299- ] English Literature - John Fowles

299- ] English Literature

John Fowles

Born                                        31 March 1926

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England

Died                                         5 November 2005 (aged 79)

Lyme Regis, Dorset, England

Occupation                             Writer, teacher

Alma mater                             University of Edinburgh

New College, Oxford

Period                                      1960–2005

Notable works                        The Collector

The Magus

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Robert Fowles (/faʊlz/; 31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005) was an English novelist, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.

After leaving Oxford University, Fowles taught English at a school on the Greek island of Spetses, a sojourn that inspired The Magus (1965), an instant best-seller that was directly in tune with 1960s "hippy" anarchism and experimental philosophy. This was followed by The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a Victorian-era romance with a postmodern twist that was set in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where Fowles lived for much of his life. Later fictional works include The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985).

Fowles's books have been translated into many languages, and several have been adapted as films.

Early life

Birth and family

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the only son and elder child (a sister, Hazel, was born fifteen years later)[1] of Robert John Fowles and Gladys May, née Richards. His father had trained as a lawyer—"clerking and reading in a barrister's chambers"[2]—but worked for the family business, tobacco importer Allen & Wright, as his father Reginald had been a partner in the company; at Reginald's death, Robert was obliged to run the firm as his brother had died in the Battle of Ypres and there were young dependent half-siblings to provide for from his father's second marriage. Gladys was daughter of John Richards, a draper, and his wife Elizabeth, who was in service. They came from Cornwall to London, where John became chief buyer for a department store, and gave their daughter a "comfortable upbringing in Chelsea", but they relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex on account of the healthier climate following the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. On returning from the First World War in bad health, having served for three years as an officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, Robert Fowles met his future wife at a Westcliff-on-Sea tennis club.

Education

During his childhood Fowles was attended[clarification needed] by his mother and his cousin Peggy Fowles, who was 18 years his senior. He attended Alleyn Court Preparatory School, where a maternal uncle and aunt were teachers.

In 1939, he won a place at Bedford School, where he remained a pupil until 1944. He became head boy and was an athletic standout: a member of the rugby football third team, the fives first team, and captain of the cricket team, for which he was a bowler.

After leaving Bedford School, Fowles enrolled in a Naval Short Course at the University of Edinburgh and was prepared to receive a commission in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on 8 May 1945 and was then assigned to Okehampton Camp, Devon, for two years.

After completing his military service in 1947, Fowles entered New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he stopped studying German and concentrated on French for his BA. Fowles was undergoing a political transformation. Upon leaving the marines, he wrote, "I ... began to hate what I was becoming in life—a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist."

It was also at Oxford that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He has also commented that the ambience of Oxford at the time, where such existentialist notions of "authenticity" and "freedom" were pervasive, influenced him. Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing was motivated from a feeling that the world was absurd, a feeling he shared.

Career

Teaching

Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers. At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said: "Of course, I went against all the dictates of common sense and took the Greek job."

In 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses (also known as Spetsai). This opened a critical period in his life, as the island was where he met his future wife. Inspired by his experiences and feelings there, he used it as the setting of his novel The Magus (1966). Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow expatriates. But during 1953, he and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England.

On the island of Spetses, Fowles had developed a relationship with Elizabeth Christy, née Whitton, then married to another teacher, Roy Christy. That marriage was already ending because of Fowles. Although they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company. It was during this period that Fowles began drafting The Magus.

His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1957, they were married. Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. For nearly ten years, he taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries at St. Godric's College, an all-girls establishment in Hampstead, London.

Literary career

In late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector. He finished his first draft of The Collector in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape, was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published in 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year, it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard. British reviewers found the novel to be an innovative thriller, and several American critics detected a serious promotion of existentialist thought.

The success of The Collector meant that Fowles could stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. Film rights to the book were optioned and it was adapted as a feature film of the same name in 1965.[12] Against the advice of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second published book be The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy essays. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work, The Magus.

