Daniel Martin by John Fowles (MOBI)

Description

A new trade paperback edition of “a masterpiece of symbolically charged realism….Fowles is the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James” (John Gardner, Saturday Review).The eponymous hero of John Fowles’s largest and richest novel is an English playwright turned Hollywood screenwriter who has begun to question his own values. Summoned home to England to visit an ailing friend, Daniel Martin finds himself back in the company of people who once knew him well, forced to confront his buried past, and propelled toward a journey of self-discovery through which he ultimately creates for himself a more satisfying existence. A brilliantly imagined novel infused with a profound understanding of human nature, Daniel Martin is John Fowles at the height of his literary powers.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This highly introspective novel covers so much ground and so many facets of psychology, culture, sex, love, history that to write any sort of review that approaches the comprehensive would mean for the reviewer to write a book of his own, which is not the place of an Amazon review. I will say this definitively: The book is for readers who love to read, have been doing so all their lives, and don’t mind spending hours, days being lost in what some might term overly erudite verbiage. I suppose it also helps to understand the English/American cultural differences, to have, like the eponymous Daniel Martin, been born and to have come of age in England, but to have spent most of one’s life in America. Such has been my lot in life, but, regardless, the book is not really one that I suspect most Amazon reviewers or readers will bother with at all. So, I shall simply present the aspects of the book that seem most salient to me and let the rare Amazon reader who is interested in Fowles and in this type of work take what s/he may from my take on it.The first thing that struck me in the early goings here was the contrast drawn between, as it has often been drolly put, two races separated by a common language. Daniel Martin as narrator puts it thus:”Other races look at themselves in the mirror, and either live with the reflection or do something practical to improve it. We paint an ideal, or a dream self on the glass and then wallow in the discrepancy. Nothing distinguishes us more clearly from the Americans, nothing characterises us better than the very different ways we use our shared language – the way they use it as a tool, even when they are being poetic, and the way we treat it as a poem, even when we are using it as a tool;”This is obviously very broad-brush differentiation, yet it is, more often than not, quite true, though I noticed on my last trip back to England that the English seem to have become more Americanised in this respect, a subjective impression. In any event, the American reader will have plenty of pages of very English dialogue to pore over here to see if this judgement, which Martin retracts and then restates as he does with almost all his pronunciamentos, holds true or nay.One way to look at this book is as a fleshing out of the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. Martin and all the characters herein have deep, submerged, inner lives which they are in the constant state of examining from the book’s start to its finish. There’s a dreamy, contemplative tone to the entire work, a frequent sense of the past, the passing, the to come all being merged, time and again, in retrospective reflection.What Martin says of his own sort of psyche obtains for all the major characters herein:”They live not life, but others lives; drive not down the freeways of determined fact, but drift and scholar-gypsy through the landscapes of the hypothetical, through all the pasts and futures of each present. Only one of each can be what happened and what will happen, but to such men they are the least important.”If you are a scholar-gypsy by reading and temperament, there’s a chance this foray into inner worlds may indeed be your cup of tea, glass of Scotch, drag of literary tobacco.Drink and inhale deeply.

⭐I had read this in the early ’80’s but couldn’t remember it clearly. Now I know why: it really is not his best.While the first half moves along nicely, as the interesting characters get developed and Fowles treats us to some snappy dialog and interesting disquisitions, the second half (as other reviewers have noted) goes on forever in a seemingly never-ending fog of philosophical self-flagellation. It’s tough to describe what I felt without giving away plot spoilers, but really, if a ~45-year-old man can’t figure out who he is, why should we have to read about it?* Maybe it all seemed mysterious or portentous to me in my 20’s, but now it just seems self-indulgent.On the plus side, Fowles shows more of the writing skills he is famous for – great sentences abound, and he challenges your intellect without being too much of a supercilious ass about it. He makes some trenchant observations about the movie business and especially about what it is (was?) like to be Engilsh in the world in the ’70’s. He makes even more direct comments about the differences between the Engilsh and Americans – some are not pretty, but all are thoughtful. You have to recall that even as late as the ’70’s, England was still recovering from the Depression and WWII and it wasn’t until the ’80’s that they could be said to have dug out completely and fully joined the modern world – which for good or bad at that point been shaped largely by American ideas.So I wonder if Fowles had written this book 20 years later, would he have used the same characters and reached the same conclusions? Would he have updated it? Or would the book have been more a lament for a lost England?And would it have been shorter?—* SPOILER – I laughed out loud at the commenter who said the reason a main character killed himself was because he heard this book in his head and needed it to stop!

