The Magus: A Revised Version

I went into this novel with some trepidation. I was not intimidated by its doorstop size, nor by its reputation as sophisticated metafiction. But it had received a solidly negative review from my Other Reader, and the book's own author John Fowles lamented it as "haphazard ... a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent" (6, 9). These worries were mitigated by two factors. First, the version I read was a "more than ... stylistic revision" (5) perpetrated over a decade after its initial publication. Second, I had encountered the two-page "fairy story" of "The Prince and the Magician" excerpted in the "Magic Shows" issue of Lapham's Quarterly (Summer 2012), and found it wonderful. I can now report that it loses none of its show more luster in its original context (550-552). There was a big twist at the end of part two (562), which I had seen coming for at least 200 pages, so that was underwhelming.

Like any "novel of adolescence," The Magus is a story of initiation, but more explicitly so than most. The fact that the ceremonial aspects of the rite are largely non-consensual, and that the candidate (i.e. the first-person narrator Nicholas) is so profoundly unlikable, were perhaps contributing factors to my Other Reader's thorough disgust with the book. There is an explicit Sadean element here, with or without sadism. It is in some respects a more naturalistic approach to the content of Bernard Noel's Castle of Communion.

In the course of the novel, an elite conspiracy perpetrating a system of "experimental" initiation has as its upshot an opposition between freedom and faith. "There is no god but man," and "Love is the law, love under will" (none of these quotes from the book). The closing epigram reminded me of the words of Liber CLXVI: "This Path is beyond Life and Death; it is also beyond Love; but that ye know not, for ye know not Love." Aleister Crowley gets one solitary name-check here, when a character in a combination of criminal trial and witches' sabbat appears in a Baphomet mask, and Nicholas (gagged) thinks sarcastically to himself, "Doctor Crowley, I presume" (502).

The magus of the title is the inscrutable psychopomp character Maurice Conchis, whom I found more reminiscent of Gurdjieff than of Crowley. The most esoteric influence mentioned by Fowles in a discussion of his sources is C.G. Jung, but it is possible that there was a Gurdjieffian element. The metaphysical concept of "hazard" emphasized by Conchis was key in the work of John G. Bennett, who was active in England promoting Gurdjieff's teachings during the extensive period of the composition of The Magus. (I synchronistically stumbled across a cheap used copy of Bennett's book on Hazard on the same day I finished reading The Magus.)

I did enjoy this book, although it does tend to have the weaker side of the comparisons in which I find myself most likely to include it, whether with Hesse's Steppenwolf, Pynchon's Vineland, or Irwin's Satan Wants Me. I'll still plead for the virtues of "The Prince and the Magician," though, a teaching story on a par with the Bektashi parable of "The Shrine." show less

This was a puzzle! The shortest spoiler-free summary I have is that it's about a guy who could be the protagonist in a Donna Tartt novel - a smug, well-read recent college grad who takes a teaching position on a small Greek island and meets a wealthy recluse who wants to play some fucked up mind games.

It's definitely one of those books that's more about the journey through its pages than about the destination - the ending is a bit of a letdown (maybe even actively hateful to me) but cover to cover it's such a twisting, perplexing, interesting ride, full of really rich and complex characters, that you can't really complain when the game ends and you realize you yourself have been a player (or played) all along. I see why it's a classic show more and I'm glad I gave it a read! show less

I am a woefully impatient reader. I have zero tolerance for wasted words, literary flab, narrative bush beating. I like short books and have been known to dislike long ones. My trite complaint of every other classic I read – Dracula, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird – is that they could have, and should have, been shorter. But somehow I fell in love with John Fowles' The Magus, which stretches to some seven hundred pages and took me twenty three hours of solid reading time (according to the Kobo app on my iPad.)

