First impressions review: A Maggot, by John Fowles
This is one of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time, but a really interesting one. The title comes from an old term for a whim or quirk, sometimes used in the 17th and 18th centuries to refer to dance tunes – an allusion by the author to the fact that this book doesn’t really fit any normal genre. It is mostly a historical fiction set in the 1730s but is constructed like a mystery and has some science fiction elements. The latter is the second link to the name: one of the characters sees a mysterious vessel that she at first thinks of as a giant maggot because of its shape and color. Because all of our narrators are in some degree unreliable, the truth of events is not clear even to the reader at the end – but that doesn’t matter too much because the story is more about exploring themes of selfhood and societal change.
The story begins with five travelers riding along in silence. They seem to include two gentlemen of moderate means (one older and one younger), a manservant and a maid, and a military man as guard. None of them speak a word for 14 pages, and I began to worry the book was going to have way too much narrator exposition – including telling us things about the 18th century that could have been shown. However, that turned out not to be the case, and almost as soon as the chracters do start to speak it becomes clear that none of these people are who they seem.
The older “gentleman” is revealed to be an actor. The younger had told him their reason for travel – and the former’s disguise - was a woman but seems far more caught up in hypotheticals about what one should do if one knew the future than his supposed elopement. We see the maid upstairs dress herself in a fine gown and puts on makeup while the manservant watches unhappily…and, somewhat disconcertingly, gets his dick out, which she regards with more pity than shock. Downstairs, the military man is telling the local servants that the fellow is a deaf-mute who communicates with his master in signs. After joking with the actor that his true purpose might be “to plot with some emissary of James Stuart” or “to creep into the woods and meet some disciple of the Witch of Endor. To exchange my eternal soul against the secrets of the other world” the young gentleman assures the actor he has no criminal purpose, and that his services are nearly done. The actor leaves, and the servant enters: “Such a fixed, mutual, interlocked regard would have been strange if it had lasted only a second or two…It is such a look as a husband and wife, or siblings, might give, in a room where there are other people and they cannot say what they truly feel.” Then, without a word, they start merrily burning all the books and papers they had carried there in a large chest.
Finally, the maid enters in her finery, and the young gentleman humiliates
her for being a prostitute in a surprisingly sadistic manner. He seems jealous of her affection toward his servant, though he had
evidently instructed her to sleep with him. He questions
her about her origins and though the tale is rather pitiable he remains severe. He tells
her she must serve some foreigners who he would please and that she must play
the demure maiden. “Her eyes are wet with tears again, the small tears of one
who knows herself without choice.”
It is a hard scene to
read and this and later scenes
in which this same poor woman is similarly berated even after turning her
life around had me wanting to re-read ‘Moll Flanders’ by Daniel Defoe. There,
at least, a man of the times (Defoe himself) shows empathy for the limited options
available to women. But that is just the first 52 pages of this 450-page book, which abruptly changes format.
We learn from a newspaper article that the servant has been found hanged in a wood, while the other travelers are missing. We then switch to a series of letters and deposition transcripts, the record of a lawyer’s efforts to find out what happened to the young gentleman, who is the son of a Duke. He questions the landlord and maid of the inn where they last stayed, and a clergyman who spoke with the actor. An intriguing detail here is that the maid reports that the chest that contained the papers – found empty in the woods – also contained a device that looked like clockwork. Ayscough, the lawyer, knows the young gentleman was interested in the mathematical and natural sciences, and suspects he came to speak with someone about that…the trouble being that there are no such experts in that rather backwards part of the country.
Ayscough tracks down the actor (who was sent off before whatever happened), then the madam who employed the woman, and then the supposed military man. Ayscough seems strangely intent on determining if the young gentleman and his servant were having sex, later remarking the Duke would accept any fanciful tale or bad news other than that! Everyone says they didn’t suspect so, though the two did seem strangely close and in tune, as if they were brothers rather than master and servant. The "sergeant" says that, having figured out who the young gentleman was, he followed after the remaining three so he could perhaps gain a reward from the Duke for news about his son. He saw the woman dress in a fine white gown with a crown of hawthorn blossoms before the three met with another woman:
“They did kneel all…as before a queen…She was most strange dressed, as it seemed in silver, and more as man than woman, for she wore breeches and a blouse.”
He sees the three go into a cave and hears a strange humming from within. Then the servant comes dashing out in a fright, followed by the young woman, naked and dazed but not fearful.
To say more would be getting into too many spoilers. Suffice to say, the young woman tells the "sergeant" a tale of witches and the devil, but when found later she tells a very different story. I’m still not entirely sure what I think the "truth" is. There are elements of the story that suggest genuine time travel – fragments that sound like the Vietnam war or the atomic bomb, for instance. But there are other elements that might or might not be meant to be an image of a future yet to come. This book also, surprisingly, functions as an imagined origin story for the Shakers, which I actually rather enjoyed. I heard the Shaker Christmas carol 'Hail the Memorable Morn' when I performed with this choir and was intrigued by its proto-feminist themes:
Women: Half the savior then was owned, this was all the world could bear
Still the whole creation groaned, waiting for the second heir
Men: True, for many hundred years, all creation screamed in pain
Pouring out their cries and tears, oh, that Christ should come again
Women: Well, from this we plainly see, that the whole were jointly bound
Until the woman was set free, groaning was the common sound
Men: Can you confidently state, who was God’s peculiar one
Whom did he predestinate, to bear the image of his son?
Women: Sure, it would not be a man, none with Jesus could compare.
Men: Was it your good Mother Anne?
Women: Yea, it was, we do declare!
She has joined the union band, that we are no longer two
On the level now we stand and are just as free as you
The author – based on the end note - seems to have been similarly intrigued by this communal, pacifist, egalitarian religious movement, despite his own atheism.
A constant theme in this tale is how much the authorities distrust change and democracy and so have an interest in making sure the lower-downs in society believe in neither:
“A conventional Englishman of the time might have said the national palladium was the Anglican Church; but the country’s true religion…was far more vested in a profound respect for right of property…One might suppose that this general obsession with property would have swept away, through Parliament, the abominably antiquated laws concerning ownership and acquisition of it…But not a bit of it: here love of property clashed head on with…the belief that change leads not to progress, but to anarchy and disaster...the word mob was not fifty years old in the language at this date; a shortened slang version of mobile vulgus, the common rabble. Mobility or movement meant change; and change is evil.”
The author clearly does not agree, and perhaps neither does the young gentleman – though, if so, his methods for stimulating change are rather odd.
Overall recommendation: If you enjoy historical fiction, science fiction, mysteries, and/or social commentary –which, as readers of this blog will likely have gathered, I do – then you would probably enjoy at least parts of this book. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it in total: for instance, whether the callous behavior of the young gentleman would be justified even if the most charitable interpretation of events is true. But I’m glad that I read it and I suspect it will be haunting my thoughts for some time to come.
