The Toughest Question

By Paul Gray

DANIEL MARTIN by John Fowles; Little, Brown; 629 pages; $12.95

Can an English playwright turned Hollywood scenarist find, in his late 40s, happiness and the right woman? By making this question the premise of his fourth novel, English Author John Fowles runs several risks, chief among them being another question: Should anybody care? And Fowles is far too thoughtful a writer not to have anticipated this reaction in advance. His novel raises and then rubs constantly against the doubt that any single life--particularly that of an overprivileged, overpaid clerk in the bureaucracy of mass entertainment--is truly worth caring about amid all the wreckage, the past and potential dooms of the present century.

Daniel Martin, the novel's hero, is aware of this dilemma and of his fortunate position in the world. Raised in the Edenic splendors of the Devon countryside before the war and educated in the genteel bower of Oxford afterward, he falls into an existence in which occasional bumps are easily cushioned by his status and talent. His marriage fails and his brief career as a London dramatist is not the roaring success he had hoped for. But Martin's skill at writing dialogue lands him movie jobs, money, amorous actresses and, eventually, a well-heeled expatriate life in Hollywood.

What's wrong with this picture? Too terribly British to be self-pitying, Daniel is nonetheless self-regarding to a pathological degree. He looks at himself and his contemporaries and sees failure. "We had all our values wrong," he tells his current actress girl friend. "We expected too much. Trusted too much. There's a great chasm in twentieth-century history. A frontier. Whether you were born before nineteen thirty-nine or not. The world, time...it slipped. Jumped forward three decades in one. We antediluvians have been left permanently out of gear."

An unexpected phone call gives Daniel the excuse he wants to step out of his current life; his best friend at Oxford, long since estranged, is dying of cancer and wants to see him. Although the Oxford aesthete in Daniel notes with defensive irony that "all return is a form of bathos," he nonetheless packs his bags and his quest for self-purpose and goes home again.

In Fowles' hands, this pilgrimage becomes thoroughly absorbing, intellectually challenging--and not at all the snappy read his admirers have come to expect. In The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles kept fun and philosophy in separate compartments. The narrative sleights of hand in these novels could be explicated in the classroom; the books could also be enjoyed--for their tight plotting and pervasive eroticism--straight off the drugstore rack. Daniel Martin is altogether more austere; its story cannot be pried loose from its philosophical attack on one of the modern age's sacred tenets--"that only a tragic, absurdist, black-comic view...of human destiny could be counted as truly representative and 'serious.' "

It is one thing to challenge this belief and quite another to write a novel showing it to be false. Authors who try generally find themselves accused of going soft, of frivolously aping the Pollyanna fadeouts of popular schlock. To counter such charges, Fowles fills Daniel Martin with plenty of reasons for contemporary despair: war, poverty, tyrannies of the body and mind, mankind's apparent inability to do anything about problems except augment them. His hero tries "to discover what had gone wrong, not only with Daniel Martin, but his generation, age, century; the unique selfishness of it, the futility, the ubiquitous addiction to wrong ends...not only a trip to nowhere, but an exorbitant fare for it."

Fowles illustrates such issues through the intelligent conversations and coherent meditations of his characters--devices once common in good fiction but rare enough now to seem innovative again. Gradually, the pattern of such thoughts forms an antidote to their depressing subjects. Their wit, style, grace and refinement offer not a shelter from the storm (the refuge of the dandy) but a vantage point from which the storm can be most thoroughly observed.

Few novels in recent years have been more thoroughly textured with contemporary history or more rigorously reluctant to offer pat solutions. Near the end, Daniel tells his ex-wife's sister, a woman he once loved and now loves again: "I don't know how people like us were meant to live this age, Jane. When it gives you only two alternatives...feel deprived or feel guilty. Play liberal or play blind. It seems to me that either way we're barred from living life as it was meant to be."

This problem hardly bothers the ma jority of mankind preoccupied with the daily struggle to exist, but its specialness in no way invalidates it. Like Henry James before him, Fowles has created rarefied creatures free enough to take on the toughest question that life offers: How to live? In suggesting that today's seemingly infinite variety of choices need not produce a catatonic or nauseated antihero, Fowles has created both a startlingly provocative novel and a courageous act of willed humanity.

-- Paul Gray

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