John Fowles - The Magus

 

Eventually I realized that all this cleverness was going nowhere,

but until then ……. Wow!

Right from its first words, this novel has a precision of narration that has me hanging on every word. The prose as spare and elegant as a Greek statue. The story moves from ordinary to possibly supernatural , making the reader as uncomfortable as the protagonist. A charming effect! 

 Up to chapter 20, it promises to be the story of a well educated young man in his mid twenties ,Nicholas, learning how to live from a man born about thirty years earlier, Conchin. Serving in the army right after WWII, he could not relate to his own, recently deceased, military father, and was a bit lost as he began to live independently. He was intensely critical of others and so critical of himself he contemplated suicide. He believed in nothing other than his own critical acumen. He reminds us that he graduated from Oxford about a dozen times. No career or woman had yet captivated him. Like myself at that age, he was a well educated incompetent. 

 The older man embodied success and profound mystery. He was wealthy, well read, independently minded, aesthetically astute, and claimed to have psychic as well as medical abilities. He was apparently living a good life - but why choose isolation on such a tiny island? How did he spend all that time? This book was published two years after “Meetings with Remarkable Men” and he may have been one of them - a kind of spiritual adept like a Sufi, Yogi, or Taoist master. He has met with two of Nicholas’ predecessors at the island school, but suggests that only Nicholas has been “elected” to be what might be called his student. The first exercise, a kind of Russian roulette, assaults his self esteem in both perceptual ability and character. Things are not as he sees them, including himself. Perhaps he will learn how to undermine his hyper critical ego. 

 And then the character of the novel begins to change. The old man shares stories that soon appear in the flesh - presumably performed by actors in costume. The characters become more like mouthpieces for ideas that interest the author, and less like people who might ever have roamed a Greek island, or anywhere else for that matter. The romantic prologue of Nicholas makes him feel quite real. His affair with the smart, sexy, intellectually inferior, Australian flight attendant is a bleeding slice of life. But once on the island, that realism fades behind a cloud of provocative ideas that often set self against society. Conchis tells his life story - is it real, or just a kind of teaching tool? His youth is certainly different from that of Nicholas. But he doesn’t really feel like a real, possible person. He may as well just be one of the inner voices in the young man’s head - a pastiche of his teachers at university. If the stories are real, perhaps all the playacting is an attempt to mitigate the shame of past failures. 

 Eventually we learn the source of his wealth - a casual acquaintance died and left him a fortune - at which moment we, and Nicholas, are given two documents to study. One is an idealized commitment to reason - the other suggests that some people can communicate telepathically with minds in distant parts of the universe - and two Greek gods, Apollo and Artemis, make their appearance. Then, since one of the characters represented is a long dead girl friend, Lily, the Egyptian god of the dead, Anubis, appears at her side. Will someone now living soon be actually killed? The tension is building - just as it now occurs to this reader, that escape from boredom is the primary motive for both characters.  Nicholas feels stuck teaching school and Conchis ended up with a boatload of money and talent,  but no purpose in life. 

 Then, radical changes happen again. The story shifts to Nick’s romantic interest in Julie, the woman acting the part of Lily. Conchis reveals that all this play acting was created as therapy for her mental illness. Surprisingly Nick has little curiosity about how that treatment is supposed to work and he readily submits to be drugged/hypnotized to assist. His description of the subsequent psychedelic vision takes too many pages not to mark some kind of turning point. And indeed it has. He awakes to find the estate deserted, so he takes his weekend in Athens for a reunion with the Australian girl. Predictably, it results in a firm break up. The girl wants Nick as husband; Nick needs to pursue his enchantment with Julie. 

 This is where I’m beginning to disconnect from the story. Up to this point, I’ve identified Nick as an English version of myself at age 25. He doesn’t really have any direction, but sex will do for now. Is  Julie really damaged or just an adventurous young adult like himself ? I’m beginning not to care. 58% of the novel is ahead of me, and there’s nothing more i really want to get out of it - except perhaps for a few more fascinating references to English literature. Never heard of Robert Foulkes before. Never knew Dryden marked the turning away from Renaissance English literature. Never knew about the English Helicon; a period collection of Elizabethan pastoral poetry Nicholas invoked when seeing his girlfriend romping in a mountain field. 

 I’m afraid that I know as much about Nicholas Urfe as I care to - or as Fowles will reveal - so I’m stopping at page 296. Had lots of fun before that, however.

*********

What does Nicholas know about Julie by page 296?  Conchis says he is treating her for schizophrenia - and he is known to be deceitful. But why else are she and her twin sister on the estate ?  She is also deceitful - either to Nicolas or Conchis or both.   If she’s not mentally ill, she is a very skillful collaborator of Conchis - and what possible good could they be up to?  Relieving boredom? Testing the limits of credulity?

Nicolas is either an opportunistic sexual predator or an eager victim of who knows what  - or both. Either way, his destiny is not compelling.

The core of this story is nihilism.  

Erudition,  brilliant storytelling, and taut, delicious prose can not elevate it.