John Fowles has died, at age 79.
I remember reading his book The Magus in 11th grade English class. Most of the students like it because it was “the dirty book” but this writer sucked me completely into his labyrinthine plot, and the complex, devious characters responsible for creating the maze. I must have read this book five or six times, and recommended it to scores of friends. It’s the first book I read written in the 20th century that I can remember truly LOVING. It definitely taught me that the types of books I like are not just “the old ones” or genre novels — that there was a literary life for me beyond Penguin Classics.
I thought of The Magus when I saw The Game, when I read Salamander and when I visited the island school on Spetses where Fowles set this most intriguing novel. It’s about history and sex and race and class and psychology and politics and detachment and love and mystery and action — in short, everything I like in my novels. At the time, I didn’t realize that the obvious next step would be to search down his other works. I know better now, a decade later.
I haven’t read the book in years. My copy was lost to a friend who never returned it. I think I’m going to buy another this afternoon, or maybe pick up The French Lieutenant’s Woman or another work I have not read.
Thank you, Mr. Fowles, for writing me such a wonderful book. Thank you for opening the door to everything I learned as a result of reading The Magus, and thank you for whateverinfluence you have had on my development as a writer.
Ave et Vale.
4 Comments
November 7, 2005 at 8:46 pm
I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman in college and it was…wow…so moving. Definitely recommend the book. And, the movie is excellent, too. Nice tribute here.
November 7, 2005 at 9:22 pm
Coincidently I’m reading The Magus for the first time right now. (I’m a little more than half way through.) I’d been having difficulty getting into books again after the whole fire thing and hadn’t really been reading at all. Then a friend gave me this book, thinking it might be something I’d like. And they were right – I’m fascinated by it. Completely hooked. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.
Sorry to hear of the passing of Mr. Fowles. He was an amazing writer.
November 7, 2005 at 11:27 pm
From novelist/blogger Ron Franscell at http://underthenews.blogspot.com …
Who knows why an author becomes an author. A tricky wiring of the senses? A quest to recapture some too-brief moment in the distant past? A hubris that allows him to believe he has something worth somebody else’s attention? A wan attempt at immortality? Keener-than-normal typing skills?
I wrote “stories” when I was very young — snippets, really, without the pretention or self-awareness I now combat. I read voraciously and unwittingly collected a vocabulary that stood me in favor with English teachers. I started working on the school paper when I was 12 and never stopped.
But it wasn’t until college, when I read “The Magus” by John Fowles, that I believed I could write a book. Not because it seemed too damned easy, but because Fowles was alive and because his writing was rich beyond belief. Intensely erotic in its language, incredibly brave in its structure, and utterly asymmetrical in its intellectualism — it opened a door that had been cracked only a sliver. Here was this Brit who spoke so beautifully and viscerally and poetically when all I knew about British literature to that point was stuffy, overwrought and exceedingly long. And the ending … inconclusive, atmospheric, an unanswered question. To this day, “The Magus” remains among the two or three books that made my life better, both as a writer and a man.
Fowles’ death Saturday, then, gives me pause. We’d never met, although I had hoped someday to shake his hand and to tell him what his writing meant to me. I spent some time in his old hometown — Oxford, England — while doing some international reporting years ago, and I asked about him, but I was discouraged from knocking on his door like a troublesome literary groupie — which, I suppose, I was. After all, he was a private man and the fact that I had written two novels gave me no unique dispensation to ask him to share a pint at the corner pub and tell me a secret. I’m sorry now that I didn’t.
John Fowles did what a writer must do: He created his alternate, parallel world and invited me in. More than the others whom I admired — the literally all-American passel of Hemingway, Steinbeck, London and Fitzgerald — he showed me possibilities I hadn’t considered. His later books taught me everything I needed to know about non-linear storytelling, the free-verse that prose could be, and diabolic irony. And more than the rest, he showed me that poetic eroticism and visuality — not the strength of the Americans either — wasn’t only the country of women writers. But his mystery was no mystery at all; he knew there were no magic beans, no answers, no perfect resolutions, no knowing what comes next, except dying.
I’ll miss Fowles. And I promise: If any young writer ever knocks on my door to tell me he became a writer because of something I wrote, I’ll let him take me to the corner pub for a pint. I just won’t have any secrets to share. I’ll just hand him a copy of “The Magus.”
November 8, 2005 at 3:25 pm
I loved all his books, but the one I prefer is The Collector – he was ahead of his time when he wrote that, and it still chills me when I think of it.