Why Did One of Britain's Most Esteemed Authors Wrap Up His Career with a Bizarre UFO Novel?
A Look Back at John Fowles's A Maggot (1985)
I’m tempted to describe A Maggot , John Fowles’s peculiar 1985 novel, as a “first contact” story. Fans of science fiction are familiar with these tales of aliens arriving on Planet Earth, bringing peace or war or merely an ominous black monolith. The plot has been reworked countless times, with everyone from H.G. Wells to Carl Sagan speculating on the impact of an extraterrestrial intrusion into world history.
But John Fowles has written the most multi-layered 'first contact' story of them all—indeed, the narrative is so rich in possible interpretations that many readers might even hesitate to classify the book as science fiction. As Fowles grasps, the notion of ‘first contact’ is much older than sci-fi. The four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could very well be described as ‘first contact’ literature. The same is true of the Old Testament. When I was a child, I was taught the religious hymn "Ezekiel Sa w the Wheel ( Way Up in the Middle of the Air ) ." For the prophet Ezekiel, this uncanny appearance in the sky marked a visitation by angels, but nowadays people who see flying saucers get written up in The National Enquirer , not holy scripture.
A person who experiences such a disjunctive contact with a higher power might be a shaman in one historical era, and conspiracy theorist in another. Such an encounter might initiate a career as a prophet, as it did for Muhammad in the seventh century and Joan of Arc in the fifteenth century, or inspire avant-garde science fiction books, as it did for Philip K. Dick in the twentieth century . The arrival of a mighty force from on high might signal a wrathful final judgment or a serene rebirth of humanity on a higher level. For some, this moment of connection has already taken place in the past; for others it is anticipated (or feared) in the future.
In Fowles’s novel, this moment of contact and communication takes place on May Day in the year 1736. A man known as Mr. Bartholomew is leading a small group of travellers into a sparsely-populated area of southwest England. But every member of this group is harboring some secret. Mr. Bartholomew is actually the son of a Duke, and seems to be fearful that his influential father might interfere with his secret schemes. He is accompanied by an actor named Francis Lacy, who is pretending to be Bartholomew’s uncle. A former soldier known as Sergeant Farthing protects them on this trip, but he too is an actor enlisted to play a part. A maid of obscure French origins known as Louise is also a member of the traveling party, but she is actually a prostitute hired out from a London brothel. The last member of the group is Bartholomew’s servant Dick, and he is the most enigmatic of them all—he is deaf and mute, but possesses both an acute sensitivity to his surroundings and is fiercely loyal to his master.
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This group pretends that they are traveling to a distant country house, where they plan to facilitate an elopement. But this is mere subterfuge. We might do better to say that this group of travellers is engaged on a pilgrimage. But only Mr. Bartholomew seems to grasp the significance and destination of their journey. He brings with him scientific books and tools, and consults them for guidance. The three outsiders hired for this strange trip ask him questions about the real nature of their travels, but he responds to their inquiries with short, cryptic responses.
By the time of the moment of 'first contact', Sergeant Farthing has left the traveling party, and Francis Lacy has been dismissed. But the Duke’s son is determined to continue traveling to his mysterious destination. Accompanied by his servant and the hired courtesan, he proceeds to a cave where the much anticipated encounter takes place.
And what happens at this moment of first contact? During the course of A Maggot , the reader tries to unlock this mystery. The novel is mostly told in the form of transcripts of interrogations conducted by the lawyer Henry Ayscough, hired by the eminent Duke to track down his son. Ayscough gradually pieces together the details of a strange manifestation in the Devonshire cave. Here a woman appeared dressed in strange garb, and offered a kind of hallucinatory vision to her interlocutors. She herself was also a traveler, having arrived in a large maggot-shaped container, which seems to be a kind of machine or conveyance. But is she a visitor from another planet? Is she a time traveler from the future? Is she an angel or tutelary spirit?
How do we even begin to answer these questions? Bartholomew disappears after the visitation, and may very well be dead. The servant Dick commits suicide in the aftermath of the encounter, but even had he lived what kind of testimony could be extracted from a man who neither hears nor talks? The prostitute survives, but she is now living under the name Rebecca Lee as a member of a Quaker splinter sect. She interprets her experience in the cave as a moment of religious conversion, but during the course of the novel she offers contradictory descriptions of the particulars of the encounter.
