The Magus {original}

Ah, the difficulty of reviewing God. God the book, God the wicked old millionaire, God the author, God the reader. All the gods looking down on poor old Nicholas Urfe, holy fool and everyman, just intelligent enough to sense the game, not intelligent enough to know what to do about it. Like the rest of us. Because he wants in. He wants to know the purpose, the answer. He wants to be a player. Oh God, don't we all. And everybody, even Nicholas himself, knows that he is being played and, worse still, that there is no game and no God, though it seems crass, even vulgar to say so.

Nicholas Urfe goes to Greece to teach at a remote, secluded island. He leaves behind an unsatisfactory life and love affair, and brings with him all his faults and show more failings. On the island he encounters a rich old man, and over weekends at the old man's house hears his life story. Right from the start, games are being played. Visions appear, unseen guests move about, suggestions of ghosts and madness and theatrical tableaux, and all the time lie after lie after lie. Nicholas accepts the challenge, which at its heart and stripped of deception is to simply be a part of the old man's games, to be a fox that knows it's being hunted. Naturally, he does not know what he is in for, but at each stage, half deceived, half aware of the deception, he plunges deeper into the labyrinthine layers of the game, until there is no turning back and no guessing the harm and humiliation awaiting him.

No reader can possibly find the broad elements of this unfamiliar. It has utterly permeated our culture, the idea of the manipulative game played on an unsuspecting person who must succumb to the game's hidden but inevitable outcome, or who must overcome the traps and deceptions and defeat the minotaur at the heart of the maze. It pops up in books, films, television. The cheap attraction of the authorial stand-in able to make things happen in a certain order and a certain way with contrived complexity and conceptual craziness; the cathartic choice of the victim falling at the final trap or breaking the walls and gaming the gamers. And yet none of them are quite like The Magus.

The lessons of the game in The Magus are brutal and unpleasant. The arrogance with which they're dispensed are horrifying. Nicholas is chosen as likely to be at least semi-complicit in the proceedings, and as this is an elaborate con and the gifted con-man will exploit the victim's weaknesses to his profit, sympathy for con victims tends to be limited. If it weren't for their own greed and foolishness they wouldn't have been caught out, we say, sitting in judgment. The repulsive heart of any con is the co-man's apportioning of blame with the victim, and so it is also the repulsive heart of this superb novel.

This book made me depressed and angry as Nicholas inveigled himself into the lies and illusions, setting himself up not just for betrayal, but for the flaying of his own personality for the entertainment of all. And the lesson is good. The lesson is right. Illusions, freedom and the simple necessity of not hurting other people. Be skeptical about things, but not cynical. Be open to the signs and portents and experiences of life without being infantile. Know the measure of your freedom and use it. But even so.

Nicholas' heroism is that he resists as many lies as he falls for, and he sees through the game as it happens. His tragedy is that he's supposed to, and then he's supposed to be grateful for it. At the end he is poised with the girl from the affair previous to his trip to Greece, both dripping from mutual wounds, and one is, perhaps, meant to root for them to somehow bridge the canyon between them. Why, I wonder, are they meant to be together? They won't have a relationship, they'll have an ongoing trauma. The suspense of the ambiguous ending, to me at any rate, isn't whether they will get together, but whether they'll find the strength to walk away. Find Jojo, Nicholas, and get your shit together.

