Why has John Fowles grown so slowly? What can explain the combination of conceit (the publication of his personal philosophy in The Aristos and, worse, of his poetry) with the insecurity shown by post-publication revision? (The Aristos … appeared in first and revised editions [as did The Magus].) The answer seems to lie in Fowles's inability to reconcile his intellectual beliefs about what men and novelists should be with his own strongest instincts and abilities. Evident in his works are two related and hitherto unnoticed patterns: first, Fowles has obsessively written and rewritten the novel of education with which it is natural to begin a career, to the exclusion of almost all other themes; second, he has (as we know him through the authorial voice of the novels) at the same time remained unregenerate in regard to precisely those "philosophical lessons" his protagonists must learn. His own education is unfinished or unsuccessful, according to his own criteria. These two points are mutually illuminative: Fowles seems to repeat the same education theme because he cannot get beyond it himself. Although Fowles's heroes are often justifiably left youthful (until Daniel Martin anyway) and dynamically in process, their educations unfinished, one has a right to expect that their creator, dictator of the novels' norms, not lag behind. (pp. 86-7)
The basic situation in a Fowles novel, as in The Magus, is the education of a male protagonist, often a budding artist, who sets out with a constellation of character faults…. (p. 87)
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