It helps that the writing is not at all flabby. Fowles skims the surface of life for the ripest details and uses them to evoke feelings, settings, people. Our narrator, Nicholas, show more contributes much of the charm; he's a bit egotistical and curt, but you can't help but smile as he dispatches minor characters with damning little epithets – 'spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick'. He is the listless, angst-ridden teenager who somehow manages never to whine at you or waste your time. When he takes up a teaching post in the Greek Islands, and meets a remarkable old man who invites him to spend each weekend at his house, Nicholas functions as a stand-in for the reader, becoming hypnotised by the mysteries of Conchis' invented realm and constantly hungering for more.

Fowles' world is immersive, alluring; brilliantly real and brilliantly unreal. What makes The Magus so enjoyable is the pleasure of being under the spell of a writer who knows what he is doing, and is content to do it without pomp, pretentiousness, or even obvious purpose. Like Nicholas, the reader is blindfolded and led through a labyrinth. Fowles throws in twist after twist; as soon as the reader begins to feel comfortable with the new status quo, the bottom falls out of the story yet again. I have never read a novel that ties itself up in so many knots, and I loved every minute of it.

For those who are not as well read as Fowles, it can be difficult to keep one's feet in a sea of allusions to classic plays, novels, myths and works of art. But the relentless references draw our attention to the nature of the story world that Fowles is weaving for us. We can almost feel him mocking Conchis, who denounces fiction as useless, asking 'Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' Far from being a meaningless fabrication, The Magus is a novel that self-consciously examines the incredible powers of fiction.

So I would highly recommend The Magus: the longest book I have ever read, and the first long book I have ever loved (excluding the later Harry Potter books, which don't count.) show less

The Magus is the first novel written by an obviously talented writer. If that sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, that's because it is. Every once in a while, you encounter a work that seems as if it should make for great art. There's obviously talent and intelligence on the artist's side, and the work itself does not appear to lack for ambition. Yet what comes out seems to lack a certain vitality, to seem impressive more for its ambition than its actual achievements.

The Magus is the story of a callow Englishman who is teaching on a small Greek island, where he is drawn into some strange psychological games by one of the inhabitants of the island. Nicholas Urfe is our protagonist, an emotionally stunted womanizer getting over show more an affair with an Australian air hostess, who takes a teaching position at a Greek academy on the island of Phraxos. He has been warned by a former teacher about a certain gentleman who owns a large estate on the island. Despite this warning (or perhaps because of it), he meets up with said gentleman, Conchis and becomes involved in odd philosophical and psychological games.

The set up is ripe for fascinating explorations of character or philosophy, and the story is full of mythological and literary allusions. However, for all it's apparent brilliance, it never really manages to achieve the kind of mind-bending exploration of truth or human nature that it seems to have set out for itself. Despite the novel's many references to Othello and The Tempest, to me this felt more like a case of Much Ado About Nothing.

All of what should make the novel fascinating, it's psychophilosophical speculation, its many allusions, its labrynthine structure, ultimately work against it.

The psychological exploration reaches an interesting point in a flashback encounter between a rational man and an overwhelming evil, but then that gives way to one bored cad's inability to commit to his girlfriend. The novel's many allusions to literature, to art, to mythology and occultism reach a level of oversaturating, creating the impression that they exist in the novel not so much for their fidelity to the plot but because the author wanted to show that they could be worked into the plot.

And, worst of all, the twisty narrative ultimately twists into itself. I have simple criteria for what makes an effective plot twist: it must create the impression of being both unexpected and inevitable. The twists in The Magus may be largely unexpected, but there is nothing inevitable about them. And without inevitability, a twist is just artificial, a transparent attempt at tricking the reader. The result, then, is of a plot that is not organic so much as mechanical.

For the novel to work as it should, Nicholas should serve as a proxy for the reader. We should feel some thrill or relief when Nicholas has managed to get things his way, feel a sinking feeling when events move unexpectedly outside his control. But neither the character nor the plot ever really allow for that degree of investment.

If I may delve into the analogy of a horror movie (because horror is the least of the genres), when Nicholas goes to open the door into the haunted house, there should be a feeling of, 'No, don't open that door!' Instead, the feeling is one of, 'C'mon, open the freakin' door; I want to see the kind of CGI they used on the monster.'

