John Fowles · 1965 · exile

Fowles taught at a boarding school on Spetses in the early fifties and spent twelve years turning it into this. A young Englishman takes a post on a Greek island and is drawn into an elaborate game by a wealthy recluse who stages scenes from his own life in the pine woods - and cannot afterwards tell which parts were real.

1. 1
   London

   An Oxford graduate of twenty-five with a private income, no talent and a habit of leaving women takes a teaching post at a Greek boarding school to get away from one of them - and Alison Kelly is the one he is getting away from.

2. 2
   Athens

   Arrival, and a summer of being bored in a city he expected to be transformed by - Fowles giving Nicholas exactly the disappointment that a man who has read about Greece and not been there deserves.

3. 3
   Phraxos

   The island, drawn from Spetses, where Fowles himself taught at the Anargyrios school in the early fifties - pine forest, one village, and a schoolmaster with nothing to do at weekends but walk.

4. 4
   Bourani

   Maurice Conchis's villa on the south shore, where a wealthy recluse begins telling a young Englishman his life story - and then staging it, with actors, in the pine woods, and will not say where the story stops.

5. 5
   Mount Parnassus

   Alison comes out to Athens and they climb the mountain together, and it is the one honest thing in the novel - after which Nicholas lies to her about the island, and she works out that he is lying.

6. 6
   Athens

   The trial: Nicholas taken, drugged, and put in front of a panel of people who read him a clinical assessment of his own character - the scene the whole book has been assembling, and the one Fowles rewrote most.

7. 7
   London

   Regent's Park, and an ending Fowles deliberately left ambiguous and then defended for thirty years - two people in a park, and the reader told only that the rest is up to them.