SOURCE: "History, Fiction, and the Dialogic Imagination: John Fowles's A Maggot," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 229-43.

In the following essay, Holmes examines Fowles's treatment of history, mystery, and rationalism in A Maggot, as well as the novel's narrative structure.

Although all of John Fowles's works of fiction grapple with common themes, each new volume has seemed to be the fresh creation of an experimental writer determined not to repeat himself. To a degree, however, his latest novel, A Maggot (1985), seems to revert to the narrative method of what is widely regarded as his finest work, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Both are unconventional historical novels which bring an explicitly modern authorial consciousness to bear on the past rather than pretending to be of the historical period during which the action takes place. This strategy makes it possible for both novels to examine history critically as a...