The Ebony Tower (1974)

5 סיפורים קצרים, אחד פולקלור. סיפור הכותר הוא נובלה​ קצרה בסגנון האהוב על פולס. גבר, שתי בחורות, אומנו​ת מול מציאות, אהבה מול ארוטיקה, פולס טוב ואופיני. ​יתר הסיפורים נעים בין השבלוני למעצבן.​ ( )

never heard of this book and then saw dvd of laurence o and then found i had the story. the movie was very faithful and both created a good ambience of sexual longing. ( )

This is a collection of four inventive stories, one of which is a translation of a madieval French ballad called "Eliduc", and one kind-of misfire built around its own little fairytale. Fowles indulges in light versions of his typical existentialist poststructuralism,unsettling the text for ultimately moral rather thanartisic reasons, but if you're sympathetic to his project like I am it works. And certainly it entertains, and touches the heart. Perhaps in my current straits I was expecting too much from a series of stories in which noble but hapless protagonists leave their lives, which range from mostly worthless to beautiful and fulfilling, to enter enchanted realms, in one case scary and unpleasantly social-realist (although I'm really beginning to appreciate that dash of cold water in retrospect, in a book where literally every other character uses "one" so liberally, not only to mean "myself or someone of my social milieu", as in "Well of course one has friends with places abroad", but also simply to mean "me, explicitly", like "one does have two daughters as well." Fowles is the one with the cred in this case, of course, but till now I've only encountered the latter usage as parody in Gail Simone comics).


In the other stories, though, the worlds entered are enchanting and sexy, and the struggle between two kinds of joy and figuring out which is ephemeral, and how ephemeral, is a perennially good study for the human male. But Fowles just . . . I don't know, creeps it up with all this "gigantic (enervated) melancholies and gigantic (troglodytic) mirths of the middle-class English iconoclast" stuff. Sub-DH Lawrence, painfully, awkwardly unrepressed and gropily sexual, no doubt coming across as erotic tiger sharks in their milieu of foxhunty reserve, where the number one rule is "repress not express" - but to the reader in 2009, or even 1980 you'd expect, the endlessly, idiotically available female bits ("o' nice") in the service of overcoming male samurai repression is just so weirdly cryptoporny . . . like, David is driving up to the secluded country house, and you're all "okay, where are the exotic, free and brown, but still properly English girls, and when are they going to come out and get naked and be made faint by his potency?" And then when he arrives they're already naked.


I mean, this stuff was probably needed in the mid-'60s when The Magus was published, and certainly you can't fault Fowles for getting caught up in the spirit of the times. But it has not aged well, and if Mantissa was the author in self-parody and well aware of his past and rep, this appears to be self-parody unintentional and unaware. And it makes you think that the Summer-of-Love era could never have been as good as you (I) always want to imagine it was - that all that sex could not have been all that freeing if it was practiced on these unequal terms. And then you think of your students the other day, giggling away at the rape imagery in "Goblin Market" (which gets almost "take it, bitch" at times, and is an amazing work, thank you Mrs. Rossetti), and you think, Wow, maybe it's just in the nature of gender relations that free love can never be equal and love between equals can never be free. ( )

I did not find this book as satisfying as Fowles' novels, but it does provide interesting insights into his writing. ( )

1952 The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles (read 2 Nov 1985) This is a collection of five short stories. The first, and title story, is obnoxious, so filled with scatological and vulgar language, interspersed with much technical language on painting, I nearly quit reading it. It tells of a young painter who goes to visit an old painter who lives in France with two young English women. I hated it, even though the "I" (the young painter) remains technically not an adulterer, and the ending wasn't too bad, though arty and up in the air. The story "Eliduc" is a rendering of a supposed medieval story, which had no interest for me. The third story, "Poor Koko" is an exceptionally well-written story of a guy who is the victim of a burglary-robbery: though the criminal is not the kind of criminal I ever see. The fourth story, The Enigma, tells of the disappearance of a proper Tory member of parliament in 1973--fictional, but very well done. The disappearance is of course never solved--in modern fiction such as Fowles writes the ends are never tied up as they were in the juvenile fiction I so loved when I was a kid. The fifth story, The Cloud, is superbly written and tells of a bizarre picnic by English picnickers in central France--three kids, five adults--and I presume involves suicide of a widowed young woman--but that is not clear either. Fowles can certainly write, but I wish he'd put his talent to better use. ( )