Shimmering Perversity

By LANCE MORROW

THE EBONY TOWER

by JOHN FOWLES

312 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

In his first three novels, John Fowles displayed a talent for taking risks. The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass--butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing alternative endings to the novel.

The Ebony Tower is a far less ambitious exercise--four stories, "a personal note," and a version of the medieval story of Eliduc. Fowles says he intended these as a series of "variations" on related themes; he leaves the reader to make the connections. In the title story, a young English artist and art critic named David Williams visits an old expatriate English painter, Henry Breasley, in his rural French farmhouse. Breasley, living with an old French couple and two young English birds, gets drunk, rants against Picasso and the century's other departures from the world as the eye sees it. Williams, whose wife has stayed behind, almost seduces one of Breasley's "gels." The story until then has the sure, mellow complexity of Mozart--at the end it degenerates into the kind of opera that advertises soap flakes.

Otherwise, The Ebony Tower is a book as lovely as its dust jacket--Pisanello's Portrait of a Lady. The retold tale of Eliduc, a 12th century Celtic romance, charmingly repeats the story of a knight torn between his love for a princess and his loyalty to his wife. A story called Poor Koko tells of a sort of casual Marxist burglar who amiably loots the guesthouse where a pedantic writer is staying, then, like a Manson of letters, coolly destroys the writer's notes and manuscript for a book about Thomas Love Peacock, a 19th century writer of burlesque romances (who is, incidentally, one of Fowles' favorite writers). The Enigma, a marvelous piece of illusion, describes a London police sergeant's search for a paradigm of Establishment life in the form of a conservative M.P., who has, perhaps deliberately, disappeared.

The last story, The Cloud, possesses one of Fowles' faults--a facile, painterly dreaminess--without his vigorous grasp on the facts that make illusion matter. Fowles' themes in all these elegant stories are the surprise of passion v. the safety of tradition, abstraction v. spontaneity, and more broadly, the secrets of art (including Fowles' own art) played against a fictive "reality" that represents merely his own deeper lamination of imagined life. Fowles, like any other storyteller, tells his tale--and then has the shimmering perversity to let his readers know that maybe he was lying all the time, or that life itself was lying. sb Lance Morrow

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