A Maggot

Author: John Fowles

Fowles is known as a postmodern writer, though some of the postmodern techniques he uses could equally be considered fantastic: the god game in The Magus for instance, or the shifts in time in The French Lieutenant's Woman. In his last novel, A Maggot, we are offered various interpretations of the curious events at the heart of the novel, religious, satanic, criminal, sexual, but at the end the only one that seems to make sense of it all is science fictional. We follow a group of travellers in Exmoor in the middle of the 18th century. Through interviews, letters and newspaper articles we learn that the leader of the group is a nobleman's son who may be eloping and who disappears. One of the group hangs himself, another claims she was raped by Satan. Eventually, although it is never made explicit, we realise that they are visiting a spaceship or time machine, which shows them films of the future, and which takes away the nobleman's son at the end. Fowles's novels always upset our expectations, and this is one of the best, starting out like a very precise historical fiction, then shifting perspectives so that each succeeding explanation is undermined until we are left with science fiction as the only possible truth.