Quote of the Day (John Fowles, on Why Novelists Write)

“You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture-makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.” —English novelist, critic and poet John Fowles (1926-2005), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

John Fowles was born 100 years ago today in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex, England. Four of his novels were adapted into movies: The Collector (1965), The Magus (1968), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and, for TV, The Ebony Tower (1984).

Ironically, the one that did not was Daniel Martin (1977), whose title character is an English playwright who becomes a well-paid but dissatisfied Hollywood script doctor.

For nearly 20 years, Fowles landed on the bestseller lists with large novels best characterized as metafictional, psychological, and postmodern. But even during his lifetime attention to him receded (to some extent, probably hastened by a stroke suffered in 1988), and it has only grown more so in the two decades since his death.

The book of his that seems to have the best chance of being continually re-read is The French Lieutenant's Woman, which, like A.S. Byatt’s later Possession, is a historical romance set in the Victorian Era but with a modern narrative voice.