The Magus

The Magus a novel by John Fowles

John Fowles: The Magus

I first read The Magus (originally titles The God Game) back in 1976, when I was 18, suggested to me by my girlfriend, Josephine, an intense girl, who was then just 16. I read it several times that year as it seemed to have far greater import than the books I was supposed to be reading at university. I read it again a couple more times in the Eighties. Why?

Well, I guess The Magus is, at the very least, a literary maze...and at 18 or 20 or 25, I was looking for an answer to my own maze:

plus, I identified and simultaneously abhorred the main character, one Nicholas Urfe (as in Earth)

I loved the self-conscious, hemmorohoidal pomposity of the prose &, well...
the story itself was, well, kinda trippy & damn entertaining

Urfe, a recent Oxford university graduate fom England is teaching English at the er...Lord Byron School on Phraxos, a remote Greek island in the early 1950s, while working out what he wants to do with his life. He's flirting with becoming a poet but predominantly, seems to be slowly rotting in a poxy vat of his own self-importance.

He's thrown into total emotional and psychic chaos when he meets up with Conchis (as in Conscious), a mysterious Greek millionaire, almost certainly modelled on stories about the Greek philosopher Gurdjieff (though author Fowles never confirmed or denied the connection).

Conchis, it turns out, has, for a few years, annually overseen the "education" of a young man who chances into his sphere, teaching through:

strange "psychic" occurences
narcotics
theatrical dramas, masques, played out to Nicholas' audience of one &
possible romance with an un-reachable beauty...and/or perhaps her twin sister

Why?

What is Nicholas supposed to learn?
Is Nicholas learning...or is he merely participating in the elaborate, expensive charade, seduced by an unrealistic quest for Love?
Is Conchis teaching something worth knowing or merely manifesting The Laws of Hazard for his own voyeuristic and/or sadistic enjoyment?

All this and much, much more, played out over 600 pages, which Playboy apparently named it one of the 25 sexiest novels of all time.

Sometime during the mid-1980s I lent The Magus to a young man after a drunken but serious chat during a party at my house. I never saw him again, nor did I ever get The Magus back. Sometimes I wonder whether he ever read it. Did the Laws of Hazard work for him or did he skim through a couple of pages and toss in the too-hard basket. Who knows?

Anyway, now 40 years after it was first released, 30 years after I first read it and knowing that 5 million copies have been sold worldwide, I recommend The Magus with certain reservations. You see, the world has changed considerably since Fowles wrote it back in the early Sixties. Try to understand, the world was still attempting to recover from the trauma of World War 2, trying to recover from that collosal nervous melt-down.

The Magus was created for a generation with an understanding of the classics, of Latin, of Greek (it's not merely geography which places the action in Greece) a generation that sensed radical change was about to come in the cataclysmic upheavals of the mid-Sixties. Of course, 40 years later on Planet Ipod, keeping up to date with change is integral to survival...but then it was different. Hopes were different and Change was terrifying.

I'll be a little bit of a spoiler, here, but to understand The Magus, one has to have a concept of Shame. Not shame, as in, being sexually uptight, but Shame as in understanding that if you have perpretated a wrong, you are morally bound to try to remedy your actions.

I fear that this in this era, that knowledge may not be understandable for many young people any more...and undoubtedly, The Magus is aimed at young people. Without that sense of Shame, The Magus is just a long-winded curio and probably a waste of time.

With it, well, it's is a really cool mind-f***!

The Magus (book)

The Magus Trivia

1 The movie version of The Magus directed by Guy Green and starring Michael Caine & Anthony Quinn is an unmitigated disaster. Woody Allen is quoted as saying:

"...If I had my life to live over again, I would want everything exactly the same with the exception of seeing the film version of The Magus..."

...and Caine said it was the worst movie he had ever been involved with. As such, it's become a minor cult classic on the Art-house circuit and has recently been released on DVD.

The Magus (DVD)

2 The final lines of The Magus are a quote in Latin:

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet

...which translated as:

"...Let those love now who've never loved,

Let those who've loved, love yet again..."

3 There are many similarities between The Magus & the movie, The Game, released in 1997, starring Michael Douglas.

Author Fowles had at one time considered suing its makers, Polygram Films for plagiarism but eventually decided not to.

The Game DVD