November 5, 2005

A Maggot (1985) a book by John Fowles, (March 31, 1926 to November 5, 2005) contains several references to cats, and they are in the context of setting a stage which hints at witchcraft.

The Guardian reviewed the book:
.....
‘[I]n a prologue to the present text …[the author] 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.

'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.

‘But 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.

‘What Ayscough discovers is that nothing is what it seemed to be. ...

'All 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. (Dick of course is dead, and his alter ego, the degenerate nobleman, has disappeared.)

‘Fowles, as always, is a clever pasticheur, and all the various voices ring quite true. …[The] authority of his storytelling convinces us that a mystery is being unravelled, and that all will (ultimately) be revealed…’

That revelation is a fictional account of the origins of Shakerism. The reviewer continues:

‘There are two writers in John Fowles. ....[One]... is the poet Fowles, who trusts his unconscious and has something of the genuine mythopoeic imagination at work in him. The other Fowles, alas, is didactic, a preacher/teacher with an incurable lust to inflict his views upon us. While he confines his lectures to little asides about the importance of sheep and the wool trade in the early eighteenth century, this Fowles is just about tolerable...

‘Fowles, a brilliant beginner because he begins by accepting some poetic donnée and presenting it to his readers, has not yet learned how to end a text on the same level. …’

Fowles wrote a variety of novels, some of which became very famous. Like The French Lieutenant's Woman, (1969), and The Magus (1965). This last is interesting because the date of Fowles death, is also the date a real magus died. I can see no connection or significance in this. None whatsoever.