Contemporary English novels, as a rule, are modest things—modest in their themes, their manner, their physical dimensions. If many an American, Continental, or Latin American novelist attempts, in each new book, to embody a startlingly original vision, to be formally innovative, to stage a linguistic fireworks display, and to make major statements about love, death, history, the nature of reality, man’s life in society, and the function of art, the typical postwar English novelist seeks rather to relate a relatively unambitious story about the subtle pains and pleasures of a single unremarkable life. The characteristic virtues of the postwar English novel, accordingly, have been its exquisite restraint and delicacy of nuance, its ability to convey the significance of everyday reality, the simple beauty of even the most prosaic human soul.

For the past quarter century or so, the major exception to this rule has been John Fowles. He is the author of six novels—The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot—as well as of a poetry collection (Poems), a volume of short stories (The Ebony Tower), a philosophical treatise (The Aristos),¹ and the texts of numerous books of photographs. Though his novels are strikingly different from one another in plot and setting (and even exhibit an unusual variety of style and form), they are all strange and provocative, and—most important—share at bottom a consonance of theme and situation.