John Fowles is, in his recent novel Daniel Martin, as he was in his preceding novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman,… explicitly conscious of his attitude toward his own characters…. Fowles is fond of almost all of [them], sometimes, perhaps, excessively fond…. Man's brutality toward other creatures, in Fowles's world, is endemic, established in the first chapter, an account of a summer day during which Daniel Martin, the narrator and the subject of a long search for himself, worked helping out on a farm in Devon in 1942, a day on which he saw the mower, moving through high grass, slice the legs off a concealed rabbit and then saw the German bombers rip the skies on their way to Exeter…. [Fowles's use of animal imagery], like his use of the rabbit, is never heavy or melodramatic; rather, it is understated, part of a dense texture of detail, conversation, description...