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Daniel Martin

3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 · rating details · 1,083 ratings · 39 reviews

Set internationally and spanning three decades, Daniel Martin is, among other things, an exploration of what it is to be English. Daniel is a screenwriter working in Hollywood, who finds himself dissatisfied with his career and with the person he has become. In a richly evoked narrative, Daniel travels home to reconcile with a dying friend, and also to visit his own forgot...more

Paperback, 704 pages

Published November 4th 2004 by Vintage Classics (first published 1977)

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Feb 03, 2013 Craig rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had a graduate professor who challenged our group to find a contemporary literary novel with a truly believable 'happy ending.' Fowles' Daniel Martin does just that, but it takes over 600 pages to develop it -- and 'happy ending' doesn't mean a necessarily 'happy journey.' Fowles set out to show that sometimes in life, things do turn out well -- but it takes a lot of hard work, will, and luck. His experiements with changing tenses and point of view make for an interesting read. Adult reading,...more

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Dec 12, 2007 Virginia rated it 2 of 5 stars

i don't know why i keep reading books about self-obsessed middle-aged men. it's not that i have nothing in common with these characters (lord knows i have my share of self-obsession, why else would i be typing out a review that i'm pretty sure no one will ever read). it's that they seem to take their self-obsession as a badge of honor--it makes them interesting or worth-while. i'm actually conflating daniel martin and john fowles, but the novel invites that sort of confusion, so i don't care. al...more i don't know why i keep reading books about self-obsessed middle-aged men. it's not that i have nothing in common with these characters (lord knows i have my share of self-obsession, why else would i be typing out a review that i'm pretty sure no one will ever read). it's that they seem to take their self-obsession as a badge of honor--it makes them interesting or worth-while. i'm actually conflating daniel martin and john fowles, but the novel invites that sort of confusion, so i don't care. all i know is that i finished reading this book with the feeling that if i ever actually met john fowles, i would dislike him intensely.

formally, this book is less "tricky" than the french lieutenant's woman. you could say it's more subtle, but since i like that other book so much more, i'm not willing to say that. it's more that daniel martin is interested in the connection between author and character in a different way than flw. that book highlighted the novel-ness of the novel--the unreality of the characters and yet their tendency to claim a reality strong enough to elude the direction and penetration of author and reader alike. this one is, as i mentioned before, interested in what happens when the author "writes from life". i actually don't know anything about john fowles, and i could be completely wrong here, but it's hard not to see daniel martin as a stand-in for him. the hints in the text (daniel martin plans to write a novel about himself, we are led to believe that the novel is that novel) make the relationship between writer and written a bit of a rabbit-hole. if i liked the book more, i might examine it more closely.

finally, there was one little narrative tick that annoyed me about this book. people are always giving higly significant little glances, dressing in a way that somehow sends a message, or speaking sentences that manage to contain paragraphs of meaning. one of the characters will cough, and that will mean, at least to daniel, "i approve of what you're doing, but i feel that i must show my disapproval because of the company we find ourselves in and because i don't think this course of action is particularly beneficial for your psyche. however, i want you to read my approval coded into this disapproval, so that you will understand that i understand that we are beyond such petty machinations. also, i'd really like tuna tartare for dinner." maybe it's just me, but when i cough it doesn't mean anything more profound that "jeez, i could use a lozenge."(less)

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Feb 19, 2008 William rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: any john fowles fans

This 700-page tome is a most unlikely suspense novel. Its two main characters, both overcerebral Oxbridge graduates in their mid-40s, are thoroughly disillusioned with society on both sides of the Atlantic. Jane, whose husband Anthony has just died of cancer, has previously been a Catholic but has lapsed and is now a Marxist, though more theoretical than active. Dan, who early on lapsed from writing plays to Hollywood scriptwriting, engages in seemingly continuous deep, complex introspection, su...more This 700-page tome is a most unlikely suspense novel. Its two main characters, both overcerebral Oxbridge graduates in their mid-40s, are thoroughly disillusioned with society on both sides of the Atlantic. Jane, whose husband Anthony has just died of cancer, has previously been a Catholic but has lapsed and is now a Marxist, though more theoretical than active. Dan, who early on lapsed from writing plays to Hollywood scriptwriting, engages in seemingly continuous deep, complex introspection, such as these thoughts on his profession:

“Like all self-conscious writers Dan had always associated success in work with the breaking of established codes; or to be more precise, with keeping a balance between the expected, obeying his craft, and the unexpected, obeying the main social function of all art. Another of his grudges against his own particular metier was that it put so much more value on the craft than the code-breaking side; that even the smallest departure from the cinematic established and sanctified had to be so fiercely fought for.”

