A Maggot

John Fowles seems bound to disappoint me.  I had such high hopes for The French Lieutenant’s Woman when I read it- it starts so well.  But, it rapidly went downhill and I ended up not really enjoying it.  Despite this, I had high hopes for A Maggot.  It’s written in a cool style (that’s the technical term), with transcribed interviews, letters, and cuttings from a period magazine.  To clarify, that’s a magazine contemporary to the time the book is set in.  And yet… I couldn’t get into it.  Some parts were great (and I’ll come to those) but I just felt let down by the book as a whole.

A Maggot tells the story of the disappearance of Mr Bartholomew and possible death.  Keen to find his son, the mysterious Duke gets involved and an investigation begins.  This largely involves a lawyer interviewing everyone who can still be tracked down.  Bartholomew forms a travelling party, telling each member a different story to explain his travelling to Devon.  While there, he takes his servant Dick Thurlow and a prostitute he has hired for the journey Rebecca Lee into a cave.  Versions of what happens in this cave vary wildly, despite the fact that Rebecca is the only one able to tell the tale.  Consequentially, what starts as a fairly routine whodunit soon descends into women being raped by Satan, or possibly aliens and time travel.  It veers a bit off course at the end.  There’s also quite a lot about Quakerism and Shakerism.  To be honest, I’d never heard of Shakerism before and these themes don’t really add to the story.

I think this book disappointed me as it tries too hard to be complex as a narrative, but retains the idea of a very simplistic morality (at least for its female character).  I quite liked the Satan explanation.  This may well be personal preference speaking, but in fiction I’ll take the supernatural over aliens any day of the week.  We know, when Rebecca gives her testimony that she is pregnant and the idea that the child she is carrying could be Satan’s is far more interesting than the actual explanation (a convoluted tale about it being Dick Thurlow’s).  I feel like such a hypocrite, but it’s a shame that the Satan-baby isn’t the actual truth, especially as I get annoyed at the fact that her testimony about the aliens is seen by the male lawyer as less believable that a man’s story of Satan despite the fact that the man wasn’t even there.  I know the book is set in, like, 1736 and these are probably fairly accurate attitudes of the time, but still.  It’s even more annoying as Rebecca is a character of polarised morality.  When she is a whore, she is the lowest of the low, but once she returns to Quakerism, she is sickeningly pious.  It seems that there is very little ambiguity around her morality.  The only reasons she is disbelieved are her gender and her religion.  She is unquestionably moral by the end.  And people, even the very religious, aren’t actually like that.

So there we have it; A Maggot.  A disappointment.  I still hope one day to read a book by Fowles and actually enjoy it all the way to the end.  Truthfully, though, I don’t see that happening for some time.  Maybe I’ll give him a break before I pick up The Magus.  I feel like I say this about a lot of books, but A Maggot would have been so much better if the sexism had been less prevalent and had the aliens not gotten involved.

After a fairly lengthy break from it, I’ve moved back to Russian literature.  It’s now the turn of Ivan Turgenov’s Fathers and Sons.