Most grating is that Nicholas keeps asserting that he has things in hand, that he understands Conchis' scheme, and that he's not going to let himself be manipulated anymore. Seriously, you could change his name to Nicholas Dumbass (with an aside from Nick regarding how he liked to claim he was descended from the French Dumas) without in any way decreasing my estimation of his intelligence. As a reader, it seemed clear the twists were designed to be impossible to guess beforehand.

(Warning: I'm going to start tossing out spoilers here.)

Perhaps most dissapointing was the way that the artificiality of the story affected some of the elements that were actually intriguing. Allison, Nicholas' emotionally damaged Australian girlfriend, makes for a compelling foil for him throughout the early part of the novel. There's something real about her--messy, vulnerable, too honest--that made her endearing to me. After she fakes her death and becomes involved in Conchis's conspiracy, she lost that realness, becoming as artificial as the plot. Whatever spark of messiness animated her early on no longer seems charmingly real by the end, which meant emotionally I was moving in the opposite direction than the protagonist. At the beggining of the novel, I could wish for Nicholas and Allison to try to stay together and work out their issues. By the end, when Nicholas is meeting her and having his little 'OK, I'm a total cad and probably no good for you, but I'm ready to try to commit' speech, I couldn't see why he bothered.

And that is, I think, meant to be the culmination of the novel, the final emotional awakening. A few hundred pages earlier, Conchis had related a story of the island during WWII. In the story, the Nazis occupy the island. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, and Conchis' functions as a kind of liasion for them. Some German soldiers are killed by Greek partisans, who are later captured by the Germans. In a bit of cold-bloodedness, the Nazi commander orders Conchis to beat the partisans to death with an unloaded rifle. If he refuses, they will execute the adult males in the village where the partisans were discovered. Of course, we can't be sure how true the story is. Some on the island claim that Conchis' participation with the Nazis was more sinister, and there's no reason to believe his own account of the events won't be self serving.

But the result of this actually intriguing question of truth, guilt and responsibility is: a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. Shortly after finishing the novel, I thought of it as some literary version of David Fincher's 'The Game,' where Michael Douglas undergoes many trials and tribulations to figure out that he should be less of a jerk and ask the cute blond out on a date. 'The Game,' though, manages to be relatively consistent in its pulpiness. This is actually a bit more like some version of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' where the big emotional pay off is that a callow English man-child decides that he can kinda, sorta commit to his flighty foreign girlfriend. (Call if 'Forty Literary Allusions, One Nazy War Crime and an Island.')

As much as I was disappointed by the novel, it does have some great moments and does reflect the work of an author with some degree of skill. Which is why I feel the most fair thing I can say is that it's the first novel of a talented writer. However, I think like many first novels, Folwes doesn't succeed to match up his ambition with his literary skill. show less

Detta är ett mästerverk, en historia som sakta vecklas ut och drar in er djupt in i intrigernas värld. Vad är sant och vad är illusion , ett arrangerad rollspel skapad av den exentriska miljonären Mauice Conchis för att roa en en mans publik ?
Nicholas vet snart varken ut eller in, han har fastnat i ett nät av lögner eller sanningar , tappar han bort sin fria vilja i ett försök att hitta sin identitet.
Det var längesedan jag läste en bok där jag var lika förvirrad och ovetande som huvudkaraktären . Man vet inte vem man ska tro på och det bästa är att det inte går att förutse hur boken kommer att utveckla sig :

Magic is more than deception. There is meant to be an elegance, a certain grace in the illusion that transcends mere chicanery. Nearly every boy discovers magic. That day usually comes during the same transitional adolescent period when the innocent mysticism of childhood begins to wear thin. Taking flight on the seat of a Schwin is no longer a possibility. Play-time pursuits begin to be shaped more by sport and less by imagination. Ghosts and the grotesque, slimy things under the bed are less frightening because the everyday world is more so. But then you discover that magic still exists, that, even though it is illusion, you can still conjure.

