Norm notes his passing, as we would expect that good literate friend of ours to do, but I found the debate over at Counago&Spaves spawned by Fowles death to be hilarious. Not only does Fowles come under the hammer, but James Joyce as well. And as much as I can intellectually admire Joyce's writing or at least accept the right of others to praise it, I can honestly say his work is truly "Vienna." *
I liked "The French Lieutentant's Woman" for its knowingness; and for slightly different reasons I liked "A Maggot" (I came across that book when discussing the philosophical debates about time-travel movies such as "Twelve Monkeys" and the Terminator films: in that light "A Maggot" is actually rather enchanting). Is Fowles a bit pretentious? Possibly. Was Joyce? Absobloodylutely.
Doesn't mean I agree with John's intimations about cat lovers though....
* It means nothing to me...
7 comments:
But it needed Reidski to cut through the crap!
Nowt like a Scot to identify the pish.
Well, it is pish!
You say Vienna. I think Ultravox. Think I am at wrong end of stick.
Vienna? Think I missed something at some time in the past (or is it the future? Hard to tell)
You're alright Marie: I WAS thinking of Ultravox...
Um, well, I'm kind of with Bill on this one as I quite liked "Ulysses". Not in a my-God-it's-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread way, but in a hey-that's-kind-of-clever way. I don't have a problem with books which you can read and enjoy and which then yield more interesting stuff if you dig a bit deeper. I DO have my doubts about books where you have to dig deep to get started, which is why I rate "Ulysses" over "Finnegans Wake". I read Ulysses as a teenager and basically just went along for the ride; went back in my twenties and read it a bit more carefully. But Bill protests too much: if people want to dislike it, that's OK by me.
Re John Fowles, I read most of his stuff and liked some of it. The Collector and The Ebony Tower: good. The Magus: better. The FLW: better still. Daniel Martin: good but overlong and frankly unmemorable (I now struggle to recall what it was about). And I'm sorry, but "A Maggot" just convinced me that he'd lost the plot totally. It struck me like the alien spaceship bit in "Life Of Brian", but you knew he didn't mean it to be funny. I made it to the end, but wondered why I'd bothered.
I once read a review (I think it may have been of "Daniel Martin") which went something like this. Some authors are highbrow, some middlebrow and some lowbrow. Sometime a middlebrow author thinks he's highbrow; sometimes a highbrow author thinks he's middlebrow. John Fowles is a 100% middlebrow author who is 100% certain that he's highbrow.
And there is some truth in that. In "The Aristos" Fowles discourses on the need for the arts in education, but basically he pares "the arts" down to "creative writing in one's own language" (rather like John Dashwood and his wife paring down Elinor & Marianne's inheritance in "Sense and Sensibility"). He isn't honest enough to say that he rates that as the most important form of artistic expression because it happens to be what he does himself; he comes out IIRC with rather a lot of justification along the lines of its being the most universal form of expression.
All of which shows that it is possible to be BOTH a very good writer AND a pompous prick. And yes, I think Joyce probably brought off that double as well.
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