The sly, dashing chapter headings of Tom Jones are a clue to the delight and surprise of reading Henry Fielding. His throw-away lines at once embrace and distance the reader, conveying his enjoyment in playing with a form which he himself has partly invented, his fun in the mock-heroic battles, his defiance of ‘the critics’, his sudden swoops to seriousness, his high-spirited love of the absurd. In Fielding's work the manipulative puppet-master rarely disappears behind the screens, but even though we are constantly aware of his authorial presence we are not bullied by a single dominating view, since he himself puts on different masks, at one point addressing our intellect, at another appealing to our sense of moral outrage, at another touching our emotions.

Fielding's characteristic style blends realistic and symbolic writing – the ‘Emblematical’ mode, as a character in his play Pasquin describes it. The reader is asked, simultaneously, to suspend disbelief, surrendering to the plot and caring about the characters, and yet to remain sceptical, analysing the allegory with a clear mind. We thus partake in the action and also share in the conscious ordering (and judging) of a potentially chaotic world. Fielding's ironic control also implies the force of that which must be controlled: the possibility of wild, surreal flights; of energy under restraint; of dangerous passions and anarchic conflicts. In Joseph Andrews for example – a novel which seems fluidly ‘Quixotic’ in more ways than one, yet is tightly and cunningly structured – Fielding repeatedly lets the action build to the brink of chaos, then twists events, not to a conclusion, but to ‘interrupt’ and divert the flowing narrative into another channel. He claims that his novels are true ‘Histories’ in comparison to earlier romances – they represent the real. But at the same time, the skilful, very visible manipulation of his narrative implies that all their resolutions of untractable problems are, in themselves, ‘fictions’.