As a spirit the lord plays a satan in rebellion against the father: an The young lord is almost a disembodied spirit, and the deaf and speechless servant is his separated body. Fowles's characters seem made less of flesh than of myth. The rest of the book records the testimony of witnesses questioned by Ayscough: the innkeeper, one of his maids, a country parson, the proprietor of Rebecca's bordello and finally theĪctor, the bodyguard and Rebecca herself, who is found chastely married to a blacksmith and heavy with another's child, conceived just before or on that fateful May Day. On behalf of the lord's estranged father. A few days after, Dick, the servant, is found hanged in a wood, the lord is missing, and the hirelings have also melted away, later to be tracked down by the agents of one Henry Ayscough, a barrister who investigates the case This part of the story ends at the inn atīedtime. The lord tells Rebecca that she will be an offering to those whom he expects to meet and that she is to do whatever they wish of her sexual favors are assumed. There will be a tryst with the unknown on the morrow, but the actor and the bodyguard will beĭismissed before that occurrence. The party consists of a lord in disguise, his servant who cannot speak or hear, a professional actor hired to protect the disguise, a Welshman for a bodyguard and Rebecca the harlot, also hired but for purposes not yet revealed.įrom these 50 pages we learn that the lord had lied to his employees about the purpose of the trip, and instructed them to lie to one another. The first 50 pages describe the final afternoon - the eve of May Day 1736 - of a furtive four-day journey by five people on horseback to a small town in the English countryside, where they take lodging for

The structure of the novel is unconventional. Maggot'' the hypothesis seems to be that readers will tolerate more teasing, and more indeterminacy as to plot and character, than is usually expected of them.

Novels succeed or fail, experiments confirm or refute the hypothesis being tested. Such a maggot may metamorphose into an experiment. Another maggot from the same book is the choice given to the reader at the end: does Sarah offer Charles responsibility, or pity with friendship? A drastic difference in the anticlimax dependsĪ maggot in this sense is a whim, or a work based on a whim, and Mr. Fowles himself as a ''decidedly unpleasant person'' of the 19th century who violates Charles's privacy in ''The French Lieutenant's Woman'' and determines

Ohn Fowles's ''maggots'' are familiar to readers of his earlier works, and so are his experiments with time. SeptemChariots of the Goddesses, or What? By WALTER MILLER JR.

A maggot fowles