NY Times
John Fowles, the British writer whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations, died on Saturday at his home in Lyme Regis, England. He was 79.
His death was announced by his publisher, Random House UK. No cause was given, but Random House said Mr. Fowles, who suffered a stroke in the late 1980’s and had heart problems, had been ill for some time.
Mr. Fowles’s originality, versatility and skill were nowhere more evident than in his most celebrated novels, among them “The Collector,” “The Magus” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” for example, he combined the melodrama of a 19th-century Victorian novel with the sensibility of a 20th-century postmodern narrator, offering his readers two alternative endings from which to choose and at one point boldly inserting himself into the book as a character who accompanies the hero on a train to London.
In “The Collector,” Mr. Fowles painted an eerily plausible portrait of a psychopath who kidnaps a young woman out of what he imagines is love, telling the story from the two characters’ opposing points of view until, at the end, the narratives converge with a shocking immediacy. And in “The Magus,” the story of a young Englishman who gets caught up in the frightening dramatic fantasies of a strangely powerful man on an Aegean island, he again wrote an ending of self-conscious ambiguity, leaving the hero’s future an open puzzle that readers are challenged to solve for themselves.
“Fowles’s success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller,” wrote Ellen Pifer in the “Dictionary of Literary Biography.” “Remarkably, he manages to sustain such effects at the same time that, as an experimental writer testing conventional assumptions about reality, he examines and parodies the traditional devices of storytelling.”
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under ODD Guests.
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