In 1965 Fowles left London, moving to Underhill, a farm on the fringes of Lyme Regis, Dorset. The isolated farm house became the model for The Dairy in the book Fowles was writing: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Finding the farm too remote, ("total solitude gets a bit monotonous," Fowles remarked), in 1968 he and his wife moved to Belmont, in Lyme Regis (Belmont was formerly owned by Eleanor Coade), which Fowles used as a setting for parts of The French Lieutenant's Woman. In this novel, Fowles created one of the most enigmatic female characters in literary history. His conception of femininity and myth of masculinity as developed in this text is psychoanalytically informed.

In the same year, he adapted The Magus for cinema, and the film was released in 1968. The film version of The Magus (1968) was generally considered awful; when Peter Sellers was asked whether he would make changes in his life if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he jokingly replied, "I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn't see The Magus."

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) was released to critical and popular success. It was translated into more than ten languages, and established Fowles's international reputation. It was adapted as a feature film in 1981 with a screenplay by the noted British playwright (and later Nobel laureate) Harold Pinter, and starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House. In 1980 he wrote a highly appreciative introduction to G. B. Edwards's The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (Hamish Hamilton, 1981), the fictional autobiography set in Guernsey: 'There may have been stranger literary events than the book you are about to read but I rather doubt it' (reprinted in his Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. Jan Relf (Jonathan Cape, 1998), pp. 166–74.

Fowles composed a number of poems and short stories throughout his life, most of which were lost or destroyed. In December 1950 he wrote My Kingdom for a Corkscrew. For A Casebook (1955) was rejected by various magazines. In 1970 he wrote The Last Chapter.

In 2008 Fowles was named by The Times as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.

Personal life

Fowles served as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979 to 1988,[19] retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke. He was occasionally involved in local politics, writing letters to The Times advocating preservation. Despite this involvement, he was generally considered reclusive.

In 1990, his first wife Elizabeth died of cancer, only a week after she was diagnosed. Her death affected him severely, and he did not write for a year. In 1998, he was quoted in the New York Times Book Review as saying, "Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."

In 1998, Fowles married his second wife, Sarah Smith. With Sarah by his side, he died of heart failure on 5 November 2005, aged 79, in Axminster Hospital, 5 miles (8.0 km) from Lyme Regis.

In 2008, Elena van Lieshout presented a series of 120 love letters and postcards for auction at Sotheby's. The correspondence started in 1990, when Fowles was aged 65. Elena, a young Welsh admirer and a student at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, contacted the reclusive author and they developed a sensitive, albeit unconsummated, relationship.

Controversy

Following Fowles's death in 2005, his unpublished diaries from 1965 to 1990 were revealed to contain racist and homophobic statements, with particular ire towards Jewish people. He described rare book dealer Rick Gekoski as "Too Jewish for English tastes ... bending to the way of the wind, or the business and money pressure", and wrote a consciously antisemitic poem about publishers Tom Maschler and Roger Straus.

List of works

(1963) The Collector

(1964) The Aristos, essays (ISBN 0-586-05377-8)

(1965) The Magus (revised 1977)

(1969) The French Lieutenant's Woman

(1973) Poems by John Fowles

(1974) The Ebony Tower

(1974) Shipwreck

(1977) Daniel Martin

(1978) Islands

(1979) The Tree

(1980) The Enigma of Stonehenge

(1982) A Short History of Lyme Regis

(1982) Mantissa

(1985) A Maggot

(1985) Land (with Fay Godwin)

(1990) Lyme Regis Camera

(1998) Wormholes - Essays and Occasional Writings

(2003) The Journals – Volume 1

(2006) The Journals – Volume 2

298- ] English Literature - John Fowles

298- ] English Literature

Hohn Fowles

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says “I have tried to escape ever since.”

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by 1947 he had decided that the military life was not for him.

Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric’s College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.

The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.

In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.

The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus–drafts of which Fowles had been working on for over a decade– was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written, The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.

With parallels to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Homer’s The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader: “You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth…it’s a trap which I hope will hook the reader,” he says.

