John Fowles

Leigh on Sea's famous son - hated it down here, was rude about everybody and still they put up a plaque on his house.

seemed to go out of favour/fashion very quickly.

never much of a fan - seemed to be a bloke who filtered the predominant themes of the age into beach reading - maybe i'm being unfair

don't think you are being unfair... i thought the magus one of the most annoying books i've ever read... it goes on & on & on & on, hinting at something rather peculiar & then adopts the 'don't believe the narrator' stance at the end, thereby negating the whole purpose of the exercise... have always felt the same about murdoch's the black prince too... can understand the authorial intention behind the books, but they do leave the reader with a severe sense of hopelessness... 'i've just spent x amount of time reading y number of pages & invested various responses to the work in that time, only to be told - as a sort of codicil - that the narrator was confused or untrustworthy & that the whole book didn't happen like that at all'... cheap narrative tricks if you ask me... which are doubly annoying because i enjoyed both books as i read them... quite enjoyed the collector, or was at least positively ambivalent

sorry about that small rant, but the magus (& the black prince) are particular bêtes noirs of mine...

all that irrelevance aside r.i.p. mr fowles

funny, i saw one of his books in the salvation army shop in deptford today (the collector, i think). worth reading...?

(nb, i rather like the idea of 'turning the predominant themes of the age into beach reading' )

owen said:

(nb, i rather like the idea of 'turning the predominant themes of the age into beach reading' )

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Me too... Sounds a bit like Houllbecq!

The Magus is the only one I've read; I've only seen the film of The Collector (which is brilliant AND mentioned by Baudrillard in Seduction). But The Magus is a fabulous book... a precursor of The Prisoner and of David Fincher's The Game, amongst much else... Check this : novels reminiscent of The Magus...

Fowles deserves credit for doing what is all but impossible in British literature now, combining an unashamed desire to be popular (the beach reading impulse) with an equally unembarrassed attachment to philosophical and theoretical themes.... The Magus stands midway between existentialism and postmodern metafiction...

Slightly surprised by Rewch's response to The Magus... surely after reading hundreds of pages, after seeing each layer peeled away and all certainties evaporate, the ending couldn't come as much of a surprise... how else could the novel end except on this note of studied ambivalence? An ending which brought (yeuch) 'closure', which explained everything, would have fundamentally betrayed the novel, and would have fell into the very Conchis-Magus delusion that it unravels.

The Collector is great and I recommend it to everyone. A lot easier and shorter than his other stuff and very tense and gripping narratively.

Also, check this great article. Remember him this way!

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n09/sans01_.html

k-punk said:

Slightly surprised by Rewch's response to The Magus... surely after reading hundreds of pages, after seeing each layer peeled away and all certainties evaporate, the ending couldn't come as much of a surprise... how else could the novel end except on this note of studied ambivalence? An ending which brought (yeuch) 'closure', which explained everything, would have fundamentally betrayed the novel, and would have fell into the very Conchis-Magus delusion that it unravels.

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wasn't surprisedd by the ending or lack of it, but felt that it was handled very badly... enjoyed the x amount of pages of wtf?? cluelessness & felt horribly led by the author when he reveals the reality... so really it's one of those books that is enjoyable to read but not to finish... if that makes any sense

k-punk said:

Slightly surprised by Rewch's response to The Magus... surely after reading hundreds of pages, after seeing each layer peeled away and all certainties evaporate, the ending couldn't come as much of a surprise... how else could the novel end except on this note of studied ambivalence? An ending which brought (yeuch) 'closure', which explained everything, would have fundamentally betrayed the novel, and would have fell into the very Conchis-Magus delusion that it unravels.

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I only made it halfway through the Magus before giving up. At first I enjoyed the peeling off of the layers of reality, but became increasling bored. I didn't even enjoy the "wtf" experience of reading it. After a few incidents, it all seems rather predictable, and astonishing that the protagonist falls for each new revealed layer as if it were the truth...

rewch said:

wasn't surprisedd by the ending or lack of it, but felt that it was handled very badly... enjoyed the x amount of pages of wtf?? cluelessness & felt horribly led by the author when he reveals the reality... so really it's one of those books that is enjoyable to read but not to finish... if that makes any sense

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I see what you mean but I can't imagine an ending that wouldn't be worse... One that completely and definitively established the nature of the reality of Nicholas' life would surely have dissipated all of the book's magic.... in a way, the ending was the equivalent of a fade out in a record... that is to say, it ended contingently.... because books have to, not because it came to any conclusion...

i really like his stuff - the collector scared me stupid when i read it - hardly beach reading it's a stark book.
Brilliantly written


same with the magus - cnstant unsettling feeling all the way through. French lieutenants woman is classic too.

The magus is reportedly the book that inspired the wicker man - clear to see why

I also enjoyed his contributions to the new scientist about birdlife etc .

k-punk said:

I see what you mean but I can't imagine an ending that wouldn't be worse... One that completely and definitively established the nature of the reality of Nicholas' life would surely have dissipated all of the book's magic.... in a way, the ending was the equivalent of a fade out in a record... that is to say, it ended contingently.... because books have to, not because it came to any conclusion...

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most articulately put...

& thank you mms... interesting about the wicker man... that definitely has the same sense of cluelessness about it...

in fact it's a shame that the ending of the magus isn't more like the wicker man... i think i could've enjoyed that