If Jason Bourne ever had such thoughts, he hid them well. Moreover, Jane gives Dan a book of essays by the Marxist social and literary critic Gyorgy Lukacs, and Dan quotes whole paragraphs from these essays for us. And, although there are many sex scenes, they are strangely chaste and non-erotic, perhaps because they are all integral to the plot, depicting the course of Dan’s psychological development. James Bond would be bored.

So how is this a suspense novel? It is the story of Dan’s struggle toward a goal, and I found myself genuinely wondering whether he would make it. His goal can be defined in various ways, but it is basically the search for an authentic self that he can happily live with, an attitude toward life that he feels is healthy and satisfying. In Dan’s words, this is a a journey to wholeness, a key that he mentions many times in different ways, for instance, "full consciousness of both essence and phenomenon." By which, I would say, he means living consciously and fully in the present. Another possible expression is to give full rein to both thought and feeling, as expressed in what he reads into a Rembrandt self-protrait: “No true will without compassion; no true compassion without will.” It is steering a middle course between extreme ideologies, such as Catholicism and Marxism, which middle course Dan/Fowles calls “humanism”.

In the process of striving toward this goal, Dan has to overcome his past, particularly the emotional repression that he learned from his father and that he believes is also part of his inheritance as an Englishman. At the same time, he realizes his love for Jane and that they were wrong not to marry each other years ago. So the second part of his striving to overcome the past, inexplicably bound up with the first, is to attempt to help Jane break out of the prison of despair and self-doubt that she has been living in with Anthony for many years. I realized the level of suspense that Fowles built up around these twin pursuits during the first scene in which Dan opens up and unreservedly expresses to Jane how strongly he feels toward her. A second such scene carries only a slightly less powerful sense of release. Both of these scenes occur in the last tenth of the book. Fowles’ excruciatingly slow depiction of Dan’s and Jane’s transformations only makes them more credible and convincing when they do occur. And it is realistic that their self-changes take so long -- Dan is the king of rumination and Jane is the queen of passive-aggressive behavior.

What makes the reader keep going is not only the narrative drive -- as one critic has said of fiction, “We read to find out what happens next” -- but the fact that Fowles is such an excellent writer. He mixes in Dan’s self-absorption with such universal themes as freedom to change vs. predestination. Free will is called "this absurdly optimistic notion." An old German professor who works as a guide on the Nile cruise that Dan and Jane take says that the Germans trade freedom for order, while the English do the opposite. (He might not say that of today’s England, but in the pre-Thatcher ‘70s it probably still held some validity.) Dan compares England with the United States by noting that, although Americans mindlessly pursue freedom, they don’t realize that "the genetic injustice of life is just as great as the old European economic injustice."

Reinforcing this theme of freedom vs. determination, much of the book is couched in metaphors of artistic creation relating to theater, novels and films. At one point on the Nile trip, Dan, alone on an island, is transported out of his normal mental state into another type of perception, “as if he, and all around him, was an idea in someone else's mind, not his own." At another point he feels like "someone locked up inside an adamantly middle-class novel." Daily living is described as "to wear a mask and invent a character." As long as Dan has not broken and crawled out of the shell of emotional repression that both protects him and thwarts his psychological growth, he has a problem "distinguishing between his actual self and a hypthetical fictional projection of himself."

Fowles also keeps us engaged by deploying his bag of postmodernist tricks. At one point Dan thinks that maybe his way of reclaiming his life is to write a novel showing the aspects of life that can’t be successfully filmed. From then on we encounter an entertaining ambiguity about whether we are reading Fowles’ novel or Dan’s. For instance, the narration flips between the third and first persons. It’s jarring and gets our attention. It seems arbitrary, but I think it marks places where the Dan of the present does not understand what’s going on (“I”) and the Dan of the future, who is writing the novel, does (“Dan”).

Fowles is also an excellent stylist and an accomplished storyteller. He leavens his postmodern approach by inventing incidents that are interesting in their own right, as he demonstrated in his most popular novel, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (in this he is a forerunner of A.S Byatt and Haruki Murakami, while his focus on character development and humanism foreshadow Ian McEwan.) He is not afraid to let a scene or a conversation unfold completely and realistically in a leisurely manner, seemingly in real time. Fowles is also excellent at depicting surroundings, both natural and humanmade, and using them both to underline the mood of a scene and to further the course of the narrative. He is particularly keen on birds, with the ravens seen in England, New Mexico and on the Nile cruise being the totemic creatures of this book. His opening chapter is a classic in pastoral. And the contrast in landscape and weather between the the cruise on the lush Nile and an immediately following side trip to a Crusader castle in a desolate region of Syria masterfully highlights the dramatic shift in emotional tone in the evolving relationship between Dan and Jane.

