Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V.S. Naipaul

224 Pages·1983·11.83 MB·English

by  Kerry McSweeney

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.
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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