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The following short extract from the novel renders

Pearson's, and, evidently, Murdoch's own idea of the pre-­

sentday world and man's destiny in it:

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear the endless unsatisfied anguish of a being who passionately desires

only illusory goods

This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons

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to whose effects even nightmares cannot do jus lice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear This is where we live.

Since the 1970s Murdoch's novels such as A Word Child (1975), The Sea, the Sea (1978), The Philosopher's Pupil (1983). The Book and the Rotherhood (1987) and others have acquired a more definite social background. The construction of the plot has become less schematic, the characters have grown more life-like and their actions have become more socially motivated though the relations be­ tween the personages of her novels are as always compli­ cated and entangled.

Murdoch is a contradictory writer A search for moral values goes in her novels side by side with the assertion that the world is a place of continuous suffering where

there is no room for any sort of lasting ties or relations. Alongside a truthful presentation of life she creates a mystical world. Her work is marked with an original en­ deavour to reflect the complicated relations between people in the world of today.

 

JOHN FOWLES

(b. 1926)

The English literature of the l960-70s had a marked tendency for the revival of interest in the classical traditi­ ons. Readers, scholars and writers turned to the novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and other

19th century authors.

Characteristic of this tendency is the fiction of John Fowles who masterfully experiments with traditional liter­ ary forms. As he himself says, his ambition is to write a book in every imaginable genre. His works arc very diverse in form and contents- from an imitation of a me­ dieval romance (Eliduc, 1974) to an intricate psychological allegory (Mantissa, 1982) Fowles believes that the tradi­ tional purposes of the novel to entertain, to satirize, to describe new moods, to record life- are still alive and that the duty of all art is to improve society at large.

John Fowles was born in the town of Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. Since 1950, on graduating from Oxford where he studied French language and literature, he worked as a teacher Frence, Greece and England. In 1963 he gave up teilching to devote himself to writing fiction. His first novels- The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)- won him interna­ tional recognition.

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