The Ebony Tower
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the verdant seclusion of a Breton forest, a young English art critic arrives to interview Henry Breasley, an aging, cantankerous, and undeniably brilliant painter whose raw, figurative canvases stand in open defiance of the modern abstraction the critic so ardently champions. John Fowles' The Ebony Tower is a masterful collection of novellas that chronicles a clash of generations, ideologies, and desires, building its central story around a single, charged encounter that unravels into a profound meditation on art, compromise, and the seductive pull of the irrational. With the measured precision of a chess master, Fowles constructs a narrative of mounting tension, where intellectual argument gives way to visceral feeling and the two mysterious young women living with Breasley — dubbed the Mouse and the Freak — become avatars of a choice the critic is terrifyingly ill-equipped to make. Fowles situates this title novella alongside companion pieces, including a translation of a medieval Arthurian romance, that illuminate the collection's central preoccupation: the eternal war between reason and instinct, civilization and wildness, the cerebral ebony tower of abstract thought and the warm, dangerous truth of lived experience. His prose is precise yet deeply sensuous, managing to be both academically rigorous and achingly human — a rare and commanding combination that places this work among the finest of 20th-century British fiction. For readers who savour fiction that rewards intellectual engagement while leaving an unsettling emotional residue long after the final page is turned, this is an essential and deeply rewarding encounter.
Author: John Fowles
Format: Paperback
Genre: Fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the verdant seclusion of a Breton forest, a young English art critic arrives to interview Henry Breasley, an aging, cantankerous, and undeniably brilliant painter whose raw, figurative canvases stand in open defiance of the modern abstraction the critic so ardently champions. John Fowles' The Ebony Tower is a masterful collection of novellas that chronicles a clash of generations, ideologies, and desires, building its central story around a single, charged encounter that unravels into a profound meditation on art, compromise, and the seductive pull of the irrational. With the measured precision of a chess master, Fowles constructs a narrative of mounting tension, where intellectual argument gives way to visceral feeling and the two mysterious young women living with Breasley — dubbed the Mouse and the Freak — become avatars of a choice the critic is terrifyingly ill-equipped to make. Fowles situates this title novella alongside companion pieces, including a translation of a medieval Arthurian romance, that illuminate the collection's central preoccupation: the eternal war between reason and instinct, civilization and wildness, the cerebral ebony tower of abstract thought and the warm, dangerous truth of lived experience. His prose is precise yet deeply sensuous, managing to be both academically rigorous and achingly human — a rare and commanding combination that places this work among the finest of 20th-century British fiction. For readers who savour fiction that rewards intellectual engagement while leaving an unsettling emotional residue long after the final page is turned, this is an essential and deeply rewarding encounter.