I was no different. Sometime in the awkward peak of my elementary school years, I discovered show more Harry Houdini and begin devouring every book about him I could find with wide-eyed gluttony. Maybe, if Houdini could fearlessly face and escape certain death, I could manage an equally daring and amazing escape from childhood with a sense of the fantastic intact. My mother, always quick to support any new creative endeavor, purchased an inexpensive magic set with a book describing a couple of card tricks and a few illusions managed with colorful plastic bits. One afternoon, I loaded them into a molded plastic briefcase, a relic of my ‘businessman’ period, and carried them to the law office where my sister worked. Each private performance, whether I fumbled the pieces or picked the wrong card, was rewarded with gleeful grins and wild applause. The attorneys grasped for that elegance and grace as a foil to the mundaneness, the loss of magic in their lives.

What does any of that have to do with John Fowles’ novel [The Magus]? The title suggests the connection, as it is a word that is essentially equal to magician. A quick read of the book flap offers a glimpse at the magic that the book promises – offering to pull the reader into a “saturnalian labyrinth” with “games, hallucinations, theatrical masques, riddles, and mock trials” weaving a “web of suspense and mystery.” All of that dressing, suggesting a magical journey, is rubbish. There is absolutely no magic within the pages of [The Magus] – there is only bald deception and vain, manipulative trickery, devoid of any of the sweet elegance of real magic.

Nicholas Urfe, a recent Oxford graduate, takes a job at an English prep school on the Greek island of Phraxos, hoping to escape an affair and find some inspiration for his life and his poetry. The school turns out to be a microcosm of the England he fled and the island outside the walls of the school is only an isolated, bucolic community of peasants – save one inhabitant, Conchis. Conchis is known among the villagers as an eccentric and is rumored to have collaborated with the Nazis during the islands occupation. Hungry for stimulation, Nicholas begins visiting Conchis’ villa. Soon, Nicholas begins to see ghosts or have hallucinations that mirror the conversations he has with his host. Eventually, he starts to believe that the things he is experiencing are an elaborate play, with actors and scripts, targeted to teach him a lesson of some sort.

And Nicholas is right. Everything he sees, all of his experiences with Conchis and the people that Conchis introduces him to, are all a big lie. When Nicholas begins to see through one layer of the play, the script twists with a new lie. You’ve probably read at least one novel that featured an unreliable narrator. [The Magus] is an entirely unreliable story – everyone is lying to Nichoals, all of the time. And in the end, it seems designed to destroy any idea in him that there is any unifying moral principle in the world – everything is hazard. Of course, as is common to these stories, it is suggested to Nicholas that since everything is vanity and chaos he should simply live to please himself in an honest and straightforward way – which is a unifying moral principle. Ultimately, I felt like I was reading a parable in defense of open polyamorous sexual relationships.

There was no magic, none. Every attempt at creating a mysterious or magical reality was all based in bald-faced lies and manipulative tricks. That the lies and tricks were focused on the narrator and hero of the book neither excused the device nor made the book more palatable. And the faulty circular reasoning that was meant to establish some avant garde way of life only cheapened the book further. Many of the original reviews lauded Fowles for creating such a mystical and fantastic story. But the book amounts to little more than a back-alley game of ‘Follow the Queen’ where the con man has palmed the card. Anyone can confuse and misdirect an audience if they fix the game completely – but the real magician does it with some elegance

Bottom Line: Find a different book if you’re looking for real magic.

2 bones!!!!! show less

The Magus is a very long novel and John Fowles devoted a large chunk of his life to it. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma it is clearly meant to have a mesmerising effect on the reader. It certainly seems to have worked the trick on Fowles himself. Throughout the 1950s and for decades beyond he kept returning to it, tinkering with it, rewriting and revising it, as if attempting to solve the mystery he had set in motion: master mesmerist enchanted by his own spell.

