“David arrived at Coëtminais the afternoon after the one he had landed at Cherbourg and driven down to Avranches, where he had spent the intervening Tuesday night. ”
This is a collection of stories and one novella. It’s actually a novella, three stories, and a translation of one of the lays of Marie de France, but with a sizeable translator’s note that kind of functions a little like a story intro. Regardless, one of the things that emerges from that intro, which is the second story in the collection is that John Fowles intended the full collection to be called “Variations” and for the stories to be thematically connected. In a lot of ways they are, but also in a lot of ways they are literally just the same story that John Fowles tells in each of his books, which you really only get when you’re three or four books into his career. He also says that he had originally intended his novel The Magus to be a rendering of the Alain-Fournier novel Le Grand Meaulnes, but that scholars and critics disagreed with him that he had done so.
The novella, “The Ebony Tower” is the longest by far in this collection, but none of the stories is short. It involves an art critic showing up on a rural French estate, the invited guest of a reclusive and old modern artist. When he arrives, the first image he sees is to young women sunbathing nude, and his approach does not really stir them, except as hosts to his presence. As the weekend commences, he becomes quickly enmeshed in the sexual intertwining of this group, though his own sexual liberality is restrained and held back as he sorts through both the experience of the weekend and the conversations he has with the audience.
The other stories, minus the translation, often involve, guess what, variations of discussions of art and politics, intermixed with emotional and sexual enmeshing.
