A Maggot - John Fowles

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A Maggot

by
John Fowles

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	A Maggot
Author:	John Fowles
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1985
Length:	467 pages
Availability:	A Maggot - US
	A Maggot - UK
	A Maggot - Canada
	La créature - France
	Die Grille - Deutschland
	Maggot, la ninfa - Italia
	Capricho - España

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Our Assessment:

B : strange but often compelling brew

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Atlantic Monthly	.	10/1985	Phoebe-Lou Adams
Financial Times	.	21/9/1985	R.L.Fox
The Guardian	.	19/9/1985	Robert Nye
The LA Times	.	6/11/1985	Eileen Warburton
The New Republic	.	7/10/1985	Julian Moynahan
The NY Times	.	2/9/1985	Herbert Mitgang
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	8/9/1985	Walter Miller jr.
People	.	23/9/1985	Campbell Geeslin
Sunday Times	.	22/9/1985	Peter Kemp
Time	.	9/9/1985	Christopher Porterfield
The Times	.	14/9/1985	Peter Stothard
The Times	.	19/9/1985	Stuart Evans
The Washington Post	.	7/9/1985	Webster Schott
World Lit. Today	.	Summer/1986	J.P. Steinfeld

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus; most with some (and often great) reservations

  From the Reviews:

"Mr. Fowles's story begins intriguingly (.....) Then it wanders off into religious fanaticism and black magic that no amount of expert prose can make anything but what it is -- foggy nonsense." - Phoebe-Lou Adams, The Atlantic Monthly

"The historian in me loathes it, but he combines his imagination with a very accessible style and whatever else. A Maggot does maintain a straightforward strand of mystery." - Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times

"Fowles, as always, is a clever pasticheur, and all the various voices ring quite true. (...) It may seem churlish to complain that what is wrong with A Maggot is that too much (ultimately) is revealed. Because Fowles can give so much narrative pleasure to the reader I don't want to discuss the exact nature of this revelation, but I must observe that the book seems to me to fall away sadly from the point where Ayscough finds the whore, Fanny, alias Rebecca Lee, and she is allowed to become the vehicle for some tawdry born-again Christian nonsense, and then even a peg on which the author (appearing in his own person it would seem) hangs various opinions regarding feminism, agnosticism, dissent, and the merits of that United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (commonly called Shakers)" - Robert Nye, The Guardian

"It weaves together arcane theology, vivid characters, some first-rate detective work, a touch of science fiction, feminism, and both historic and fictional documents." - Eileen Warburton, The Los Angeles Times

"How tricky can you get ? We expect prologues and epilogues to be places where a writer stands by his work, clears up problems, levels with the reader; yet this prologue and epilogue are studiedly evasive. (...) When I consider all these assorted possibilities and hypotheses, I become convinced that Fowles has failed to write a serious book. As he says, it is a maggot -- a whim doing the work of imagination." - Julian Moynahan, The New Republic

"Judged on its own -- and even against Fowles's own novels -- A Maggot is strewn with obstacles. The author uses a fictional method that is difficult to sustain for hundreds of pages: court depositions in question-and-answer form. As a result, the novel is repetitious and circuitous instead of artful and exciting. (...) (L)ong on atmosphere and short on narrative." - Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times

"The structure of the novel is unconventional (...) Some of Mr. Fowles's characters seem made less of flesh than of myth." - Walter Miller jr., The New York Times Book Review

"If the title of this original, imaginative novel is explained, one of its major surprises will be destroyed (it has nothing to do with larvae, anyway). (...) In this novel, Fowles' truths create shimmering, indelible images." - Campbell Geeslin, People

"The real motive behind the suspense story he's so elaborately concocted, it transpires, has been to decoy the reader's interest along to a point where Fowles can bombard it with disquisitions on a subject he's become fascinated by." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

