Fowles calls his new novel, which basically is homage to the
philosophical underpinnings of Shakerism and to the moral
narratives of Defoe, "a maggot": a 17th-century-style working-out
of an obsessive theme. In length and relative linearity, the book
is just that. The fictional kernel is small: the strange journey of
an English lord, his deaf/dumb valet, and ex-whore maid and two
other ancillaries that results in a scene of revelation enacted in
a cave; then death, disappearance, and legal reconstruction of the
happening. The lord's father hires a lawyer - and most of the book
is composed of this lawyer's interrogatories with the surviving
participants, namely the ex-whore, now named Rebecca and become a
mystic (and the mother-to-be of Anne Lee, the founder of
Shakerism). Conducted wholly in period English, these depositions
have an eloquence and pith that are impressive. Less so are Fowles'
buttings-in in modern language, during which he comments from the
vantage point of a later age on Rebecca's salvationism, its
mixtures of pure feminism and communism and fervor. In the
questions and answers of the lawyer and Rebecca, these ideas have
drama, but when Fowles steps back to gloss them, they curl up ("In
truth these two were set apart from each other not only by
countless barriers of age, sex, class, education, native province
and the rest, but by something far deeper still: by belonging to
two very different halves of the human spirit, perhaps at root
those, left and right, of the two hemispheres of the human brain"),
and they are as pungent as commentary on educational TV. Though the
dogged antiqueness of it all may put some readers off, it's the
very virtuoso power of the language - the ideas in context - that
makes the novel interesting. Once Fowles dusts the ideas off and
puts them plain in his own voice, they seem unremarkable. (Kirkus
Reviews)
A MAGGOT is not an historical novel in the normal sense. It began as a quirk or obsession (a 'maggot' in the archaic sense of the word) which found its setting in the second wave of Protestant Dissent in England. It took shape as a mystery - a compelling investigation of unaccountable motives and deeds - which led through beguiling paths to a starling vision at its centre.
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