Word: maggotism
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Although Fowles is an atheist, the "tender sympathy" for the Shakers that underlies A Maggot is not as unlikely as it seems, for the author is drawn to all forms of dissent, whatever the orthodoxy. Although a novelist of established eminence, he chooses to be "unconnected" to conventional literary life: "I don't know other writers or read any literary magazines. I hate reviewing. I don't lecture or give readings. The novel is a print medium, meant to come through the eyes, not the ears. All that readings show you is whether the novelist is a good actor...
Fowles is braced for some unfriendly reviews of A Maggot, at least from English or rather British, critics. His countrymen, he says, are still devoted to "quiet, workmanlike, parochial novels" like those of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor. "I'm not against that," he says. "I'm just against the idea that it's the only way to write novels and be esteemed in Oxbridge." Floods of mail, piling up in cardboard boxes around his desk, assure him that he is esteemed around the world. But for someone worried about finding time to finish all his projected books, this...
Give John Fowles credit for bravery. A Maggot, his seventh work of fiction, is an unusual and consciously risky book. The title alone may discourage the curious (and give booksellers the willies). In a brief prologue, Fowles explains that he is using the word maggot in the obsolete sense of whim or quirk, but that won't help matters much. And what will readers make of such Fowlesian whims as building his plot around questions to which he never provides the answers? Or resting his conclusion on an assumed familiarity with the Shakers, that little-known sect of puritanical Protestants...
Real as these perplexities are, it would be a shame if Fowles' potential audience were put off by them, for A Maggot is also an immensely rich, readable book, full of passages as haunting and provocative as anything in The Magus or The French Lieutenant's Woman...
...historical view is essential to his real subject, which turns out not to be the identity and fate of the young nobleman. A Maggot, ultimately, is the story of a new era trying to be born. As in The French Lieutenant's Woman, the future's unwitting herald is an obscure, ostracized but emotionally galvanic woman. She is Rebecca Lee, a prostitute who accompanies the nobleman on his sojourn and who, conceiving a resplendent religious vision at the moment he disappears, is transformed and joins a tiny band of Protestant zealots in Manchester...