Pascal's Wager", that the rational man should believe in God, because there is nothing to lose in the next life if he is wrong, and everything to gain if he is right. (This doesn't work for me personally, as I don't see belief as something I can turn on and off as this suggests is necessary; but that is off the topic.) But, Fowles says, in the second half of the twentieth century, after the horrors of the two world wars, to choose to believe in a Christian God is no longer as reasonable, as it is harder to accept the concept of a God who loves his creation, making the choice between belief and atheism less balanced than it was in the seventeenth century. Thus the rational person should assume that this life is all there is; and this in turn means that we have a moral duty to make this life as good as possible for as many as possible, which we can do by aiming to reduce social injustice and inequality.

This may not be convincing (it is rather more so in its full form than summarised as drastically as I have done here). The intention is not so much to convert as to give an alternative to both capitalism and communism, neither of which, in Fowles' opinion, provide both "equal access to the chief sources of happiness" and "the maximum freedom [to the individual] to decide what these sources should be". Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that one or other of the two ideologies will collapse in 1989 if they fail to bring greater equality (picking the date as the two hundredth anniversary of the French revolution): a remarkably prescient prediction, as it turned out.

It could be argued that this philosophy seems rather glib for a writer from a comparatively privileged background: born in the West, well educated (at a time when class distinctions mattered more in British universities than they do today, despite all the fuss about the Oxbridge intake from private schools), well respected in his chosen profession, and so on - a "champagne Socialist". Fowles himself recognises this potential problem, and argues that for the good of society, socialism cannot be left as the province of the poorest workers. His response is to call for us to seek to promote greater equality of opportunity (which he carefully differentiates from equality of innate talent); if we don't do so, he says, we are just selfish and ultimately living futile lives.

The inspiration for The Aristos is explicitly the ideas of Heraclitus, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, whose work survives solely in quotations and descriptions in the writing of others; it is his use of the word aristos which Fowles has followed. Fowles ends his book with an appendix containing the major Heraclitan material, in his own translations: four pages in all but a useful background for the philosophically inclined reader (and I am pretty sure that this is a book which will not attract any other kind).

Is Fowles convincing? Overall, not really, though most people will agree with at least some part of what he has to say. There is much food for thought, and the whole of The Aristos is interesting and readable: the layout may look like the Tractatus, but Fowles is much more easily comprehensible. Clearly an important document for deeper understanding of his fiction, The Aristos is more, as an intelligent person's reaction to the modern wold, it is a fascinating byway in twentieth century philosophy. My rating: 7/10.


Edition: Triad/Granada, 1981 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1422

John Fowles: A Maggot (1985)

Edition: Vintage, 1996
Review number: 1256

In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles wrote a knowing twentieth century version of a nineteenth century novel. A Maggot is more conventionally a historical novel, set in 1736 but despite fitting better into the genre, it shares much of the ironic self awareness of Fowles' best known work.

The novel starts with something very small - a group of travellers riding across Exmoor, who stop overnight at a small village before heading on again. But a few days later, one of the party, a mute servant, is found dead, having apparently hanged himself. The rest of the novel deals with an investigation, not so much an attempt to find out what actually happened, but to do so as a stage towards finding the rest of the party, who have completely disappeared and who included at least one important person. Thus, the form of most of the novel is records of the interrogations of witnesses, separated (to indicated the passing of time) by excepts from the Gentleman's Magazine, a journal of the time, apparently reproduced in facsimile. While outwardly more like The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Maggot actually has more in common with The Magus. The witness interviews reveal that the ostensible purpose of the trip to Exeter hides another more sinister motive; that the people involved are not who they seem to be; that what is really going on involves some kind of occult ritual.

Anthony Burgess described this novel as "subversive", and there are several ways in which this might be considered to be true. There are both overt and covert attacks on the ideas behind the class structure of Georgian society, some of which are fairly clearly meant to make the reader think about those in positions of authority today. The idea that someone from a higher class would necessarily be a better person is not one readily believed today, but some relic of it is surely part of our hunger for scandal about the morals of politicians and celebrities - do we now believe that people in the public eye should be better than we are? There are also attacks on religious hypocrisy, particularly when the political nature of the Anglican church of the time is compared with the unsettling intensity of the Dissenters. This doesn't have quite the same resonance with the modern world, however, and attacking hypocrisy is not exactly subversive. Dissent is a sufficiently important theme that it as a focus may be said to be another aspect of subversion in the novel.

The way that A Maggot is structured is another element which is more truly subversive. Historical novels are generally quite descriptive, because part of the aim of the genre is usually to convey their background to today's readers. Here, there is very little description, apart from that in the opening pages which are entirely of this form but which could be set in any time period in which groups of travellers rode horses across Exmoor when it was a remote dangerous wilderness and not somewhere frequented by tourists as it is today - in other words, any time before the arrival of the railways. After this beginning, atmospheric as good historical novels are supposed to be, yet not positioning the narrative in time or even (initially) in place, the historical context is mainly provided by the Gentleman's Magazine excerpts, which most readers probably find difficult to read as they're in extremely small type and a hard to decipher font, apart from their lack of relation to the story.

