Author: John Fowles
Title: The Magus
Year of publication: 1965
Page count: 658
Rating: ★★★
The Magus is bewilderingly, frustratingly seductive. I adored Fowles’ The Collector, and decided that a trip to Greece presented the perfect opportunity to tackle this postmodern, metafictional tome of a novel set on a made-up Greek island… but I don’t really know what to make of it—which I feel is less a failing on my part, and more precisely what the author intended, as per the introduction to the revised edition I read:
“Novels, even much more lucidly conceived and controlled ones than this, are not like crossword puzzles, with one unique set of correct answers behind the clues (…) If The Magus has any ‘real significance’, it is no more than that of the Rorschach test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no given ‘right’ reaction.”
Fowles began writing it in the 50’s, under the title of The Godgame (which I prefer), worked on it for twelve years before publication, and continued revising it for almost as many afterwards. Party based on his experiences on the Greek island of Spetses, where he taught English for two years, it tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, an Oxford graduate in his mid-twenties who flees Britain and a relationship by accepting a teaching post on a small and fairly remote Greek island. Plagued by loneliness and disillusionment, he begins wandering around the island, and eventually stumbles upon the estate of a wealthy recluse. Conchis (I suppose that’s a pun on “conscious”) is a fascinating individual, and they develop a sort of odd friendship, but it soon becomes apparent that Nicholas has stumbled into the domaine of a master trickster who gradually draws him into ever more elaborate and intense psychological games and eccentric masques, to the point where both Nicholas and the reader can no longer determine what’s real and what’s artifice.
“I knew I would never have another adventure like this. I would have sacrificed all the rest of my days to have this one afternoon endless, endlessly repeated, a closed circle, instead of what it was: A brief and tiny step that could never be retraced.”
I was only mildly interested until about halfway through, at which point one twist followed another, one more bizarre than the next, and the story slowly but surely morphed from a mystery into a sort of convoluted psychosexual thriller. It’s a tour-de-force steeped in symbolism, metaphors, mythology, Jungian psychology, and literary (particularly Shakespearean) references that left my head reeling; I think my ultimate take-away is that it’s essentially about the profound impact chance meetings can have, as well as self-knowledge and the freedom that comes with it. It’s an overwhelming novel I don’t profess to fully understand, and I do think it could’ve been trimmed down and tightened for more impact, but it will stay with me for a long time for the sheer mind-fuck it evoked.
“No man is an island.”
“Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, airplanes, telephones, wireless—what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear forever. You are an island that has not sunk.”
watercolorstain 