The most commercially successful of Fowles’ novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Winner of several awards and made into a well-received film starring Meryl Streep in the title role, it is the book that today’s casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles.

In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects–including a series of essays on nature–and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. He also worked on translations from the French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France’s 12th Century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974.

Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist’s struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history.

In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forwards/afterwords to other writers’ novels. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979).

Beginning in 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant’s Woman). His interest in the town’s local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

Wormholes, a book of essays, was published in May 1998. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles–A Life in Two Worlds, was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year, followed by volume two in 2006.

John Fowles died on November 5, 2005 after a long illness.  Read an obituary and an appreciation by clicking here.

 

297- ] English Literature - John Fowles

297- ] English Literature

John Fowles

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by 1947 he decided that the military life was not for him.

Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.

The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete and too lengthy.

In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.

In 1965, Fowles' third novel, The Magus--drafts of which he had worked on for over a decade-- was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written,The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest and has become something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.

The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels was The French Lieutenant's Woman, which appeared in 1969. The novel was the winner of several awards and was eventually made into a well-received film starring Meryl Streep in the title role; it is the book that today's casual readers most associate with Fowles.

In the 1970s, Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects--including a series of essays on nature--and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. He also worked on translations from the French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France's 12th Century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974. Fowles also wrote a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forwards/afterwords to other writers' novels. He wrote the text for several photographic compilations.

Since 1968, Fowles lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbor town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles--A Life in Two Worlds, was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year (followed recently by volume two).

John Fowles died on November 5, 2005 after a long illness.

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Published Works

The Belmont House & Landmark Trust

296- ] English Literature - John Fowles

296- ]English Literature

John Fowles

Also known as: John Robert Fowles

Quick Facts

In full: John Robert Fowles

Born: March 31, 1926, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England

Died: November 5, 2005, Lyme Regis, Dorset (aged 79)

Notable Works: “The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas” “The Collector” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” “The Magus”

John Fowles (born March 31, 1926, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England—died November 5, 2005, Lyme Regis, Dorset) was an English novelist, whose allusive and descriptive works combine psychological probings—chiefly of sex and love—with an interest in social and philosophical issues.

Fowles graduated from the University of Oxford in 1950 and taught in Greece, France, and Britain. His first novel, The Collector (1963; filmed 1965), about a shy man who kidnaps a girl in a hapless search for love, was an immediate success. This was followed by The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964), a collection of essays reflecting Fowles’s views on such subjects as evolution, art, and politics. He returned to fiction with The Magus (1965, rev. ed. 1977; filmed 1968). Set on a Greek island, the book centres on an English schoolteacher who struggles to discern between fantasy and reality after befriending a mysterious local man. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969; filmed 1981), arguably Fowles’s best-known work, is a love story set in 19th-century England that richly documents the social mores of that time. An example of Fowles’s original style, the book combined elements of the Victorian novel with postmodern works and featured alternate endings.

Fowles’s later fictional works include The Ebony Tower (1974), a volume of collected novellas, Daniel Martin (1977), and Mantissa (1982). His last novel, A Maggot (1985), centred on a group of travelers in the 1700s and the mysterious events that occur during their journey. Fowles also wrote verse, adaptations of plays, and the text for several photographic studies. Wormholes, a collection of essays and writings, was published in 1998.

 

295- ] English Literature - Jasper Fforde

English Literature

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Forde is an English novelist known for his quirky and inventive novels, most famously the Thursday Next series, which began with The Eyre Affair in 2001. He also authored the Nursery Crime books, the Shades of Grey series, and the Young Adult Last Dragonslayer series.

Career: Before becoming a novelist, Fforde worked in the film industry for 19 years, contributing to movies like Goldeneye and The Mask of Zorro.

Notable works:

Thursday Next series: A popular series about a literary detective who can enter books.

Nursery Crime series: A detective series where classic nursery rhyme characters are investigated, such as in The Big Over Easy where Humpty Dumpty is the victim.

Shades of Grey series: A post-apocalyptic world where society is fragmented by the inability to see in color.

