What I like about Fowles is his humanism,his plain-speaking and getting intellectually to the main point,his lack of fuss.In these collected essays,introductions to books and literary articles,they are all personal writings,literary criticism,autobiography,memoirs,his literary influences,love of old books,nature-pieces and travel.What is evident is his magpie,tangential mind.We get served the idea of the lost domaine,woman as princesse lointaine,the idea of the importance of hazard in nature and creativitity.They reflect his lifelong commitment to socialism, his idea of our desire to escape into unreal worlds,his interest in `green issues',his dislike of the literary world of his day, and his desire to maintain the narrative traditions of the novel against an intellectual elite who don't wish to share their avant-gardisms with the public.He deals not with philosophical or scientific truths in his fiction,although he admits to the fictionality of fiction,he infuses it with his own personal philosophy and he uses the idea of games being played,but to appeal to `feeling truths' in the reader, who is neither critic nor writer.He admits to a love of solitude, geographically and socially.Love of both France and Greece inspired his prenovelistic self..Both as teacher and preacher he feels on a par with DH Lawrence as regards the role of the novel,with Jane Austen about central moral positions.With fellow exiles,Golding,Alain-Fournier,Hardy,he detects an irrecoverable sense of loss,Gardens of Eden,childhood innocence,idealized mothers, unattainable objects of desire. Loss is essential to the writer and drives him.Nature,Devon,his own private Eden are his sanctuary and retreat and check against that loss.He expresses anger as a conservationist against the destruction of natural landscapes. Nature needs to be respected not sentimentalised.He loves a `hands-on' approach to it.He venerates the wild,le sauvage.The novel is not dead and he dislikes absurdist pessimism fashions in life. Existential awareness of the now is what he most prizes in art,indeterminacy,the fork in the road,the unknown,the inability to end,uncertainty, mystery, secrets.He is the shaman who knows he has to lie as a novelist,but yearns to express a whole truth.`Writing is like eating or making love:a natural process,not an artificial one!'.The spark was lit for him in his youth by the love induced in him for natural history by both an uncle and a cousin. He also took to heart Socrates saying `know thyself',the quest for selfhood,thoroughness of vision,'whole sight', is more important than success,'looking at' not 'looking for'.