⭐I consider John Fowles one of the greatest of British writers and The French Lieutenant’s Woman among my favourite books. I enjoy a book that has depth and soul. I enjoy philosophy and books that delve into the human psyche. In a nutshell, I enjoy reading something I can get my teeth into and I certainly appreciate whether or not a book is well written.Daniel Martin is a great ‘drone’ of a book. So long and so verbose, I actually sighed with relief once I’d finished.The only saving grace is Fowles brilliance as a writer. His descriptions of Egypt and the short trip Daniel makes into Syria are wonderfully portrayed and the mark of a first class writer.However I found the plot quite flimsy. A middle aged man, now a Hollywood script writer who feels the ‘scene’ is beneath him and he yearns to be playwright or a novelist. He is ‘stuck’ with memories of his time at Oxford where he met his first wife. While still at Oxford he has a brief sexual encounter with his wife’s sister and his ongoing obsession with this woman is the basis of the plot.I have to admit the endless philosophising and ‘double speak’ tested my own intellect to capacity, and I believe it was written for a niche group of readers. Certainly if one reads for pleasure this will not be a welcome addition to the library.If I had to ask a few British writers to a dinner party I would include Julian Barnes, Charles Dickens, Thomas hardy, The Brontes, Hilary Mantel and William Boyd and so on. I would not be asking Daniel Martin (alias John Fowles) in case he got bogged down in philosophy, dominated the conversation and bored everyone to death.Three stars for the writing…. zip for the content.

⭐John Fowles seems to be the forgotten man of late 20th century fiction, known mostly for ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ and possibly ‘The Collector’, his first and best work. This somewhat self-indulgent work follows the reflections of the eponymous hero, a screen-writer utilising a variety of narrative voices. It is Fowles’s playing with literary narrative traditions that makes his work so interesting, every novel seems to adopt a different approach, the alternate endings of ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ (which perhaps has its genesis in Dickens’s two endings to ‘Great Expectations’), although in the latter’s case a change imposed by his publisher or the dual diaries of ‘The Collector’.The structure of ‘Daniel Martin’ is such that it could be read as a series of short stories as its use of intertwined timelines results in a non-linear narrative. There are two main flaws in the novel, the first is shared with most of Fowles’s works, a desire to demonstrate the author’s cleverness by using untranslated quotations in foreign languages and words that not part of the normal educated reader’s vocabulary e.g. ‘eleemosynary’ for ‘charitable’. I have a PhD in English literature and have been assessed as having a vocabulary of some 60,000 words but I am thankful for the Kindle editions that allow me to access the Oxford English dictionary (although the shorter version is often stumped!) and its translation tools (although unaccountably there is not a Latin or Classical Greek tool). The second, which may be a personal cavil, is that the last few chapters consist of an extended whining courtship by Martin of his lost love Jane, which is boring beyond belief. It bizarrely reminds me of Dawson’s extended conversations with Joey in the US teen drama ‘Dawson’s Creek’! That said the novel contains, in the chapter about Daniel and Nancy probably the best exploration of adolescent sexuality in modern fiction and the dangers and disappointments of revisiting the past.Thoroughly recommended, but one star deducted for the whining and the necessity to use a dictionary!

⭐Daniel Martin starts with a highly evocative description of a scene of haymaking in which a young Daniel Martin participates, prior to leaving home for Oxford, and later playwriting and scriptwriting. The novel is told in non-chronological parts, and with some episodes written by the woman, Jenny, with whom Daniel is currently having a relationship in Hollywood, a young film actress. The main story, however, is about Daniel, his love life over the years and particularly is a stocktaking for him at age 45 or so, and for others he has known at Oxford, including his first wife and her sister, as they approach middle age and all feel they haven’t done perhaps what they might have done with their lives and as they have adolescent and young adult children of their own, living in a different time and place….This is a highly philosophical novel, in which much of the action derives from a ‘gratuitous act’, as the author puts in in a section heading, committed by the sister of Daniel’s first wife in Oxford many years before the start of the main action, but which now many years later precipitates the return to England of Daniel from Hollywood to take stock of his past…and which follows its own inexorable logic as the novel unfolds.I enjoyed this rather less that all the other Fowles novels and short stories, perhaps because I’ve come to it last, but perhaps because it simply doesn’t quite have the edge-of-the-seat plotting and story-line and is not quite so psychologically gripping as his earlier work. The dilemmas of the characters here are very much of their time and place – though midlife crises no doubt will continue to plague humanity…There is still much here that is memorable, however, and Fowles’ world-view continues both to attract and to challenge the reader – at least this reader.

⭐The first half unfolds nicely, but gets bogged down soon after Daniel returns to England. Fowles’ books are always dated, which can be an interesting look into the past, but here it’s ridiculous. 1970s upper middle class ideas of China, Marxism and Socialism as ‘the greater good’ were even then contemptible. Add that to Jane, a whelk of a character, and you’d be hard put to finish. Why bother, when there’s plenty else to read?The Magus, The Collector, and the short story collection The Ebony Tower are far and away better books.

⭐I have enjoyed this book through the author’s ability to conjure images. The book has had clear backdrop which has added to the stories woven around them. There has been much to relate to for everyone middle aged. It is also easy to transport to the present. A long book for that kept attention and did not wilt throughout. A strong and enjoyable novel that makes you want more but also leaves space for the imagination to fill.Take a week off and read this

⭐I was very disappointed by this book as Im a huge John Fowles fan and was excited to read another one of his novels. If this book was half the size it would be an ok book. Only about 3 chapters are worth reading which in unlike Fowles who is usually a writer who grips the reader.

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