“Daniel Martin” probably could have been cut a lot and still have been an excellent novel, but I’d hate to be the one to select the places where the cuts should be made. Of the four books by Fowles’ that I’ve read -- “The Magus”, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, “A Maggott” and “Daniel Martin” -- I would say my favorite is “A Maggott”. It has the same theatricality, sense of shifting identities, postmodern mode of storytelling, amazing incidents, feeling of suspense and philosophical heft that “Daniel Martin” has, but it is shorter and more . . . weird. On the other hand, “Daniel Martin” is more grounded in the psychological challenges of our time and thus seems more . . . solid.

(less)

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Apr 28, 2011 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

An amazing, intense, dense, almost unreadable book. It took me three months to read it. It was by turns - self-indulgent, masterful and romantic. It has the otherplacedness that Fowles can deliver – better done in the Magus. The novel requires intense attention as Daniel sifts through his romantic life - Nell, Jamie and finally Jane - all beautiful, desirable and complicated. I disliked and loved the book at the same time - a remarkable feat.

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Feb 18, 2009 Lara rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

John Fowles has previously rocked my brain into twisted submission with such delights as The Magus and Mantissa. The things that man can do with a Greek island and sunlight are not to be trifled with.

A dozen or so pages in, and I am not yet hooked. Curious, perhaps, piqued by an accent I cannot place and haunted with two images: that of a thick slice of ham resting on buttered bread, and the other a screaming rabbit with its legs shorn off by a thresher.

617 pages to go.

_________________________...more

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Aug 17, 2011 Ronald Wise rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A decades-long story of four good friends who met at Oxford University in the years following World War II. Two marriages resulted, but did they pair off in the correct combinations? The story is told through the eyes of Daniel Martin, one of the four who become a playwright successful enough to be recruited as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. The book is full of dense, philosophical paragraphs and dialogues full of cryptic references, some of which I had to reread once or twice to capture their sig...more

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Jun 01, 2009 Max rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, things-i-love

John Fowles is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and now--having read Daniel Martin--I almost regret not saving it for my last read of his. It was written nearer the middle of his career, but still manages to provide the most wonderful feeling of autobiographical summation, like an epic epilogue reflection on life lived. Being that the life in question is that of a narcissistic playwright turned jaded Hollywood screenwriter too much obsessed with the nostalgia of his youth and the yearnin...more

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Feb 09, 2009 Chrissie rated it 4 of 5 stars

First: it really upsets me that when you search "Fowles" on goodreads, you get every Artemis Fowl book before a single one by John Fowles. On John's behalf, I take this personally.

Second: I love John Fowles. He has an ability to make me feel that almost no other writer does. Like The Magus, some parts of this book were hard to read because the situations in it are so painful and real. People and their relationships are often crazy, confused, and troubled, and Fowles captures that better than any...more

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Mar 18, 2009 dead letter office rated it 2 of 5 stars

After reading A Maggot and The Collector, I was operating under the conviction that John Fowles was incapable of a book unanchored in extreme oddity. Daniel Martin is fine, but its absolute disinterest in defying expectations was totally unexpected. This book is boring in a way I would have thought John Fowles couldn't pull off. He's woven some good short stuff into the very long story of a character who seems to exist only to expound a fundamentally boring personal philosphy. The bottom line is...more

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Sep 07, 2012 Charles Bechtel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Can't say what it is about this book, but I have read it more times than any other book except the Hobbit (13). I pick it up every 2-3 years and devour it. (I'm due!) The excellent transfer by the author of me to his locations, the well-formed characterizations, the variety of scene and time, all of these thrill me as I read. Just love it. My favorite Fowles, who is a favorite author, and probably my most favorite book. And I don't know why, precisely.

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Sep 10, 2010 Bettie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: published-1977, philosophy, summer-2010

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jun 22, 2012 Dale Elizabeth Merriman rated it 5 of 5 stars

....the difficulties and sacrifices in adapting the written word to motion picture. The tentative nature of the artist regarding a love interest and unfairly idealizing as a result of his artistic nature so that his perceptions take on an elevated and far too spiritual vision when it is all so basic, primal and erotic like most of life. Honest introspection vs. suppressed desires.

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Jan 26, 2012 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

I need to reread this now that I'm adult. I feel like the subtleties of the relationships were lost on a carefree 23 year old living abroad. As always, Fowles descriptions of locales and facial expressions make you feel like you're in front of these people and in these places with them. What I do remember most about these characters is that they were so real - I could relate to them because I knew them in my own life. That's what I think makes Fowles' writing so powerful - his characters are liv...more

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Apr 13, 2010 Erich added it

I read this 3 decades ago during a week-long storm lashed to a cliff top off northern Vancouver Island....the dialogue is so rich, the characters so real. There are so many great passages. Conveying the sense of place is one of Fowles' gifts. He was a naturalist in the true sense, a lover of nature. Skip the first chapter, however.

