John Fowles has never been at ease with fiction. Even in so neat a package as The Collector we had the sense, here and there, of one or other of the author's intellectual concerns awkwardly protruding from the surface of the narrative. The Magus, probably the best thing he has ever done, used the machinery of fiction like a hydro-electric dam adequately to contain and direct his sometimes overpowering conceptual flow. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, an archetypally late 1960s morsel of rediscovered Victoriana, the wall finally collapsed and a flood of Fowles's Patent Notions came washing over us. I wasn't, I suspect, the only reader irritated at having to endure a drenching from a mixture of archly self-conscious detachment, toe-curling patronage, and a set of opinions, stated or implied, on the Victorians which I didn't share….

His aim, a sufficiently laudable one, seems always to have been...