It works through constant surprise, revelation and sudden reversal, so it’s difficult to say much about the plot without spoiling it. I will try to tread carefully. Twenty-something Nicholas Urfe, somewhat self-centred and commitment-phobic, abandons his latest show more girlfriend in London and heads out to the Greek Island of Phraxos to teach English at an elite boys school. He meets Maurice Conchis, an elderly and reclusive millionaire who lives in a villa on the island. And then ‘the mysteries’ begin: dead people come back to life, nymphs are pursued by satyrs across the grounds of the estate and… but I did promise not to spoil it. Nicholas finds the boundaries between the real and the unreal becoming increasingly blurred.

Like the plays of Harold Pinter The Magus exploits to the maximum the potential fiction has to confuse us. It’s not so much a question of what it means as what is actually happening at any given moment. Nicholas doesn’t know and neither does the reader. As the book is Nicholas’s first-person narrative he is in effect the reader and Conchis is Fowles. Conchis plays his mystifying ‘godgame’ with Nicholas and Fowles does the same with us. It’s a dazzling performance, a conjuring trick of astonishing inventiveness combined with immense technical skill. I was quite happy to lie back and allow Fowles to work his manipulative magic on me, enjoy the baffling and duplicitous ride, and let the meaning take care of itself.

It is too long, though, and not without its longueurs. It would have been twice as good at half the length. It is so heavily dependent on narrative twists and turns that over the course of 656 pages a law of diminishing returns inevitably sets in. The unexpected tends to lose its impact when you have become accustomed to expect it. There were times when I felt the spell Fowles was weaving was about to break, or that he would fall off the tightrope he was walking (I can mix my metaphors with the best of them) and the sublimely mysterious would descend into the farcically ridiculous. There is an overcooked flavour to pretty much every ingredient of this book: the intimidating length, the allusions to Greek mythology and Shakespeare, the references to Freud, Jung and the Holocaust, the hypersensual prose, the assiduously worked at sense that matters of Great Import are at hand. The phrase ‘laying it on with a trowel’ springs to mind. Conversely, although it tests the patience at times, much of its peculiar atmosphere and undeniable power is created through this over the top quality.

John Fowles was a big deal back in the 1960s and ‘70s. A bestseller who was also critically lauded; a postmodernist whose novels were turned into Hollywood movies. His critical reputation seems to have slumped rather dramatically over the decades but, judging from this website, he continues to be read. The Magus does occupy a sweet spot between the conventional and experimental novel. A less generous impulse in me couldn’t help feeling that it also fell awkwardly somewhere between Great Novel and airport blockbuster. Some of the dialogue is so B-movie bad that it is deliciously, though entirely unintentionally, camp: ‘I’m not playing games, you moronic little fool!’ The super-intelligent, urbanely sinister, and Machiavellian Conchis is clearly Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s older brother. Nicholas is forever unsure if Conchis is truly a magus or merely a charlatan, and I came away with similarly ambivalent feelings about the book: profound or pretentious? Epic or over-egged? All of the above, perhaps.

A half-century on from publication, for all its metafictional games and existential themes - freedom and responsibility, authentic and inauthentic existence, masculine psycho-sexuality - The Magus impresses mainly for its robustly traditional virtues. Above all it is a well-crafted piece of old-fashioned storytelling. The resolution even has more than a faint whiff of the Victorian morality tale about it. It is, I think, a little too obviously contrived to be genuinely haunting or mysterious but, despite my reservations, it is a work of extraordinary imagination.

I’ve come late to John Fowles. I read The Collector - his first published novel - earlier this year, and now this. Of the two I would say The Collector, which deals with many of the same themes but at less than half the length, is the greater book. It had an emotional impact on me this one didn’t come close to. Still, I remain sufficiently intrigued to want to continue to read him in chronological order, so The French Lieutenant’s Woman next. Not just yet, though; I need to recover from this monster first. It may take some time. show less