A Maggot
Fowles, John
ing, this might have been a better and more valuable book. But he is a theorizer, and a liberal one at that. Jefferson is his ideal founder, education his all-purpose nostrum for saving America from...
...There is, however, a more solemn, ulterior, possibly more evil purpose for the long journey, a climax that will involve the girl meeting with and giving herself to (it is suggested: nothing is made so clear that it will spoil the broth) certain personages from other climes (other worlds...
...They drag out minutiae of circumstance endlessly, going over and over old ground without breaking much new...
...Bartholomew," is presented as a worldly, etiolated, capricious, and at times cruel dilettante-scholar (or mystic, or necromancer) who has a strange relation with the lackey, that of master, yet also almost fraternal, too, and maybe (it is strongly hinted) even something else...
...Possessed of this terrific revelation, Mistress Lee undergoes a complete conversion...
...The young gentleman, who is addressed as "Mr...
...It is an end fraught with ominous-sounding mystery...
...Flaubert and Ttrgenev: The Complete Correspondence edited by Barbara Beaumont...
...Well, he botched it...
...In his "Prologue," this heretofore masterful spinner of the ambiguous tale confides in us the meaning of "maggot" as he applies it to this work...
...When the skeptical Mr...
...This serves to introduce Henry Ayscough, Esq., a solicitor in the employ of Bartholomew's sire, who diligently investigates what happened...
...Wait . . .) Actually, the carnal offices were performed by Dick, who is the brutish allomorph of His Lordship, which is why Dick had to die so that His Lordship would live, like an ear of corn, or something, because His Lordship, at this consummation, is assumed into paradise, becoming like one with the godhead...
...John Fowles's A Maggot wants starting over, not from the beginning, but from, say, page 52, which is when the intriguing narrative is abandoned for nearly four hundred ensuing pages of tedium and tendentious foolishness...
...This is a dangerous afflatus...
...Can he truly be dishing out a rehash of all the junk we have had come off the presses since Rosemary's Baby...
...Fowles's case, a promising entertainment is ruined...
...He then declares, "Suppose you were he that can read this most awful decree upon what shall come...
...Box 10448 • Arlington, VA 22210 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...a small group of travellers, faceless, without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event...
...She contracts a marriage of convenience with a fanatical semi-literate "prophet" of a splinter sect of the Quakers, patiently awaiting two events: the birth of her blessed child, who, of course, will be a Madam, or Ms., Messiah, and, in her baby, the true Second Coming...
...Bartholomew disappeared without a trace...
...Fowles has graduated from entertainer to seer...
...which sacrificial act will open to the young man the gates of virility and mayhap much else Oh, yes: there is a good deal more at stake We learn from a conversation with the "uncle," a Mr...
...This is when, like Tolstoy in his later years, writing his tracts, storytellers become silly...
...The narrative virtually stops...
...Fowles as being a Negro, by the way...
...The landscape is the then brutish wilderness of Devonshire, in England...
...But just when our interest is most keenly fastened, Mr...
...The elitism of it might shock him, but Mr...
...Oh, she is along to enter into the service of the rich aunt...
...She is a London prostitute...
...Everything that he ascribes to this poor woman's parent-age is, he confesses, an invention, in whose supernatural trappings he himself doesn't—of course—believe, because he is a "convinced atheist...
...Ayscough, deem these ravings what they are...
...It is an acknowledged task of the schools to assist the Beware novels that sport introductory notes, which more often than not are sly and disingenuous disculpations for a work that the author has uneasy suspicions is wanting...
...Though he had been paid off and dismissed the night before Dick hanged himself and the young lord vanished, he covertly followed the party next morning into a sylvan wilderness, in the heart of which they come upon "a black-mouthed cavern...
...lb which we are to ex-claim what...
...but we quickly catch on that this is a space ship from another world/time...
...Fowles concocts for these eighteenth-century travelers are contrived and outlandish...
...If she is not a nut, however, is she else than a liar...
...Fowles then explains that this "fictional maggot was written...
...It bears also the more ancient meaning of a whim or quirk...
...Ayscough to his principal, and with essays by Mr...
...Is it not best that you should accept to be its only victim...
