Daniel Martin

Abstract

Fowles’s next fiction, Daniel Martin, was published in 1977. Placed, like The Magus, in a modern setting, it deals with a wide variety of contemporary concerns, and ranges geographically from California to Dorset and from Oxford to the Syrian desert. The fiftyish central figure, the Daniel Martin of the title, is also the narrator, and the book recounts with many flashbacks and false starts the various influences that have led him to write it. As a young man Dan spent a happy and successful three years at Oxford, then married and started writing plays; but his marriage collapsed and he took up a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. When the book starts, he is summoned from Hollywood back to Oxford to the bedside of an estranged friend from his Oxford days, now dying of cancer. Contact having been re-established and peace restored, his friend commits suicide. The mainspring of the subsequent action is Dan’s growing love for Jane, the dead man’s widow. This love, first experienced in a brief fling when both were students, ripens in middle age into a force which enables Dan both to take stock of his own life (which will involve giving up screen biography in favour of written autobiography) and to rescue Jane from the sterile self-absorption that threatens to engulf her.

‘… if I could ever hope to describe it, it would have to be beyond staging or filming. They’d just … betray the real thing again.’

‘What’s “it”?’

‘God knows, Jenny. The real history of what I am?’

(DM, p. 20)

[Daniel Martin] was an attempt … to do a kind of English and twentieth-century Sentimental Education, that is a picture of your own generation.

(Plomley, 1981)