Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings

As a longtime admirer of "The Magus", recently interested in non-fictional essays, I picked up "The Wormholes" with double interest. I was richly rewarded. John Fowles gave the readers a collection of his musings on subjects so diverse as his work, nature, literature and other forms of art. The essays are divided into four sections: Autobiographical, Culture. Literature, and Nature. They span quite a long time - from 1964 to 1996. I wanted to choose the best ones as examples here, but virtually all are masterpieces - my personal favourites (highly subjective, because of my particular interest in the subjects, not because they are better written!) being "The filming of The French Lieutenant's Woman", "Behind The Magus", "Greece", "On being English but not British", "Thomas Hardy's England", "Weeds, Bugs, and Americans", "The Islands", and, last but not least, "The Nature of Nature". The essays are a pleasure to read - they are not only informative, showing very sharp insight into many matters, and stimulating the train of thought, but also exquisitely worded, full of metaphors and allusions. At the end there is a bonus - an interview with Fowles done by Dianne Vipond in 1995. Fowles was a rare erudite. These essays fully show the extent of his knowledge, his intellect, and his humanism. He is completely at ease with history and literature, and at the same time is not removed from the real world, sees the details of its beauty and deeply cares about environment. After reading this collection, I have a lot of respect for him as a person, not only as a writer.

Though I'd like to have had another work of fiction, this book of various and sundry non-fiction is most interesting when Mr. Fowles writes about his own fiction and his thoughts on the process of fiction in these post-modern times.Indispensable to any admirer of Mr. Fowles fiction.