The Last Dragonslayer series: A Young Adult fantasy series about a young woman who manages a company of magicians.

Awards: He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing for The Well of Lost Plots, the second book in the Thursday Next series.

Welcome to the jasper Fforde website, and yes, Jasper Fforde is my real name. I am a British writer who lives in Wales and writes absurdist fiction.

You may notice that this website looks very little like modern websites, and that's because it was written a long time ago in HTML, which your great-grandfather can tell you was the language behind all websites back in 2000, the year when all this began - this website was about the thirty millionth ever registered. Wow. How small the internet was in those days.

The website has gone though many iterations, and has been added to so much over the years that there are now over 1300 pages to explore. Obviously, upgrading all that to a modern bells-and-whistles website would take forever and remove some of the Olde-eWorlde charm, so I have decided to simply leave it as it is, and carry on as I am. It's fine on desktops, most of it will work on tablets, although you may have to do a bit of jiggery-pokery on smartphones to read any articles.

Actually, while I'm talking about HTML, it does allow the relative novice like me to edit and add relatively easily, and if I have an idea for a silliness, the wonders of writing in source code HTML will allow you to do it. If you click on the 'Welcome' and 'This is me' banners above, you'll see what I mean.

So everything we have ever put on the site is still here. Navigation is at best eclectic, but usually logical, so long as you know how an index works and are willing to explore. You'll find lots of stuff, such as an introduction to the Seven Wonders of Swindon, my improved version of Monopoly, a little bit about How To Be A Hamlet, and a whole bunch of Special Features, complete with deleted scenes and 'making of' wordamentaries.

There are also easter eggs in abundance, with lots of unindexed pages to be found, like this error 404 message that pops up when you are looking for Romeo and Juliet. There is even an emergency boss coming facility just in case you get bored at work and don't want to get busted.

I add to the website sporadically as the mood takes me, and should be the first port of call if you want to find stuff out. Yes, agreed, Facebook is a better way to keep everyone totally clued in to what's going on, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I'm not a big facebooker, besides, this is kind of about ownership, too, and adding to stuff that is already here in order to create one huge 'Fforgasbord' of stuff.

Any alerts will be on Threads or Instagram, so if you want to know when there's an update, follow me on those. I also have a Mailchimp database, so if you would like to be s ent emails with news and views, sign up there.

So far, I have written books in four series: The Thursday Next series of which there are seven books, the Nursery Crime series (two), the Last Dragonslayer, series (four) and the Shades of Grey series (two so far out of three). You can have a look at a potted precis of the books. The next published book will be Red Side Story , the long awaited sequel to Shades of Grey. Ive also written two standalones: Early Riser, a thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated, and The Constant Rabbit, an allegorical story of racism and xenophobia in UK, also labelled as 'My Brexit Anger Book'. It's about anthropological rabbits living in the UK as a demonised other. It's kinda dark, but I do like it.

The Fforde Grand Central page is probably the best place to start to explore, but the index also covers most things. There is an FAQ page, too, and I also have an eBay page named Ffotographica where you can buy books and stuff.

Enjoy.

Jasper, Dec 2023.

  

294-] English Literature - Jasper Fforde

294- ] English Literature 

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is an English novelist whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has also published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series, two in the Shades of Grey series and four in The Last Dragonslayer series. Fforde's books abound in literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots and playfulness with the conventional, traditional genres. They usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.

Early life

Fforde was born in London on 11 January 1961, the son of John Standish Fforde, the 24th Chief Cashier for the Bank of England. He is a grandson of the Polish political activist, Joseph Retinger, and a great-grandson of the journalist E. D. Morel.

Fforde was educated at Dartington Hall School. In his first jobs, he worked as a focus puller in the film industry. He worked on a number of films, including The Trial, Quills, GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, and Entrapment.

Novels

Fforde's published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication.

Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots. Several streets in the Thames Reach housing development in Swindon have been named after characters in the series.

