The French Lieutenant's Woman'' and determines his character's fate by tossing a coin. A drastic difference in the anticlimax depends on the reader's opinion. A maggot in this sense is a whim, or a work based on a whim, and Mr. Fowles's whim is often to tease. Such a maggot may metamorphose into an experiment.
Novels succeed or fail, experiments confirm or refute the hypothesis being tested.
In ''A Maggot'' the hypothesis seems to be that readers will tolerate more teasing, and more indeterminacy as to plot and character, than is usually expected of them. The structure of the novel is unconventional. The party consists of a lord in disguise, his servant who cannot speak or hear, a professional actor hired to protect the disguise, a Welshman for a bodyguard and Rebecca the harlot, also hired but for purposes not yet revealed. From these 50 pages we learn that the lord had lied to his employees about the purpose of the trip, and instructed them to lie to one another. There will be a tryst with the unknown on the morrow, but the actor and the bodyguard will be dismissed before that occurrence.