Fowles has called this book in interview 'Me in America'. Rightly so - an 'Aga Saga' for the more educationally well-prepped Middle Classes, this is a thinly-veiled portrait of Fowles, and the navel-gazing preoccupations of a whole social stratum that has lost its way and function ever since the end of WWII. Arch, littered with the signposts of privilege and status, and ultimately irrelevant in its assumptions about England, this was for me a literally unreadable work. This is not, as Fowles is also quoted as saying, about: "Englishness - what it is like to be English in the late 20th century." Rather it is a broken artifact of a particular social grouping, and its unconsciously painful groping for a sense of meaning it could never quite achieve, or perhaps justify, again, after the caesura of the khaki election in 1945. Woeful.

1955 Daniel Martin, by John Fowles (read 10 Nov 1985) This tells of a screen-writer's life, and his relationship with Jane. They are at Oxford together, he marries her sister Nell, she marries Anthony. The novel has lots of meat to it, much soul-searching, much conversation about serious subjects. It also has very jarring and obnoxious and totally unnecessary four-letter words, and of course far too much explicitness in physical matters. The title "hero" (not to me: how nice it'd be to have a fictional hero in a recent novel who obeyed the Sixth Commandment!) and Jane do end up together at the end after a trip to Egypt and Syria. Fowles is a superlative craftsman--I wonder if there is anyone better writing in English today. Of course, he is very intellectual and one feels a clod over his super-subtle probings of human relationships. There were times when I was really caught up by this intricate account of people I could not admire, even though philosophically I deplored everybody in the story. (The one loyal Catholic commits suicide holding a crucifix! But of course Fowles is an atheist, and one cannot expect him to do other than seek to proclaim his lack of Faith.) I was very impressed by much in this book. ( )