The Ebony Tower

This collection of five short novels and one essay is characteristic of Fowles's intense, painterly vision of the natural world and the world of human relations. The stories are inviting: a painter living in seclusion with two young female attendants, a successful writer whose latest manuscript is destroyed, a medieval love story, a man who disappears and a family picnic in France on a sunny Sunday. Jonathan Oliver reads with meticulous care for phrase and punctuation, inviting attention to Fowles's image-laden descriptions, spare but enigmatic plots and mysterious revelations of character. Oliver makes the often jarring transition between novels gracefully. He captures Fowles's ironic tone but doesn't overplay it and is as much at home playing a young burglar as a lecherous film producer.