ABSTRACT
The notorious openness of John Fowles’s endings, which he has presented as part of a battle against consolation, is partly consequent on the fact that a closed ending would, as indeed it does in Daniel Martin, convert one kind of heroine into the other. Fowles has described Daniel Martin as ‘a very long novel about Englishness’ and about his own ‘100 per cent selfish’ generation. Daniel Martin’s possible writerly soubriquet is S. Wolfe, an anagram of Fowles, and, though Martin is carefully distinguished from Fowles in a number of respects, he is also identified with him. In Daniel Martin the inhuman generosity of the action repeatedly and punctually serves the cunning mediocrity of its hero. Daniel Martin does read as a falling-off; but it is too early to tell to what degree Fowles’s partial disengagement in his long struggle with the problematics of his chosen form marks a new epoch in his writing.
