One of the greats …

… The Novels of John Fowles: A Reassessment by Ted Gioia. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Fowles best works still dazzle. And they seem just as strange and 

wondrous now as when they were published. When Fowles’s The Magus 

arrived in bookstores almost exactly a half-century ago, its first readers 

must have shaken their heads in amazement. How could you describe a 

novel that was so different from every other book on the shelves? These 

kinds of characters, situations and plot complication simply didn’t exist in 

other tales—it was almost as if Fowles had mapped a hidden world that no 

one had previously visited. But that’s still true today, and perhaps the most 

impressive testimony to his achievement is that this author’s finest works 

still defy categorization.