Barring any mishaps, changes of heart or other unforeseen events, I'll write on this book for my Genre Interventions paper. The basic idea is to pick up on its self-reflexive engagement with genre etc to problematise Derrida's "Law of Genre" (so that, as usual, the 'primary' text will interrogate the 'secondary' as much as the secondary does the primary); having read A Maggot over the last couple of days, I think that there's enough in here to lend itself to that purpose. But I'll be writing enough in that vein about this book in the weeks to come; here, I mainly want to set down initial, 'pre-academic' thoughts on it based on my first reading.
I can't help but compare A Maggot to The French Lieutenant's Woman, the only other Fowles I've read, and a favourite of mine, and in this light it's somewhat disappointing. His themes in A Maggot are less closely connected to my own interests, and the structure within which they are presented, while probably bolder, is less immediately rewarding. There isn't the same sense of texture to A Maggot nor the same sense of engagement with its characters, both of which were significant to my affection for The French Lieutenant's Woman. And the detective/mystery story at its heart didn't actually interest me very much (I'm still in two minds as to whether it was meant to).
But, that said, I did enjoy A Maggot, and I admire it. Its metafictional and intertextual gestures are perhaps somewhat overfamiliar these days, but they're nonetheless still effective, and well done by Fowles, and although I found all the ideological stuff at the end to be a bit irritating, I think it 'fit' with the design of the book as a whole. So much for first impressions.
