His meditation on nature and creativity encourages readers to turn away from purposeful activity and embrace the ‘profound harmlessness’ of natural life
I picked up John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman in a bargain bin last summer. It was so brilliant that I quickly read three more of his books, which absolutely never happens. Combining titanic commercial heft with highbrow complexity, Fowles’s novels are daring, funny and unpredictable; so unpredictable, in fact, that they sometimes seemed to wrongfoot themselves. “The Magus has more surprising plot twists than almost any book I’ve ever read,” writes the critic Ted Gioia. “Every 30 pages, more or less, something transpires that forces the reader to reassess everything they have learned in previous chapters.” This ingenuity did for the ill-fated film version, with star Michael Caine admitting that even the cast didn’t have a clue what was going on.
The Tree, Fowles’s 90-page meditation on nature and creativity – which he calls “siblings, branches of the one tree” – gives a hint as to why this might be. It’s a blissful fusion of memoir, social history, art criticism and nature writing. Beginning with the fanatically over-pruned fruit trees in his father’s suburban garden, Fowles takes us on a journey through western humanity’s relationship with the natural world. There’s a basic error in the way we relate to nature, he says: we have been duped by Victorian science and its “obsession with the machine” into seeing it as either potential for commercial yield or a kind of intellectual puzzle. Both are subtle species of control that ultimately alienate us from the richness of being in nature and our own “greener, more mysterious processes of mind”:
We shall never understand nature (or ourselves) until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability – however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.
I do not plan my fiction any more than I usually plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry … I have method in nothing, and powers of concentration … that would disgrace a child.
Related: From John Fowles with love: how the author’s first true romance and lost poem came to light
Continue reading...