Like the rest of us. show less

The Magus is hard to describe as the story morphs from one apparent genre to another as it progresses. There is no action to speak of but a lot of storytelling and exposition that is more or less not what it at first appears. The plot is simple enough, the protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, travels to a remote small Greek island to act as the English teacher in an academy located there. He knows it has an unusually high turnover rate of English instructors (who’ve all been English) but that is chalked up solely to the isolation and remoteness of the island. Once there, the island is described in several dreamlike sequences as he wanders the place in his off time. There is probably only a scene or two inside the school in the novel.
This show more initial fifth of the novel struck me as almost as if it were a horror setup and gave me strange fiction vibes ala Robert Aickman through to the second fifth of the book. The third fifth reads more like a psychological thriller (with no real incidents or action), and the fourth part becomes a horror story where the reader dreads what The Masque (appearing as a traditional satanic horror cult) is going to do with the protagonist, then the last fifth becomes a detective story where the detective is seeking a vague sense of closure though he tells himself it is a mission of vengeance then becomes a mission to reunite with his girlfriend. The protagonist has a real problem with having vague motives and when his motives are clear, he often misleads himself and thus the reader.
When it came to that toxic relationship, between Nicholas Urfe and his estranged girlfriend Allison, I have to admit, my reading sped up so I could get through it. It was fine as a contrast to the strangeness of the island when they took a trip to the mainland of Greece, but it tended to drag after a while. I am also aware that this is a setup to get the reader to spend time with her before Urfe gets the news that she has committed suicide.
Nicholas has a major flaw which is pushed into his face on a few occasions, misogyny facilitated by his sadboi act, he even admits to it at one point early in the book, but he simply does not feel or see anything wrong with his conduct even while contemplating his toxic ex-girlfriend’s purported suicide. He remains unrepentant and it is this flaw that The Masque (as he refers to the mysterious cult in the latter parts of the novel) exploits to break into his life. Instead of thinking over how his own major flaw let these people into his life, he goes on a mission of discovery with the hint of revenge in his motive in the last fifth of the book. This does set the novel up for a disappointing ending.
The main incident that kicks everything into motion is the old recluse on the island occupying the sole mansion on the island, Maurice Conchis. The man is spurned by the natives and the school staff as he is a known nazi collaborator from when they had occupied the island and murdered dozens. Urfe seeks him out of pure curiosity and is lured by a beautiful young woman by the name of Julie, her name is later revealed to be Lilly after she gives him the names of the goddess(es) she portrays in Conchis’ plays put on solely for his and Urfe’s eyes. Later, Conchis seems to want to bring the saying All the World’s A Stage to life with performance, insanely elaborate trickery, alcohol, drugs, and hypnotism. It seems that there is a theme here with his trying to render Nicholas into a pawn within his game of masks, performances, and symbols coupled with his First and Second World War recollections. This is especially so when Nicholas is notified of Allison’s supposed suicide (another “performance” for and at his expense) forces him to pin all of his romantic hopes onto the actress Lilly.
Conchis’ story of the First World War was fantastic, I never thought that I would contemplate the stench of mud and burst bowels on the battlefield. The brutality of the story of what “really happened” (maybe) on the island during the Second World War was shocking and very graphic. I loved it.
The motifs of this expansive novel feed into the theme, the duplicity of the twins, Julie/Lilly and June/Rose, hired by Conchis to help conduct his “experiment in mystification”, the repeated references to roles, performance, and masks, and the mask-wearing cult dubbed The Masque in the fourth fifth of the book. Lilly even turns up with another name and guise during the cult meeting scene as well. Nicholas Urfe’s character flaws and those contrary to those of the members of the cult as he tracks them down in the last fifth all sum up to a certain theme. The theme is that life is but a series of performances and the truth lies covered in layers of masks and symbolism. A concurrent theme also found in the story is that of ambiguity. Vagueness is conducive to life and truth bringing only death. It is stated somewhere in the later third of the book that “…an answer is a form of death.” Very much like Schrodinger’s Cat, it is both alive and dead until you open the box revealing the truth.
Strangely, The Masque does seem to hold a much more progressive attitude than the protagonist especially when he tries to shame Lilly’s mother by bringing up her having sex with Joe because he’s black. The mother says that Joe is a fine man and educated as well as putting Nicholas to shame for his racism. This duplicity, a progressive cult that puts unsuspecting men through damaging psychological experiments as opposed to their victim who holds, especially today, outmoded ways of thinking such as misogyny and racism feeds into the revelation of truth in the theme. After these revelations of character, these traits become an unchanging cemented component of the character as opposed to the cult members who ultimately reveal their true identities, but they retain a fluidity drawn from their unreliableness. At least, until they tell him the game is over near the end of the book.
The remaining fifth of the book goes on too long, it feels like the story is just caught in a holding pattern just going around in tiny circles. This does allow the reader to feel the buildup of Nicholas’ frustration and impatience in seeing Allison again, but it just felt like the author had no idea how to wrap this thing up. I have to say that I was not satisfied with the ending of the story at all.
Would I recommend this one? Well, with some caveats. If you want to sink into and immerse yourself in a long, involved story, then this is your lucky day, if not, then stay far away from it. If you’re looking for a horror story or even a thriller, this is not it. This story is built from dreamlike scenery, long conversations, and the contemplations of the protagonist. Otherwise, have at it, I did really enjoy the first half of the novel, but it seems to me that it should have ended soon after the trial of the masque. The last fifth of the book is a massive dénouement. The ending made me comment, “That’s it?”
Favorite Quotes:
“I love being humiliated. I love having a girl I like trampling over every human affection and decency. Every time that stupid old bugger tells me another lie I feel thrills of ectasy [sic] run down my spine.” I shouted. “Now where the hell am I?” [pg.442-443]
The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all evil, man himself. [pg.448]
Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem. [pg.521] show less

The Magus took John Fowles more than two decades to complete. It was the first viable novel he began writing, but was published for the first time in 1966, and then in a revised version in 1977. The latter edition, which is by far the easiest to find these days, was the one I read.

As Fowles explains in the preface, some of the details of the story are taken from his own life: for instance, like his protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, Fowles spent some time teaching at a school on a remote Greek island. From such material, Fowles weaves a fantastic story that owes a heavy debt to Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest. The Prospero character, in this instance, is Maurice Conchis, an elderly multi-millionaire who own a house on a section of the show more island known as Bourani. Nicholas finds himself drawn to Conchis's character, and in the hours they spend together he learns more and more about his host's past, which includes an uncertain relationship with the Nazis. Further characters are introduced, most notably a pair of beautiful twin Englishwomen and a black man, Joe.

