Mysterious Movers and Shakers a Maggot

By Christopher Porterfield No sooner had John Fowles' American agent finished reading the manuscript of A Maggot than she was on the transatlantic telephone to him. Who was the missing nobleman? What really happened in the cavern in Devon? "She probably

Fiction that is too tidy and finished, he believes, does not allow the reader an active enough role. "It's much better to leave gaps, which the reader will broach--one hopes."

Although Fowles is an atheist, the "tender sympathy" for the Shakers that underlies A Maggot is not as unlikely as it seems, for the author is drawn to all forms of dissent, whatever the orthodoxy. Although a novelist of established eminence, he chooses to be "unconnected" to conventional literary life: "I don't know other writers or read any literary magazines. I hate reviewing. I don't lecture or give readings. The novel is a print medium, meant to come through the eyes, not the ears. All that readings show you is whether the novelist is a good actor."

He prefers not to think of himself as British, which, as he once declared in an essay, he equates with being imperialistic, conformist and arrogant. Being English, on the other hand (tolerant, humane, in harmony with green nature), is all right. He accuses his own generation, particularly the writers, artists and performers, of "selling the past," neglecting serious work in a scramble for media success. Partly as a result, standards have crumbled, and the younger generation is "growing up cultureless."

All of which might suggest the fumings of a dyspeptic recluse. In fact, Fowles, 59, and his wife Elizabeth equably fill the role of prominent citizens in the resort town of Lyme Regis on England's southwestern coast. He has made his peace with the town, a Tory stronghold, and plunged into directing the local natural history museum. The town, in turn, has recovered from the hullabaloo over filming The French Lieutenant's Woman there five years ago.

On the second floor of his 18th century house, Fowles follows a daily regimen of "natural drift" in a jumbled study overlooking the English Channel. He is a fast writer but a slow publisher. Composing "in a haphazard, cockamamy way" on a well-worn manual typewriter, he can turn out a draft of an entire novel in two or three months, but typically holds it for revision over a period of years.

Fowles is braced for some unfriendly reviews of A Maggot, at least from English or rather British, critics. His countrymen, he says, are still devoted to "quiet, workmanlike, parochial novels" like those of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor. "I'm not against that," he says. "I'm just against the idea that it's the only way to write novels and be esteemed in Oxbridge." Floods of mail, piling up in cardboard boxes around his desk, assure him that he is esteemed around the world. But for someone worried about finding time to finish all his projected books, this too can be a burden. "The most appalling letters," he groans, "are the ones that say, 'I've got a wonderful story, and you're the one to write it.'

Give John Fowles credit for bravery. A Maggot, his seventh work of fiction, is an unusual and consciously risky book. The title alone may discourage the curious (and give booksellers the willies). In a brief prologue, Fowles explains that he is using the word maggot in the obsolete sense of whim or quirk, but that won't help matters much. And what will readers make of such Fowlesian whims as building his plot around questions to which he never provides the answers? Or resting his conclusion on an assumed familiarity with the Shakers, that little-known sect of puritanical Protestants who arose in England two centuries ago and later prospered briefly in the U.S.?

Real as these perplexities are, it would be a shame if Fowles' potential audience were put off by them, for A Maggot is also an immensely rich, readable book, full of passages as haunting and provocative as anything in The Magus or The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Its hypnotic opening montage, for example. Five travelers on horseback--four men and a woman--are seen moving across the bleak landscape of southwestern England early in the 18th century. Fragmentary, half-perceived scenes reveal that most of the outward facts that can be learned about this little group are untrue. Their names, their social stations, their relationships to one another are shifting masks in a cryptic performance. They are surely bound together in a more ominous enterprise than they pretend, yet only one of them seems to know their destination. After a night at an inn, they ride on. Within days, one member of the party is found hanged from a tree, another has apparently dematerialized in a paranormal occurrence, and the rest have scattered.

These mysterious events prompt an investigation by a shrewd, vinegary London barrister named Henry Ayscough, acting on behalf of a duke whose son is believed to be the vanished traveler. Most of the novel unfolds through Ayscough's persistent, painstaking inquiry, and it makes gripping reading indeed, part detective story, part crackling courtroom drama. A vivid gallery of the English underclasses passes under the lawyer's scrutiny. Testimony is offered on London brothel life, moonlit rituals at Stonehenge, witchcraft and an odd prefiguring of science fiction in a cavern beneath the Devon moors.

Characteristically, Fowles recounts it all with the kind of narrative flourish that calls into question its own flourish. He writes in a pastiche of Daniel Defoe's 18th century documentary style, a la Robinson Crusoe or A Journal of the Plague Year, but occasionally interrupts in his own voice to take over the narrative or to recast his themes in a 20th century perspective.

The historical view is essential to his real subject, which turns out not to be the identity and fate of the young nobleman. A Maggot, ultimately, is the story of a new era trying to be born. As in The French Lieutenant's Woman, the future's unwitting herald is an obscure, ostracized but emotionally galvanic woman. She is Rebecca Lee, a prostitute who accompanies the nobleman on his sojourn and who, conceiving a resplendent religious vision at the moment he disappears, is transformed and joins a tiny band of Protestant zealots in Manchester.

England in this period, Fowles emphasizes, is equidistant from the past Cromwellian and the future French revolutions, "united only in a constipated hatred of change of any kind." Ayscough, though a man of the Enlightenment, exemplifies the ingrown society he serves, with its feudal hierarchies, rigid rationalism and worship of property. Rebecca, in her dissenting spiritualism, embodies the more irrational, inspirational side of human nature. She points ahead to another kind of enlightenment, to individualism and the Romantic ethos. In the lawyer's long, climactic confrontation with her, he recognizes her for what she is: a revolutionary. "What (Ayscough) saw in Rebecca's eyes . . . could lead one day only to the most abhorrent of human governments: democracy, that is synonymous with anarchy."

Before readers can grasp Rebecca's full significance, they must realize that her infant daughter Ann is the future Mother Ann Lee, founder and leader of the American Shaker movement. This is asking a lot, as Fowles seems to acknowledge in a detailed note tacked on at the end. Whether any novel should hinge on such built-in explanations is a debatable point. Still, in philosophical romances of this kind, part of the drama almost always lies in the author's own struggle with the material. That Fowles has shaped his with such inventive energy and intelligence is, in its quirky way, a remarkable achievement. One can even imagine a bewigged 18th century visage puckering in assessment, then breaking into a smile as old Defoe gives his nod of approval.