Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Tuesday November 8, 2005
The Guardian
John Fowles, described by his agent as 'one of the best writers of fiction of the last century'. Photo: Random House handout/Carolyn Djanodly/PA
John Fowles, the novelist who brought sexiness and popular appeal to the serious literary novel, has died from heart failure near his home in Lyme Regis, Dorset. According to his wife, Sarah, he "faded away, slipped away on Saturday" after two weeks in hospital in Axminster. "His heart just gave out - gave up, really," she said.
Fowles, who was 79, will be best remembered for the romantic The French Lieutenant's Woman, a daring, meticulous and sexy treatment of the Victorian novel which gives it a postmodern twist of alternative endings. "It was unbelievably exploratory," said his publisher, Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape. "The two endings were absolutely revolutionary when it came out." Harold Pinter adapted The French Lieutenant's Woman for a film directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. "It looks good but it is somehow empty at the heart," the author said of it.
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The novel, and works such as The Collector, and the self-consciously allusive and playful The Magus (he described it to his wife as "a young person's book"), have been widely influential. According to John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, Fowles established that: "A highly literary novel could also be a potential bestseller ... he offered readers literary pleasure as well as the voltage they expected from contemporary fiction."
His longtime agent, Anthony Sheil, said: "He was one of the best writers of fiction of the last century. He was a literary writer who always had a reader in mind and wanted to communicate."
"Reclusive by nature," according to Sheil, Fowles did not find the business of literary fame straightforward. "He was a very, very private man," said Sarah Fowles. "He had a warm and lovely public persona but underneath was very shy. His first love was France, but because of the Greek setting of The Magus, people used to see him as an expert on the Greek islands, which used to drive him mad. And he'll always be associated with Slime Regis - as we call it - because of the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman. But all that washed over him. He was more interested in seeing a roe deer in his garden or a plant coming up. Small things pleased him."
His love of plants and landscape are manifest in his novels. "What he really had an eye for was topography and natural phenomena," Prof Mullan said.
His last novel was published in 1985. In 1988 he had a stroke; in 1990 his first wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer. A second volume of diaries is forthcoming, promising revelations about his turbulent relationship with Elizabeth, friends such as the publisher Tom Maschler, and the writing of The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Born in 1926 at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, Fowles studied French at New College, Oxford, before teaching English and having a spell on the Greek island of Spetsai, which inspired The Magus. Since 1968 he had lived in Lyme Regis, and for 10 years he curated its museum.
In 2003 he told the Observer: "I know I have a reputation as a cantankerous man of letters and I don't try and play it down. But I'm not really. I partly propagated it. A writer, well-known, more-or-less living on his own, will be persecuted by his readers. They want to see you and talk to you. And they don't realise that very often that gets on one's nerves."
The novels
The Collector (1963) was John Fowles's first published novel, in which sinister Frederick, a butterfly collector, turns his attention to the capture of a human specimen. Two years later came the book that he had been working on since the 1950s, The Magus, in which Nicholas Urfe, who teaches at a school on the island of Phraxos, becomes mixed up in a mysterious series of events apparently orchestrated by the wealthy recluse Maurice Conchis. A metaphor about storytelling and reading, it had a cult following. With The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came the high watermark of Fowles's popularity; his sexy modern take on the Victorian novel was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter in a film starring Meryl Streep. Daniel Martin (1977) spanned 40 years in the life of a screenwriter; and Mantissa (1982) was a comic, playful fable about a writer's encounter with his muse. A Maggot (1985), a mystery set in the 18th century, was his last novel.
John Fowles dead
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