There is also literary subversion of the same type as in The Magus. In both novels, layers of deception are gradually exposed; but here the use of interrogation reports makes the revelations less effective, even though the reader will still spend most of the novel wondering what is really going on behind all the lies.

The way that the title refers to several aspects of A Maggot is not so much subversive as clever (and Fowles obviously thought it important enough to spell out why he chose it in the introduction). In one sense, it refers to the maggot as symbol of corruption, but a maggot is also a rather old fashioned term for an obsession. Several of the characters have obsessions, including the questioning attorney who is more interested in allegations of homosexuality than in the murder itself. But the novel itself arose out of an obsessive picture in Fowles' mind, of a group of horse riders in a wilderness. This became A Maggot's opening scene, and it is an arresting image. The literal meaning of the word also makes a surprising appearance.

While those who do not know Fowles' work will probably pick up A French Lieutenant's Woman or The Magus, A Maggot is definitely worthwhile reading for anyone who enjoyed either of the other two novels.

John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

Edition: Vintage, 1996
Review number: 984

The nineteenth century novel is an important part of the legacy of English literature, and the Victorian age is one which has continued to fascinate throughout the last hundred years (particularly in this year, the centenary of Victoria's death). The French Lieutenant's Woman is a homage to the novels of writers like Dickens, Thackeray and Trolloppe (with nods towards Hardy and James), together with a commentary on the period to which much of the last century's culture has been a reaction.

The type of story told here is, with certain modifications such as overt sexuality, one which could have been the plot of a nineteenth century novel. Set in Lyme Regis (location of important parts of persuasion and, as a fossil hunter's paradise, essential to developments in Victorian scientific ideas), The French Lieutenant's Woman is about Charles Smithson, heir to a baronetcy, and the woman to whom he is engaged, Ernestina Freeman,rich heiress of a merchant. She is spending the summer with her aunt, a resident of the town. The woman of the title is a former governess who haunts the quay after having been abandoned by her lover, a French sailor; respectable people assume that she is no better than a prostitute. Charles becomes fascinated with this outcast from the comfortable society in which he has lived all his life despite his advanced Darwinian views.

The principal way that it is clear that Fowles is a twentieth century writer is in the way that the story is told. The narrator takes a large part in proceedings himself, and is more a guide to explain the psychology and culture of the characters than a traditional storyteller. The reader is constantly kept at a distance from the story, always being made aware of how it illustrates the Victorian age. It is done in a moderately academic way, making The French Lieutenant's Woman quite an intellectual novel, but it is always fascinating. A good example of the sort of thing that Fowles does is the treatment of Charles' Cockney servant Sam; we are given quite a lengthy digression just after the introduction of the character about the similarities to and the differences from the most famous fictional Victorian servant, The Pickwick Papers' Sam Weller.

In fact, The French Lieutenant's Woman is almost as much about the twentieth century attitude to the Victorian age as it is about its setting. Fowles makes much of contradictions (such as the popularity of pornography in a supposedly straitlaced culture), implicitly drawing attention to similar contradictions a hundred years later. (The novel is set almost exactly a century before it was written.) In science fiction, it is commonto use the future to criticise the present, but it is much more unusual for a historical novel to attempt to use the past for the same purpose.

John Fowles: The Magus (1966/1977)

Edition: Vintage, 1997
Review number: 444

This strange and compelling novel was one that Fowles only felt that he could pass to his publisher after he had already gained a measure of success as a writer. Even then, it was revised before its reissue just over a decade later, and the introduction to the new edition is still apologetic about its self indulgence and what it describes as its adolescent nature.

The story is about Nicholas Urfe, teaching English for a year in the Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos, an imitation of a British public school based on one in which Fowles taught on Spetsai. There he meets reclusive millionaire Maurice Conchis, and becomes involved in a strange psychological game; nothing is quite what it seems, each new revelation by Conchis turning out to be another stimulus to his experimental subject Urfe.

The major strengths of The Magus are its sense of atmosphere, and the background, as strong and understated as the best of Lawrence Durrell. (The feeling of the books is decidedly reminiscent of the Avignon Quintet.) The Greek setting and an interest in the esoteric are part of the reason for this, but the style itself is also similar.

Each revelation about Conchis' activities is interesting, for all the ingenious ways in which it unsettles our earlier ideas about the truth behind what he is doing. As well as being the point of the novel (leading us to question both the reality of our own lives and the relationship between a work of fiction and reality), it ends up being its major weakness. It goes beyond the unsettling and trivialises itself. The constant pulling out of the rug from under the reader's feet is the principal way in which Fowles' self-indulgence is manifested.

Connected with this is a lack of motivation for the way in which Conchis behaves. As we can never be sure we know the truth about what he is trying to do, it is quite difficult to impute any specific reason for it. However, Fowles doesn't even make a serious attempt to provide one, and this contributes another important flaw.

Yet the novel draws you in, and you want to try to see what is really going on. It is immensely clever and it is easy to see both why Fowles wanted to publish it and why he didn't do so until he already had some measure of success.