The story proceeds as a series of disjointed acts in which Nicholas, blessed (or cursed) with a critical mind, undermines and sidesteps the stories of the people he encounters. He increasingly suspects that he is taking part in some kind of masque or drama in which the others are all actors. It is through this device that Fowles causes the story to twist and turn, with new characters abruptly appearing (the German soldiers, for instance) or being dramatically recast (Joe, the twin girls) as Nicholas grapples with the line between fiction and reality. Nicholas's story is framed, in turn, by his affair with an Australian girl, Alison Kelly, whose directness and solidity are repeatedly placed in juxtaposition with the mind-games of the island drama.

The story itself hums along nicely enough, but there are points in the middle of the book, especially when Nicholas is drawn into permutation after permutation of different but similar mind games, that it starts to drag a little. Let me be clear: I think Fowles is the greatest English writer of his generation. His genius lies in his incisiveness, both in terms of his storytelling ability and his utter lack of moral prudery. Nonetheless, I found fault with The Magus mostly for the character of Nicholas, whose part in the game I thought became too predictable; truly turning the tables on Conchis and his actors would have been an interesting move that Fowles does not exploit. I also felt as though the flaws Nicholas judges so harshly in his character at the end of the book were merely the markings of inexperience rather than anything fundamentally bad about him. Toward the end, the novel comes dangerously close at certain moments at being morally judgmental in this respect.

Still, despite these minor flaws, The Magus is an astounding piece of fiction. Fowles clearly wrote it in a spirit of ambition that would have defeated many a lesser writer. The Magus is thus an important novel that, while it does not measure up to the true greatness of, say, The French Lieutenant's Woman, is still an enjoyable and worthwhile book to read. show less

I pretty well hated the 184 pages of this novel that I read. And I hated it most for having the potential for being awesome and failing miserably. The set-up--young Englishman goes to Greek island to teach and meets a mysterious ex-pat who seems to want to run said Y.E. through a secret masquerade for unknown purpose--ought to be delightfully creepy and engaging. But no. The narrator has exactly the kind of mid-twentieth century arrogant malaise that makes me want to shove him out an airlock, the "mysterious" Conchis is boring as hell, and the "strange" goings-on fail to entice or intrigue. The prose is tight and highly readable, though it is infected by the narrator's insufferable character. My rating of two and a half stars is show more conditional because I'll allow that rating a book I haven't finished isn't quite fair and because, having loved Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, I'm a bit mystified by my reaction to The Magus. show less

This book is like walking through a hall of mirrors, confusing and disorientating. You, along with the main character, have no idea who to trust, who's real and who's not. Just when everything seems clear, another layer is peeled off and the whole thing is turned on its head again. I found this unexpectedly readable right from page one, and though the outings with the girlfriend around about the middle section were perhaps a little boring, mostly the pace was good throughout.

Don't read this if you like books where everything is explained and everything fits neatly into place by the end page without a wasted syllable. It's not like that. Normally I'm not very forgiving of books that fail to explain themselves properly, but for some show more reason with this one it was different. I wish I could go back to the beginning and be baffled for the first time all over again! show less

This movie tie-in edition pitches to its presumed prospective readers by quoting on the fly-leaf: "Finally she stood up out of the bath, her damp, warm body the paradise of sex".
OK, it's hard to write well about sex, that's a given, but this belongs on any list of howlers. I read to the bottom of the flyleaf, which ends: "She spoke. The strangest voice; as hard as glass. 'There is no Julie...'.
Went on to read the rest of the book. A good read.

Well, I finally slogged through this entire book. It is long and "dense." I found it interesting enough to keep me reading, wanting to find out how the "experiment" ended, but now that I've finished it I don't find it to have been enlightening or particularly entertaining. The author builds a complex mystery, with the narrator never knowing what is real and what is make-believe, with one layer of mystery upon another. I had seen this title on a list somewhere of books with the least satisfying endings, and I have to agree that the ending left much to be desired, although it is hard to know what could have made it better. Conchis's motives are never very clear and I believe he leaves damaged "subjects" in his wake with all his show more experiments.

The sections in which Conchis is sharing his history, little vignettes of wars and encounters with eccentric folk, are the most interesting to me. Throughout the book, I marked passages or sentences that stood out as being true and well-written, but the overall book didn't seem to give me much insight. Of course, I'm not naturally given to existentialist angst (at least not for long periods), so I found the characters a bit pretentious - the money involved in Conchis's elaborate "experiment," the freedom Urfe has to wallow in self-pity and become wrapped up in the mystery - these are things that are foreign to me and belong to the wealthy and the young respectively. I found myself saying to Urfe that he should just get away from the madness, but like him I wanted to see where it led.

A few quotes that struck me:

"The madness of it, Nicholas. Standing in holes in the ground, thousands of men, English, Scots, Indians, French, Germans, one March morning - and what for? If there is a hell, then it is that. Not flames, not pitchforks. But a place without the possibility of reason, like Neuve Chapelle that day."

"...[S]ome experiences so possess you that the one thing you cannot tolerate is the thought of their not being in some way for ever present. Seidevarre is a place I do not want to touch. So I am not interested in what it is now. Or what they are now. If they still are."

"But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and classify it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove all the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum."

"Thre were minutes of silence then and in it I thought about pain, about hurting people. It was the only truth that mattered, it was the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime." show less