Four Contemporary Novelists McGill-Queen's University Press Scolar Press Kingston and Montreal London Kerry McSweeney Four Contemporary Novelists Angus Wilson Brian Moore John Fowles V.S. Naipaul © McGill-Queen's University Press 1983 ISBN 0-7735-0399-4 Legal deposit ist quarter 1983 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada First published in Great Britain in 1983 by SCOLAR PRESS James Price Publishing Limited 13 Brunswick Centre London WCIN IAF ISBN 0-85967-673-0 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data McSweeney, Kerry, 1941- Four contemporary novelists Includes index. ISBN 0-7735-0399-4 1. English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Fiction - Technique. 3. Realism in literature. I. Title. PR88I.M38 823'.91409 082-094647-8 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McSweeney, Kerry Four contemporary novelists. 1. English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism I. Title 823'.9i2'o9 PR88I ISBN 0-85967-673-0 Contents Acknowledgments i Introduction 3 1 Angus Wilson: Diversity, Depth, and Obsessive Energy 9 2 Brian Moore's Grammars of the Emotions 55 3 John Fowles's Variations 101 4 V.S. Naipaul: Clear-Sightedness and Sensibility 151 Conclusion 197 Notes 199 Index 213 For Susanne Acknowledgments Several persons read and commented on parts of my book: John Metcalf of Ottawa, John Mills of Simon Fraser University, David Staines of the University of Ottawa, Edward Baugh of the University of the West Indies, and my colleague Colin Norman. I am grateful to David Norton of McGill University and A.C. Hamilton of Queen's University for their counsel, and to Brian Cox of the University of Manchester for the opportunity to write about three of my subjects in the Critical Quarterly. Avrom Fleishman of Johns Hopkins University took the time to answer queries, as did Barry N. Olshen of Glendon College, York University, and J.H. Stape of the University of British Columbia. I would also like to thank John Beal of the Queen's University School of Graduate Studies for his encouragement, and the School's Advisory Research Committee for its support. Kathy Goodfriend and Sherril Barr once again cheerfully typed their way through a manuscript of mine. Donna Ketchen helped with the index. Lucy and Kendra McSweeney were helpful in other ways. Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in the Critical Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Wascana Review. Their editors have kindly granted permission to reprint. I am also grateful to the following for permission to quote: Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the extracts from Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, Marvell Press for the extract from Larkin's The Less Deceived, and Alfred A. Knopf and Faber & Faber for the extract from Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Publication has also been assisted by the Canada Council under its block grant program. This page intentionally left blank Introduction The following chapters offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V.S. Naipaul. I have attempted to chart the development of each writer; identify dominant themes, controlling tech- niques, and informing sensibility; explain what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provide an appropriate context for appre- ciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and make qualitative dis- criminations. In subject matter, themes, schemata, style, and sensibility each novelist is distinctly different from the others; the contexts within which their work has tended to be discussed are also dissimilar. Most of the critical commentary on Naipaul has been by students of Commonwealth literature. Of the three monographs devoted to Moore's fiction one is in a series on Irish writers, the other two in series on Canadian writers; and one of the best discussions of his work is in a book called Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction. As for Wilson and Fowles: though their novels have attracted a good deal of sophisticated commentary, there has been a tendency, es- pecially on the part of British critics, to sec their fiction through the prism of the condition-of-the-contemporary-English-novel question. By bringing these four novelists together I hope to create a less partial and less parochial context within which to analyse and assess their work. If one adopts a sufficiently comprehensive perspective it becomes possible to see some im- portant similarities among the four. By far the most important resemblance is that in a time of widespread feeling that the form of the realistic novel is exhausted and no longer able to perform its traditional moral functions and of widespread interest in alternative forms (metafiction, fabulation, anti-romans,ficciones, comic apoc- alypses, documentary fiction), Wilson, Moore, Fowles, and Naipaul have remained committed to the representational, communicative, and instruc- tive functions of the novel. Despite the contemporary crise de roman, none