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Jul 03, 2010 Stephen Starr rated it 3 of 5 stars

Somehow, Fowles condenses sunshine into the opening chapter, where he tells of the childhood of a film producer, living in the countryside of Britain around the Battle of Britain. As a character study it works well, but I found the ending a disappointment.

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Jan 05, 2009 Stven rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: serious readers

This is in my opinion the best of John Fowles' novels (and Fowles must have thought so, too, since after Daniel Martin he never bothered to summon the strength to produce another major novel). It is truly a great novel. Fowles' prose, in the first place, is beautiful when he wants it to be, and he is determined to draw the reader in from the opening scene... not only with sheer shimmering beauty but with a calculated grandeur, setting the pace for this vast book which tells the whole private epi...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

This large novel describes a man's struggle with himself to accept happiness. He has what looks externally like everything anybody could want. He lacks companionship but ultimately finds it with his ex-wife's sister. He also goes into detail about differences between being English and American. Verbose, but well written.

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Sep 14, 2011 Jo rated it 5 of 5 stars

John Fowles writing is truly beautiful. He can say in one sentence what would probably take me a paragraph to say. My favorite of his books.

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Feb 13, 2010 Jimt43 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of my all time favorite books. His description of the wheat field ranks up there with the best prose ever written.

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Nov 17, 2011 Sherelyn Ernst rated it 1 of 5 stars

I FINALLY finished this, but I'm not proud of it. I finished it because I didn't want to hurt the feelings of someone who thinks this is right up with Shakespeare and Tolstoi and whose opinion I respect. However, for me, the bottom line was chagrin that I plowed through 600 pages of middle-aged male British navel gazing. I understand that I am probably wrong in my assessment; some very famous literary people think very highly of it. I thought of giving it more stars to show that it is very erudi...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Good read. Intricate as per all of john fowles books, but overall very thought provoking

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Mar 02, 2012 Perrystroika rated it 2 of 5 stars

a decadent late period work by a writer who was once capable of better.

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Mar 27, 2013 Yongling rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is too long and ... after a while, it is just repetitive.

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Jun 04, 2011 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Epic in scale, the book was one of my major reads as a young man.

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Nov 10, 2012 Cristina Cristea rated it 5 of 5 stars

second best choice from Fowles after "the Magus"

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Aug 25, 2011 William rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great academic novel.

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Apr 07, 2009 Bob Kowalski rated it 5 of 5 stars

Best of his books.

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Mar 26, 2013 Ron Terpening rated it 2 of 5 stars

Could only get through half the book.

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Dec 24, 2007 Amy C. rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: slouching writers

It's got one of the densest and most beautiful openings I've ever read, so beautiful that I thought what came after was a joke. It isn't; it's just the rest of the book. Which isn't bad. I thought it went on about 200 pages too long, and the neverending adolescence of the characters wore on me, but I read till I was queasy anyway. I felt miserable and adolescent for weeks afterwards. I'd say the opening's worth it.

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Jun 02, 2012 Vel rated it 3 of 5 stars

3.5

It's about triangles, relationships, socialism, and art. Not quite in the same league as "The French Lieutenant's Woman" or "The Magus".

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About John Fowles

John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys...more

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Quotes from Daniel Martin

“Я мог бы влюбиться в неё по уши и стал бы невыносимо требовательным, предъявляя на неё собственные права; но я слишком часто грешил этим прежде, чтобы не знать, что стремление лишить партнёра независимости прямым путём ведёт к беде. Желание обладать тесно связано с желанием изменить, переделать; а она очень нравилась мне такой, какой была. Так же как фраза «Я верю в Бога» часто означает просто «Я верю, что нет необходимости думать», слова «Я тебя люблю» слишком часто оказываются иносказанием «Я хочу обладать тобою».” — 1 person liked it

“[об американцах]
— Я понимаю, они — туристы, не отличающиеся очень уж развитым воображением. Вспоминаю, как училась там в школе. Ребята там казались мне гораздо более открытыми, по крайней мере в том, что касалось личных пристрастий. Всегда рассказывали, что чувствуют.
— Да дело вовсе не в том, что они об этом не рассказывают.
— А в том, что недостаточно чувствуют?
— Да и не в этом тоже. Недостаточно знают. Не позволяют себе много знать. Как с этим Грамши, о котором ты говорила. — Он помолчал и добавил: — Всё всегда делают по правилам.
Джейн помолчала немного.
— Питер писал о чём-то вроде этого в одном из писем. Как вначале тебе нравится их прямота… а потом начинаешь тосковать по извивам.
— Я испытал то же самое. Прозрачность — прекрасная вещь. Пока не начинаешь понимать, что она основана не столько на внутренней честности, сколько на отсутствии воображения. И эта их так называемая откровенность по поводу секса. Они просто не понимают, что утратили.” — 1 person liked it

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