"(A)n unusual and consciously risky book. (...) Whether any novel should hinge on such built-in explanations is a debatable point. Still, in philosophical romances of this kind, part of the drama almost always lies in the author's own struggle with the material. That Fowles has shaped his with such inventive energy and intelligence is, in its quirky way, a remarkable achievement." - Christopher Porterfield, Time

"The book is a commentary on how our sense of self was first unlocked and the role in that process of political and religious dissent. (...) Now that in Mrs Thatcher's Britain it is fashionable to call oneself an individualist, John Fowles looks especially askance at that title. A Maggot is a powerful warning. It may be an influential one too." - Peter Stothard, The Times

"Always the champion of freethinking, enlightenment through experience, John Fowles not only portrays a venal, brutal age which bred dissent of the most extreme kind, as manifested by the religious sect of Shakers, whose founder appears at the very end of the novel, but he explores "inside that weird tense grammar does not allow, the imaginary present", the strange mystical territories of trance and illusion where forces of good and evil are transformed and confused in the eye of the beholder." - Stuart Evans, The Times

"John Fowles has done what he intended -- to please himself by making an historical novel out of a whim. But by almost every other measurement A Maggot is a disappointment. It's a prolonged mystery that remains a mystery. It's a morality tale propelled by an occult conversion to an aberrant form of Christianity. (...) John Fowles designs A Maggot to draw his reader into imaginative alliance with him through technical devices. (...) But Fowles can't or won't show us characters changing, mysteries unlocked, or plots concluded. He keeps the instructive pleasures of fiction to himself." - Webster Schott, The Washington Post

"(A) fantastic sexual and necromantic contrivance whose interweavings with the memories and imaginations of its witnesses allow no answers to be found. (...) Although significant, the novel's metafictional touchstones remain merely implications, commenting upon the narrative but never deflecting the reader from the old-fashioned, riveting mystery at hand. That mystery's final insolubility is the inevitable outcome of its twentieth century form" - Janis Paul Steinfeld, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

'A maggot' is not really the most appealing of images, but a brief Prologue by the author tries its best to dispel would-be book-buyers' and readers' possible queasiness about what awaits, noting that:

A maggot is the larval stage of a winged creature; as is the written text, at least in the writer's hope. But an older though now obsolete sense of the word is that of whim or quirk.

The promise of some whim or quirk -- that already sounds more inviting and intriguing .....
Without specifying which he means, Fowles ends his Prologue making clear that:

What follows may seem like a historical novel; but it is not. It is maggot.

