The Magus
by John Fowles
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Book Summary Information
Author: John FowlesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-01-04
ISBN: 0316296198
Number of pages: 656
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Book Reviews of The Magus
Book Review: "...a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."
Summary: 5 Stars
--that's what Fowles said of "the Magus" in his foreword to the Modern Library edition of what is probably his most famous novel.
--I asked myself: Why should I bother investing the time to read a 700+ page book which its own author all but tells me is not worth reading? Why should anyone? Was it just a case of modesty--false or not--on the part of a humble author?
--On Fowles' own suggestion, I very nearly put aside his novel in disgust. I'm glad I didn't, mainly because I didn't feel like getting out of my chair and crossing the room to find something else to read.
--In a certain respect, Fowles is actually right...at least in the sense that "the Magus" is about a callow young man's unsuccessful love-affair with a bewitching and elusive woman. It's an archetypal treatment of what is the humiliating and humbling and all-together-common experience that everyone goes through at least once...and, for the vast number of us "retarded adolescents," go through many times before learning our lesson. I mean, falling in love with the wrong person, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
--"the Magus" might well be the reworking of Fowles' own experience of this tragedy, but magnified to the mythic.
--Nicholas Urfe is the aforementioned callow young man. He goes to the small Greek island of Phraxos to teach English at an all-boy's school. He meets a mysterious Greek tycoon, Maurice Conchis, who lives in seclusion on the "uninhabited" side of the island. The old tycoon likes to play psychological games...with people as his pawns. And Nick is to be the main pawn. Or is he perhaps a prince in a disguise so effective that Nick himself has forgotten who he is?
--Enter Lily, one of a pair of beautiful twins, who appears in a variety of guises, some less real than others. Nicholas is quickly enchanted; Lily embodies feminine mystique. But is she a schizophrenic? Is she Conchis's mistress, a prostitute, a victim of the old man's machinations or his willing accomplice?
--Nicholas isn't sure. He continues not being sure for the entire novel...every time he thinks he has a grip on the truth of things he only discovers that he's been fooled again...and when he at last is allowed a glimpse of what has been and will always to a certain extent elude him it is more shocking than he could ever have imagined; likely more shocking than you could have imagined, too.
--Conchis is a character strongly reminiscent of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff--and his mythic-psychological techniques of "illumination" are reminiscent of Gurdjieff's as well. Conchis is quite willing to use lies, illusion, and sleight-of-hand to bring his "pupils" to self-realization.
--Fowles is a wonderful writer in the way the English can be wonderful writers. Intelligent, incisive, eloquent. He makes "the Magus" work, even at its considerable length, in spite of the fact that it's all so unlikely, so unbelievable. But by making everything so unreal Fowles is better able to capture the "real" sense of what it's like to love and lose than he might have with the most realistic of chronicles.
--Let's face it--nothing describes our sense of reality less adequately than a description of reality itself.
--This is a great novel, flawed, as all great novels are flawed because they try to say the unsayable. Fowles may well have been somewhat embarrassed of it because for all its exaggerations and hysteria it's so raw, so personal, and, now being older and wiser, it is a testament to a time when he was neither. Early novels are like those old photo albums where our former selves are recorded forever: full of earnest hope, full of intense convictions, full of ourselves...full of bull.
--"the Magus" is one of those novels that once read, you will likely never forget whether you like it or not. It's a book most definitely not just for "retarded adolescents" unless you consider that in quite a lot of ways--and in particular how, who, and why we love--we are all of us hardly more than retarded adolescents.
--Thus "the Magus" is very likely to weave it's magic spell over you, even if you are old and wise. In that case, it'll leave you with an enigmatic half-smile.
Summary of The Magus
At the novels center is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island. There he befriends a local millionaire, but the friendship soon evolves into a deadly game and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.Fowles, John Books
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