Dan Martin is a British screenwriter who in the 1970s has achieved worldly success in Hollywood. He’s attended Oxford University, been married and divorced, has a grown daughter, and is in a relationship with a young actress about his daughter’s age. A man with whom he attended Oxford (and is now a don) has fallen deathly ill and summons him from America because he wants to see Martin before he dies.
The meeting proceeds but events take a sudden shocking turn. As a result Dan vaults into a bout of soul searching; he realizes he has been pursuing the wrong things, including his partners, in his life, and now has a clear vision of what, and whom, he wants to pursue.
And this in broad strokes is the plot of the novel. But recounting the plot does nothing to establish in the prospective reader’s mind the depth of Dan’s yearning, nor of the erudition with which he pursues his goals. There is a lot of give and take, a lot of conversational thrusting and parrying with his chosen lover/wife/partner to be.
Along with deep and sometimes persuasive discussions of society and philosophy in England and America, we encounter Fowles’s playing with the narrative: he switches from third person to first person in an effort, I think, to capture Dan’s approach to his writing, and his view of himself. The book is full of philosophical asides, but they’re always in service to the protagonist’s thinking at the moment.
I’m reining myself in from doing a more in-depth analysis of this book. I will say it is rich in sparkling true-to-life conversation, spot-on in the way inner dialogues of highly educated people flow, surprising in how the author plays with narrative in an ultra-modern way, and rewarding in its dénouement.
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