...We learn from what is gossiped about these travelers by the raffish bodyguard, a braggart called Birthing, that the young gentleman has been in disgrace for his spendthrift ways and is even now in debt . (a . mortal sin in eighteenth-century England...
...Fowles tosses it aside by a strategic blunder...
...The American Spectator • P.O...
...We are not present at the denouement promised for the morrow...
...She conceives of this unholy union . . . and we lament to ourselves: How flat a surprise Mr...
...In his personal esteem, Mr...
...He is being taken by his kind uncle to visit the uncle's rich childless sister, into whose good graces it is hoped the wastrel will insinuate himself...
...I could not quit yawning...
...Fowles terminates his novel with an epilogue in which he confides that the daughter is to be Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers...
...She is A MAGGOT John Fowles/Little, Brown/$19.95 Reid Buckley THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 43 taken into it by a mysterious and very gorgeous lady who is at once daughter, mother, and grandmother, a trinity of persons in one—who kisses her and conducts her on a journey of the spirit...
...Lacey how he would react were he to meet with one who "said that he had pierced the secrets of the world to come—I mean not those of .Heaven, but of this world we live in . . ." and, further, "that this prophet reveals that the predestinate future of this world is full of . . . endless calamity...
...Fowles intersperses these examinations with fawning epistolary reports from Mr...
...Fowles, some mildly interesting, others bristling with prejudice, on the morals and mores of eighteenth-century England...
...Fowles has boiled in his pot...
...That is, he breaks into his yarn to air anachronistic philosophical and political opinions of deadly earnestness and overwhelming left-secular conventionality, which further encumber an already overloaded narrative The pieces of the puzzle at length begin to come together when Ayscough cross-examines the braggart known as Farthing, whose true name is David Jones...
...Claptrap...
...The motives that Mr...
...Bartholomew asks Mr...
...The time is' the early eighteenth cenReid Buckley is a novelist and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking...
...And so forth, utterly extraneous to the novel, which has no resolution because of a most dismal failure of craft and imagination...
...Are we supposed to suspend our disbelief, or like Mr...
...The riders never progressed to any destination, but simply rode along a skyline . . ." (My emphases...
...Jefferson is his ideal founder, education his all-purpose nostrum for saving America from the hideous morass of showbiz politics...
...young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their culture") For Neil Postman, television is the force that has made America stupid...
...Half an hour later she, stark naked, comes walking out, "like one who wandered in her sleep . . . like one planet-struck . . ." The young lord, however, has been as if swallowed up...
...There are Dark Doings in store, and everything we see is a hall of mirrors...
...We have been tipped off that an elaborate charade is being enacted...
...Sure: but it promises a lot of' fun...
...Worse...
...For some years before...
...Bartholomew," that the aristocrat is embarked on a mystical adventure that will terminate, or culminate, on the morrow...
...When she is obliged to enter the cavern, she sees suspended from the ceiling, under a blinding light, what she describes as a maggot...
...Are you writhing in embarrassment and maybe a little rage, too, at this point...
...As the sun sets, Dick emerges, running as though in terror for his life...
...Jones waits all day long in hiding...
...Fowles as though they were heavy stage furniture across the floorboards of his imagination, what little development there is being limited to the girl, and that accomplished by mere assertion...
...But the wench is in reality no maid...
...The four are shortly joined by a fifth rider of military appearance, carrying cutlass and blunderbuss, who is evidently a kind of escort...
...Inside that cabin she peers through a kind of window (we guess a TV screen, presumably 25") that reveals in full col-or the bliss of a place Mistress Lee dubs "Eternal June...
...Now comes the deposition of Mistress Rebecca Lee, the harlot-heroine...
...In Mr...
...The wench...
...out of obsession with a theme...
...It is the larval stage of a winged creature...
...That is what the world is coming to: Ronald Reaganism...
...The riders never truly achieve the kind of organic destination that develops out of character...
...The girl is dressed as a June bride, poor dollink...
...What a shame And quel damage in fact he does to those brilliantly evocative first pages...
...We will send cards to announce each gift to your friends during the holiday season...
...It is whitish, and has the vermiculate shape...
