Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 May 2004 00:10:14
Well, more of an observation, really. I am currently reading "the Ebony Tower", another John Fowles novel - although this one is substantially shorter than the others I have been wading through recently. Five stories in some 300 pages.
One thing that has struck me reading this is a common thread running through all of Fowles novels: sex. The story always seems to revolve at a psychological level around the central (male) character's interaction with two women; one of them intellectually his equal (or at least intriguing) with a naivety the hero finds attractive, the other woman a far more experienced and aware of her sexaulity. The Virgin and the Venus. The struggle is between lusts for either the innocent or the experienced. Sometimes, as in "the Magus" and "the Ebony Tower", there is an also older male who is the keeper of the women and the current possessor of their sexaulity.
In "the Ebony Tower" there are the two female art students, 'the Freak' and 'the Mouse'; "French Lieutenant's woman" there is the man's fiance and the woman of the title; "Daniel Martin" there is Daniel's old Oxford soulmate Jane and his Hollywood lover, Jenny; "The Magus" there are the two sisters (and then Nicholas' ex-lover thrown in as well, when both sisters turn out to belong to the Venus variety); the Collector is an interesting change because the same girl seems to contain both characters from different viewpoints - and that's all I've read.
What does that say about Fowles? What does it say about me that I like Fowles' books so much? Anyway, now that I've realised this pattern, I'm not sure I'll find the rest so intriguing...