The history of this novel casts some light on Fowles’s intentions. In October 1974, he started work on a science fiction story that he soon abandoned. But its main concerns found their way into A Maggot , published more than decade later. The earlier tale involved a nuclear Armageddon that destroys the Earth in the year 2075. But before the final apocalypse, the narrator is rescued by benevolent female space travelers from a distant world. By the time of A Maggot , the scope and setting of the story have changed considerably, but the feminist angle and the concept of a ‘first contact’ remain.
The view that men and women represent different social ideals and ways of life is pervasive throughout Fowles's oeuvre. He is rarely described as a feminist author, but anyone who has read his various novels cannot escape a sense that, for Fowles, women possess the capability of rising to a higher, more evolved way of being, and that men must struggle to approach the capacity for self-reinvention and transcendence demonstrated, again and again, by his leading ladies. This divide between the sexes informs his first published novel The Collector , but is taken to a much higher level in this two subsequent masterpieces The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman —both of which feature intellectual male protagonists who smugly believe that they possess deep insight into the human condition, but eventually learn to their own dismay how poorly they grasp the inner life of the women that haunt their dreams and spur their fantasies.
In his final works, this sensibility has deepened in Fowles’s work. One might even describe his attitude as a worship of the feminine. In Mantissa , Fowles goes so far as to revive the notion of the feminine muse who inspires an author's creative impulses. And in A Maggo t, his last published novel, he goes even further, postulating a kind of feminized path to salvation, with both sociopolitical and religious overtones.
Fowles tries to answer here the questions he posed to himself at the very beginning of his career as a writer. I believe it is no coincidence that the title of this book bears such close resemblance to The Magus , that powerful existential story that he started writing in 1956—it was his first novel, although published after The Collector . In The Magus , Fowles appeared to embrace magical realism in the work’s early pages, only to reveal during the course of his novel that a rational, realistic interpretation can explain all the story’s strange events. In A Maggot , we find the mirror image of this schema: the reader is initially led to believe that the narrative is strictly rational and realistic, but eventually is forced to consider various unconventional, magical or religious interpretations of the circumstances described. I suspect that Fowles saw this contrast as reflecting a maturation on his own part, an evolution from the ‘masculine’ analytical assessment of life to an intuitive and metaphysical, perhaps more ‘feminine’ approach to vital matters.
The book is masterfully constructed—at least until its final pages. There Fowles suddenly changes the approach from fiction to nonfiction, and offers up an interpretation of his own book that might have been better relegated to an afterword or published as a standalone essay. In previous books, Fowles often wrestled with his desire to preach a sermon rather than tell a story—you can see it at the conclusion of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and throughout Daniel Martin . But it comes across as full-fledged philosophizing at the end of A Maggot . Fowles, alas, is not as skilled a philosopher as he is a novelist. But even as I find this denouement jarring and out of character with the rest of the novel, I was grateful for the context it provided for the work as a whole.
A Maggot received almost unanimous praise upon its publication in 1985—a striking contrast to the controversies of the author’s earlier books, and the rude dismissals of his preceding novel Mantissa . Yet A Maggot has unfortunately fallen from view in recent years. It is currently out-of-print, except as a digital download. The book deserves better, but I suspect that its prospects are hurt by its very strangeness. It could easily be described as a sci-fi masterpiece, but fans of genre fiction don’t even know it exists—and publishers of highbrow authors such as John Fowles hate to market to those nerdy folks, even if it might generate sales. I could just as easily classify A Maggot as a great religious novel, but what fan of spiritual fiction wants to hear from an atheist such as Mr. Fowles? The book has many of the trappings of a historical novel, but deviates too far from strict realism to please readers of those kinds of books. And I might even praise this novel for its postmodern techniques, but Fowles handles these with such a light touch, that he will almost certainly fail to please those devotees of deconstruction who prize arch experimentalism over the more traditional virtues of storytelling.
So let me simply say that this is a smart, provocative book, and it deserves your attention. You can try to squeeze it into a pigeonhole, but it will no doubt force its way out again. In a similar manner, it will eventually challenge whatever ideological or conceptual framework you might apply to it. But that may be this book’s greatest virtue—indeed, Fowles’s own calling card and the main reason why his novels still interest us so many decades after they were written. Accept his books on their own terms, and without preconditions and expectations. Or, in other words, embrace them with precisely the kind of open mind demanded by a first contact with the unknown.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and pop culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History, is published by Oxford University Press.