It may seem churlish to complain that what is wrong with A Maggot is that too much (ultimately) is revealed. Also, while he remains on this pleasing level of the vision of the little cavalcade of travellers, who they are and what they might be doing, he deploys his usual seductive narrative gifts to great effect - we keep on reading, as we read The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, because the authority of his storytelling convinces us that a mystery is being unravelled, and that all will (ultimately) be revealed. (Dick of course is dead, and his alter ego, the degenerate nobleman, has disappeared.)įowles, as always, is a clever pasticheur, and all the various voices ring quite true.
The 'Nephew' is the controlling force, the debauched but impotent son of some great personage whose name must never be mentioned the 'uncle' was an actor hired to play the part the maid was a whore called Fanny whose best trick in the brothel from which they have removed her was to reign innocence, being known there as the Quaker Maid as for the deaf mute, Dick, his role was to couple with Fanny, while the young nobleman watched.Īll this, together with a strong whiff of witchcraft or at best astrology, is extracted by the lawyer in a series of verbatim interviews with such of the travellers as he can manage to run to ground. What Ayscough discovers is that nothing is what it seemed to be. The little group of travellers consist of what appear to be an uncle and a nephew, accompanied by two manservants (one of them a deaf mute), and with a maid whom the gentlemen may be intending to deliver into the service of a neighbouring rich relation.īut when the deaf mute is found hanged, perhaps by his own hand, with a posy of violets stuffed in his mouth, and his fellow travellers disappear, it falls to a lawyer called Ayscough to track down every possible witness and unravel the real purpose of the journey. The first two thirds of that finding out strike me as excellent. Similarly in a prologue to the present text he tells that for some years before its writing 'a small group of travellers, faceless without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event.' Who are these people? What is the event? Fowles has written A Maggot to find out.
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