       It is quite the whim, then, that follows -- though those readers hoping for an actual, familiar maggot will get more than their money's worth as well -- though here, in what also goes for the novel as a whole: "this was no true maggot nor living creature, but something of artifice".
       Fowles' elaborate artifice begins in the form of a fairly traditional historical novel, with a long section describing five travelers making their way in "a remote upland in the far south-west of England" in 1736. They seem to be a man -- Mr. Brown -- and his nephew, Mr. Bartholomew (though: "They do not speak like nephew and uncle" ...), as well as a man called Jones, in service to Brown; deaf and mute servant Dick; and maid-girl Louise. The story is that they are on their way to Bideford, to visit Mr.Brown's wealthy sister -- but it is quickly made clear that things -- and they -- are not quite what and who they seem (or would like to be taken for, at least).
       Although deferring to the uncle, it is the would-be Bartholomew that is clearly in charge, and Louise is no maid -- and no lady, either. Bartholomew has hired an actor to play his uncle, and a prostitute to present herself as Louise -- and Brown is not even to accompany him on the final part of the trip, but rather to go on his way at a fork in the road ahead.
       So go the first fifty pages of the novel, in detailed description -- and with some observations from a modern perspective as well, Fowles carefully avoiding presenting the narrative solely in and of its times and repeatedly reminding the reader of the contemporary vantage point from which they are engaging with the text (e.g.: "A twentieth-century mind, could it have journeyed back and taken on the sensibilities and eyes of those two betterclass travellers riding that day into the town" ...). Aspects of the masquerade are also already hinted at or revealed, including some of the true identities ("Jones, that is Farthing", for example).
       The first of several facsimile-pages of a 'Historical Chronicle' then follows this first section, allowing Fowles to show other conditions and circumstances of the times -- a survey of some of the news of the day --, with more of these interspersed throughout the novel, followed then by a short newspaper article describing the discovery of a body some two months after the travelers had passed through the area. It is Dick, apparently hanged by his own hand.
       Much of the novel then takes the form of depositions of sorts collected by lawyer Henry Ayscough -- "also a barrister, a very different kettle of fish from the mere attorney", here acting on behalf of a client who looks to discover what happened to the travelers. The depositions -- taken over months -- take the form of simple, unadorned dialogue; there are also some letters Ayscough and others write, as well as brief sections of novelistic description, but most of the novel is in the simple form of questions and answers.
       Ayscough conducts a thorough investigation, interviewing first those who interacted with the odd quintet, and then with those members he can root out -- the actor who played the uncle; Timothy Farthing, who played Jones; and the prostitute called Louise, called also Fanny, Rebecca Hocknell, -- and Rebecca Lee. It is the story of the man who organized the whole thing that Ayscough wants to learn about, however, much more than simply what might have driven Dick to suicide -- and it takes a while before the pieces here begin to fit together.
       It is Rebecca Lee who is questioned at greatest length, and who can provide the most information if not necessarily insight into the circumstances and what happened. There's a lot to this, from her having slept with Dick -- and not having slept with the man called Bartholomew ... -- but the biggest revelation is what happened at the end of the road, as it were, when the remaining trio of Bartholomew, Dick, and her reach their destination (with Jones/Farthing watching from afar). As Ayscough says when she gives her version of events: "this would tax the most credulous fool in Christendom". And, indeed, it is, to say the least, a fantastical tale.
       It all makes for a very odd story -- an origin story, ultimately, (of the Shakers), which Fowles builds on the English conditions of that time -- having noted early on already that the story begins when:

This particular last day of April falls in a year very nearly equidistant from 1689, the culmination of the English Revolution, and 1789, the start of the French; in a sort of dozing solstitial standstill, a stasis of the kind predicted by those today who see all evolution as a punctuated equilibrium, between those two zenith dates and all they stand for, at a time of reaction from the intemperate extremisms of the previous century, yet already hatching the seeds (perhaps even in that farthing and careless strew of fallen violets) of the world-changing upheaval to come.

Midway through he diagnoses the age more closely, noting the: "profound respect for right of property; this united all society but the lowest, and dictated much of its behaviour, its opinions, its thinking" -- but also that:

love of property clashed head on with the other great credo of eighteenth-century England.
This was the belief that change leads not to progress, but to anarchy and disaster.

       Fowles' take on this, and some of the religious movements of the day is interesting -- and certainly interestingly presented -- though it is really far out there, too. Really far.
       The investigation-framework makes for solid suspense, too, but A Maggot is certainly not you usual mystery-story -- and also offers fewer of the satisfactions expected from such (though there are some neat revelations as some of the pieces come to fit together). On the other hand, Fowles manages to surprise with some of his invention, too, as this novel goes to some very unusual and certainly unexpected places ..... But, as Fowles had also warned, this may look like an historical novel but isn't (just) quite that either, and those expecting or hoping for that will be somewhat disappointed (or befuddled).
       An odd, odd piece of work, but certainly an intriguing one, both in its presentation and its greater ambitions (addressed also in an Epilogue, in which the author again steps to the fore and explains some of what he has meant to do).

- M.A.Orthofer, 22 July 2024

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Links:

A Maggot:

Vintage publicity page
Little, Brown publicity page
Albin Michel publicity page

Reviews:

John Fowles:

John Fowles - the website

Other books by John Fowles under review:

The Magus

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Contemporary British fiction

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About the Author:

English author John Fowles lived 1926 to 2005.

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