...He tells us so...
...Tolstoy was canny enough to keep most of this stuff out of his novels, though Ttlrgenev and Flaubert, I read,' deplored the philosophical excrescences of the third book of War and Peace...
...Norton, $19.95...
...So long as the writing stays pitched at this entertaining level, not taking itself too seriously, we go along...
...She told this cockaninny tale to Jones for fear he would ravish her on the spot, which was probably good thinking on her part...
...If I were asked what the present and future world could best lose or jettison for its own good, I should have no hesitation: all established religion...
...they are shoved by Mr...
...Postman might do well to give some thought to a very different and much less palatable thesis: Television is the force that has made America's stupid people powerful...
...Indeed, what attitude we as readers are expected to adopt is as opaque as Mr...
...tury...
...She is forced at swordpoint to enter that yawning maw in the mountainside, which reeks of Fear, Foul Deeds, and Dread Destiny...
...What we read are transcripts of appalling length and discursiveness that occupy the bulk of the 150,000-plus remaining words of the novel...
...Yes, she is with child, but not by the Prince of this World...
...If that isn't enough to make you lament all that fiber you had for breakfast (angels are milling about in bucolic labors, probably talking about social justice), she meets Godthe-Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ, whose spirit animates her barren womb...
...She explains now what really happened...
...THIS OFFER EXPIRES JANUARY 31, 1986 Send a special $15 Christmas Gift Subscription to: Name Address City State Zip Gift card to read "from Send a special $15 Christmas Gift Subscription to: Name Address City State Zip Gift card to read "from Send a special $15 Christmas Gift Subscription to: Name Address City State Zip Gift card to read "from What is all this...
...This is quite awful rot, turbid, turgid...
...Instead, we behold an extract from the Western Gazette, from which we glean that Dick hanged himself that next day and that Mr...
...The young gentleman may be a bit of a bore, yet there is something appealing about the girl, bawd that she is...
...But he honors Dissent, since he has "long concluded that established religions of any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet no longer existing conditions...
...Fowles's intentions are leaden...
...There are four riders: a severe young man on a mudsplashed bay, who wears a tricorn "trimmed discreetly in silver braid," followed at a few paces by an elderly gentleman in sober dress on a plump horse, he trailed by a third animal on which are mounted two young people, the one a manservant, the other a mysterious girl muffled up "in a brown hooded cloak . . . so that only her eyes and nose are visible...
...Ayscough is presented to us as an intelligent yet narrow male chauvinist of his Establishmentarian age, bound by the conventions, Rebecca Lee as a free and honest feminist embodying the Spirit of Dissent...
...When Jones runs after the girl, she relates that she was compelled to take part in a satanic rite the climax of which was her rape by Satan himself (who is earlier represented by Mr...
...The servant Dick is a deaf-mute but not the idiot we are at first given to understand he is...
...He has hired the girl these three weeks in the hopes of exciting anatural lubricity- by observing her disport with his servant Dick, but this has failed...
...Lacey, who is a professional actor in the employ of "Mr...
...Ayscough presses her on these matters, we learn that the Supreme Deity is in actuality not the male principle but the three-in-one goddess, called by Mistress Lee (prepare yourselves) Holy Mother Wisdom, who reveals to Rebecca the awful future: flying machines that drop horrible explosives on cities, mushrooming clouds that destroy everything...
...He interrogates everyone he can search out who met, or saw, or was connected with the young lord's party...
...American Spectator DLI 'AU CI9Z ~AIEV O1L4J $15 Donor Name Address City State Zip ^ Payment enclosed ^ Bill me Send a special $15 Christmas Gift Subscription to: Name Address City State Zip Gift card to read "from Send a special $15 Christmas Gift Subscription to: Name Address City State Zip Gift card to read "from . A thoughtful and thought-provoking gift—12 issues of The American Spectator for only $15...
...Might not a most condign divine anger at such blasphemous breaking of the seals of time be assuaged at the price of your silence—nay, your own life...
...And yet there is reason to suppose that the situation is not hopeless...
...Bartholomew" (we know he is Lord-something) is, it seems, impotent when it comes to heterosexual intercourse...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
