Tommy Bunting, who’s your Daddy? Daniel Martin (pub. 1977) is. The former is the protagonist, narrator of The Book against God (pub.2003) by James Wood (recall: against God ) the latter is the eponymous narrator of Daniel Martin by John Fowles. There’s a generation between Dan and Tommy, one went to Oxford and the other to University College London. Both their fathers are vicars in country livings (where it ain’t easy). They are of course atheists which is reported to be standard for the sons of the cloth. The novels are philosophically inflected, Dan’s by alienation and bad faith, Existentialism on the Oxus and Tommy’s by Theodicy and the quicksands of Epicureanism, the subject of his foundered doctoral thesis. The one is separated from his wife the other an older man of forty five has left a twenty seven year old starlet behind in Hollywood where he is a successful scriptwriter. She is moving in on him fast and he is planning ahead on how to extricate himself. Alas poor Tommy. His Jane is moving into an objective view of his capers. When women become objective it’s game ball. Dan was in love with a Jane during his student days and yet married her younger sister Nell. It’s complicated but you can see the novel as sociology interest.
Oh yes, both are liars, one performitively the other constructively. I don’t know what that means either.
<i>Daniel Martin</i> is 688 pages long in paperback with more noticing than is good for narrative health, as James Wood might say, and irritating Trollopean buttonholing in the guise of alienation. I’m 35% through it, at the same point possibly where I abandoned it many years ago. Inertia in me and entropy in the novel are forces that must be overcome.
Later, on the rive gauche, Danny.
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