John Fowles

jenks

jenks

thread death
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
 
rewch

rewch

Well-known member
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
 
O

owen

Well-known member
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' :) )
 
k-punk

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
owen said:
(nb, i rather like the idea of 'turning the predominant themes of the age into beach reading' :) )
Click to expand...

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.
 
hmg

hmg

Victory lap
I'm reading The Aristos at the moment. Thinking about it, I made my initial foray into that book on a beach, back in July. His thesis is presented as a collection of epigrams, pithy and otherwise. It veers from wildly dated to right on the money, and certainly worth the 50p I paid for it at Oxfam. I wish I could say more but I'd rather finish it first...
 
rewch

rewch

Well-known member
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
T

tryptych

waiting for a time
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.
Click to expand...


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...
 
k-punk

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
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
Click to expand...

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...
 
M

mms

sometimes
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 .
 
rewch

rewch

Well-known member
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...
Click to expand...

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
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just bought a copy of the french lieutenants woman off some homeless guy who goes around the barrio selling books he's picked up from the trash.

Anyone read it? flicking through it I see it's got quotations from Thomas Hardy and Tennyson and Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, among others, at the beginning of each chapter, I'm quite intrigued. Plus it's supposed to be quite steamy isn't it? Victorian brothels, dance-halls and gin palaces.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Read the first five pages of FLW, can't quite believe how bad this is, one of the worst styles of writing I've ever read, there's no way I could I ever get through it. Might flick through and read the dirty bits later though, bound to be hilarious.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
"You're a very 'andsome gentlemen."
"You're a very pretty girl."
"You like us wicked girls?"

He noted she had dropped the 'sir'. He tightened his left arm a little.

She reached then and took his recalcitrant right hand and led it under her robe to her bare breast. He felt the stiff point of flesh in the centre of his palm. Her hand drew his head to hers, and they kissed, as his hand, now recalling forbidden female flesh, silken and swollen contours, a poem forgotten, sized and approved the breast then slid deeper and lower inside her robe to the incurve of her waist. She was naked, and her mouth tasted faintly of onions.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read the french lieutenants woman at university for some reason. I have bad memories of it because I had to write an essay about it and it got quite a mediocre mark.

As I recall there was a general sense of bleakness about it, that everything in our lives would become meaningless in geological time or something?
 
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