The Big Over Easy (2005), set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, reworks his first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? It was later entitled Nursery Crime, which now refers to the series of books. These describe the investigations of DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to The Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July 2006 and focuses on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Shades of Grey, the first novel in a new series, was published December 2009 in the United States and January 2010 in the United Kingdom. The sequel Red Side Story was published in February 2024 in the United Kingdom and May the same year in the United States.

In November 2010 Fforde produced The Last Dragonslayer, the first novel in a new series. It is a young-adult fantasy novel about a teenage orphan Jennifer Strange which has been adapted for television. Two more books have been published in the series, The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011) and The Eye of Zoltar (2014). The series was originally planned as a trilogy, but a fourth book in the series was announced in 2014, The Great Troll War (2021).

Short stories

In 2009, Fforde published a story in the Welsh edition of Big Issue magazine called "We are all alike" (previously "The Man with no Face").

He also published "The Locked Room Mystery mystery" [sic] in The Guardian newspaper in 2007; this story remains available online. The U.S. version of Well of Lost Plots features a bonus chapter (34b) called "Heavy Weather", a complete story in itself, featuring Thursday Next in her position as Bellman.

Fforde Ffiesta

Originating with the Fforde Ffestival in September 2005, the Fforde Ffiesta (cf. Ford Fiesta) is a bi-annual event built around Fforde's books and held in Thursday Next's home town of Swindon over the May bank holiday weekend. People travel from afar to take part in a wide range of events, including a reenactment of the gameshow Name That Fruit, Hamlet Speed Reading competitions, and interactive performances of Richard III.

Bibliography

Thursday Next

The Eyre Affair (2001)

Lost in a Good Book (2002)

The Well of Lost Plots (2003)

Something Rotten (2004)

First Among Sequels (2007)

One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011)

The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012)

Dark Reading Matter (2026)

Nursery Crime Division

The Big Over Easy (2005)

The Fourth Bear (2006)

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey (2009)

Red Side Story (2024)

The Dragonslayer

The Last Dragonslayer (2010)

The Song of the Quarkbeast (2011)

The Eye of Zoltar (2014)

The Great Troll War (2021)

Standalone Novels

Early Riser (2018)

The Constant Rabbit (2020)

293- ] English Literature - Duncan Fallowell

English Literature

Duncan Fallowel

Duncan Fallowell is one of the figureheads of modern British journalism. At 21 he was the Spectator’s first rock critic. He then released the anthology Drug Tales in 1979, before promptly giving up drugs to prevent “burning out”. Fallowell, who nearly became the lead singer of Can after Damo Suzuki left, was a friend of William Burroughs, has written on film, music and books, and has also penned novels that people seem to have a tendency to burn. Over calvados and shortbread in his west London home, Fallowell told me what drugs do to writing, and why this should be called the Literature Issue, not the Fiction Issue.

Vice: Your first book, Drug Tales, is not about what most people might expect. There are stories in it about green tea, for example.

Duncan Fallowell: I take a broad view of what a drug is. I included the elixir of youth in the anthology. One shouldn’t be too pharmacological in reading the book, it is meant to be a literary experience.

How did the book come about?

I used to know someone called Roger Machell, who was the editorial director of Hamish Hamilton in the buccaneering days of independent publishing. He sent me an anthology of short stories they were publishing about cricket—what a total yawn. That is for the Sebastian Faulks of this world; no self-respecting author can get passionate about cricket. It was embarrassing, even in the 70s. It was meant to be for fans of writing and fans of cricket, but it fell between two stools very quietly. But I told Roger I would like to do an anthology of drug tales. He dropped his glass and said, “Oh, what a good idea,” then promptly issued a dodgy contract—that was another feature of the good old days of independent publishing.

So Drug Tales was a sort of summary of drug writing to date?

I edited Drug Tales, but I actually included one story I wrote under the invented name of Peter Riviera. Then I found out there was actually a person called Peter de Rivier or something, who was the son of a record producer, who threatened to sue me. It came at the end of a drug-taking era. They always seem to coincide with the Labour Party being in government. The 60s and 70s were Labour eras and drug eras. The 80s and 90s were not. People talk about yuppies and cocaine and that is true, but I am talking about drugs being part of the creative world and being accepted as having a role in the imagination.

The Thatcherite, coke 80s was very much about making more money. When I came into drugs it was a cultural movement that, with acid, came to be the psychedelic thing. That drug era was followed by a dry period of “Sit up straight and wear a tie!”, Dynasty and Joan Collins. And then, at the turn of the century, we got another drug period, which I suspect is now coming to its end too.

There are drug problems in the world, but they are now linked with far more serious problems, political dissent being funded by heroin trade and then fading into organised crime. It much resembles the world of my first novel, Satyrday, which is full of terrorists, drug dealers and pornographers all somehow coming together and popping up at embassy receptions.

You first came into the drugs scene at Oxford, right?

Yes. It was rather an age of innocence. It came from that much earlier experience of Isherwood and Huxley on the west coast and Alan Watts and Zen. California during the last war was very much a crucible of what would burst out with the Beats.

I was interested in the Beats in terms of the territory—what you were allowed to write about. I didn’t find them very technically interesting. I remember once writing somewhere—when I was very young, one of my first book reviews, I think—that all revolutions in art were technical. I said that humans have had the same problems throughout history, but the way they were expressed could evolve. Graham Greene wrote a letter saying that it was a load of cobblers. I have been thinking about it since.

What is your view of the effects of drugs on writing and literature?

Well, in my own case, it rendered my work unpublishable. I was taking all of the drugs that were available at the time. I was never addicted to anything, I was never that organised. Taking drugs was never the objective, which they are in an addiction. Take dope, speed, alcohol, cigarettes, and sit down with a purple pen and you think you will be Gogol. And you are, until you present your results to other people. They get the Gogolian atmosphere, but your powers of communication have been impaired. My journalism was very off-the-wall at that time.

It doesn’t sound like they were particularly helpful.

The thing about drugs is that they were not a distraction for me. But they did inhibit my publishablity. What they did is they taught me to have a very sculptural, sensual and musical attitude to language. This was more the cannabis and acid side of things. Words were no longer just cars that carried meaning. The meaning and the word were one.

At the age of 30, I came off everything. I was burning up; it was all becoming either repetitive or just dangerous. Mark Hyatt, who wrote the poem “Randel” in Drug Tales, died very young. He might have become a professional writer if he had stopped taking drugs. That’s the other thing—there is a level of professionalism in anything. A writer must have a voice, a vision and something to say, but you must be able to get things across, as opposed to just fouling your own nest. Fouling your own nest taken to its logical conclusion is self-extinction.

Is there a drug that works best for writing? Or is that a silly question?

No, it is a very interesting subject that has not really been well addressed in what passed for debate on it. I used to use a lot of speed, and people know that speed turns you into a bore in these terms, because you lose your objective judgment. But it’s very exciting and wonderfully rewarding to involve yourself in a verbal universe. But that is not the same as writing a book. I don’t write for myself, I write to turn other people on. My whole drug period was in a sense an apprenticeship. I had produced this amazing material and some of it has found its way, in a highly differentiated form, into published work. But mainly I realised it was training for what would begin in my 30s, learning how to use language.

How did your attitude to writing change once you had stopped taking drugs?

I came back very slowly and carefully. I went to live in Hay-on-Wye, and I wrote my first novel, about sex changes. And that was when the absolutely enormous effort involved in writing a book that another person can read with enjoyment and excitement dawned on me. But I saw writing as an important art form that should be pushed forwards, and that took total commitment. And one of the by-products of my attitude is that people get extremely jealous of that dedication. I used to be bisexual, I am now pretty much gay, but I live here alone. I am a very gregarious person, and I hate the necessary solitude required to produce a significant book. In order to do the writing, I have to put myself in a place where there is nothing else to do, which means being alone in rather remote circumstances.

On the phone, you mentioned that you wished we had called this issue the Literature Issue, not the Fiction Issue. Why?

Fiction is such a turn-off word. Not because I am against imaginative work—I am not—but because there is just so much crap published as fiction. Fiction is like footwear or dairy products—I am not interested in it. I am interested in literature, whether it be history, poetry or philosophy. What I am talking about is high-performance language. Not just crap language to get the story across, not some commercial idea that is simply verbalised. I want high performance language operated by an expert.

When you travel on the tube these days, you notice that everyone is reading the same crappy book about vampire cheerleaders.

But these series of books today that you see everyone reading are not literature. They are not adding anything. This is a commercial enterprise. Mind you, there is always a place for it; I am terribly high-minded about what I do, but I am not going to tell people they shouldn’t be reading something. I just happen to think a book that is not performing at a high level linguistically is boring. Why should I waste time on it? I know many, many people who can read good and bad books and enjoy both. I can’t myself. Jean Cocteau, who has a reputation in some circles as a high-art fiend, used to love reading cheap detective fiction on the beach. Far too much money and energy goes into making sure there are bad books out there.

I have been re-reading books I read when I was a child, such as John Buchan novels.

He has become very fashionable recently. People talk about Greenmantle as the ultimate page-turner, but I found it very tiresome. I kept seeing Peter O’Toole standing on top of a train. I am trying to get to grips with Dante, but it’s not easy. I am very interested in the classics. If you want to talk about European identity you have to go back there, to the classical world. You have the Pope these days issuing statements about the influx of Islam and the dangers of imported beliefs. But it’s all hogwash—Christianity is an imported religion and not, may I point out, the religion of Christ. Jesus was an interesting guy, but he was hijacked by the same old farts, I am afraid.

Are your literary interests firmly anchored in the European tradition?

Well, I should hope that by 60 I would be anchored in one thing; we all need anchorage. If I had got to this age without it I would probably be some sort of awful glop that gets thrown out the back of a supermarket. I don’t think I have to apologise for admiring European values and what they mean in terms of the human spirit. I think that Europe has, in intellectual terms, been the powerhouse of the modern world, but then you have to wonder if this is necessarily a good thing given the way the world seems to be burning up.

Your novels aroused some uproar, did they not?

Someone described my book Satyrday as a late-20th-century version of Vile Bodies. But it’s much more discursive than Vile Bodies. People got very annoyed about the second novel, Underbelly, because they thought it contained extreme violence. The art critic of the Telegraph told me that he was reading one passage and that his hand clenched so hard he couldn’t let go of the book for a minute, but that when he could, he threw it across the room. He wrote about it in the review. Another person, a friend of mine who read it in the south of France, said her husband took it off her and threw it in the fire.

My fourth novel, which I have just submitted, is a ghost story; I describe it as a post-spectralist ghost story. I discovered the most frightening thing is to gradually undermine the methods by which you tell whether something does or does not exist—that is what it’s about. Most of us live in this abyss most of the time, but it’s only when you become aware of it that it becomes alarming. I suppose that is what happens to mad people.

Your Wikipedia page says the following: “Graham Greene did not like his first novel, but thought it belonged to the 21st century. William Burroughs relished his books”. How do you feel about that as a summary of your life’s work?

Well, it’s a very 20th-century quote, and we are now in the 21st. Graham Greene was an awkward bugger, he wouldn’t be interviewed. I tried to drop the names of the Sunday Times, the Telegraph—he wasn’t interested. Finally I said, “What about Penthouse?” and he said, “Oh yes, I will do it for Penthouse.” Good Catholic. I went to see him and he blew me out. So I called him back the next day and it was sorted out. But he had very conventional tastes, and was very censorious. The thing he most liked were the collected journals of Byron, which he seemed very engrossed with. I sent him Satyrday, which he described as “not his cup of tea”. He obviously felt bad afterwards and added, “But something for the 21st century.” Bill Burroughs was more of a friend really. In his old age he became a very sweet old man. He was always kind and encouraging. He used to send out Christmas cards. Can you imagine it?

What is your favourite type of reader?

A slow reader.

Going as Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book by Duncan Fallowell is out now, published by Profile Books.