Review: The Magus

SO I'm back in Christchurch. Was a pretty uneventful flight, and I saw a good movie called Dean Spanley that I highly recommend.

But the main purpose of this post is to write about the most recent book I read, The Magus by John Fowles. This is the story of an Englishman named Nicholas Urfe who is hired to teach English at a private boarding school on an Greek Island. There he meets a mysterious Greek millionare named Conchis, who invites Nicholas to his house every weekend in order to first recount his life story, and later to mess with Nicolas' head, apparently merely for kicks. Things get more complicated as Nicholas descends further and further into Conchis' world, encounters several characters whose roles and identities constantly shift and attempts his best to figure out what's going on and why. About 3/4 of the way through the book, things finally come to a breaking point, Nicholas is kidnapped by Conchis and his allies, and is put on trial for being....I'm not even sure what. Anyways, he apparently fails his trial, and is summarily thrown off the island and spends the last quarter of the book trying to figure out what was the meaning of everything that happened.

This was an interesting book, in that it is very clear that John Fowles is a very good writer, and I loved his prose. However, the plot of the book is incredibly unsatisfying, and I had a general dislike of most of the characters as well.

The pacing of the plot is very odd. The first quarter or so of the book doesn't even take place in Greece and deals mostly with Nicholas' relationship with an Australian flight attendant named Alison, which later turns out to be important, but still seems like an entirely different book from the rest of the story. The last quarter of the book is about Nicholas attempting madly to figure out what the hell was going on in the previous sections of the book, and trying to find some sort of closure, which never happens. Essentially, Fowles needed here to say definitively to say whether Conchis and the various characters who assisted him were right or wrong in what they did, and this never happens. What we essentially get is Nicholas attempting to figure out what Conchis and his allies want from him so that he can get an explanation of why they did what they did, and being constantly rebuffed. When he eventually finds someone who'll actually talk to him, they still refuse to explain anything, and basically maintain that Nicholas does not deserve any sort of explanation. The entire story ends inconclusively.

Another thing that bothered me were the characters. Nicholas is essentially the protagonist by default, as he's a bit of a cad, somewhat emotionally immature, and a tad too self-justifying to make him sympathetic. Pretty much the only thing that makes him sympathetic is that he, like the reader, has no idea what's going on and that, in the last quarter of the book, is the injured party. Almost all of the other characters turn out to be agents of Conchis, and to a person they are all self-righteous, hypocritical, and unsympathetic monsters. At various times it is implied that they did what they did to either force enlightenment upon Nicholas or force him to become a more emotionally mature person, but that's essentially hooey. They hold over Nicholas that they know what's going on, and what principles we get of their philosophy (essentially, being emotionally honest with others) are hard to swallow given that they don't follow them with regards to Nicholas: they lie to him over and over again, emotionally manipulate him with casual cruelty, and treat Nicholas as essentially a test subject in an experiment. It is possible that Fowles was intending for them to turn out to be right, but as the story is they seem to do what they do for kicks, not for any higher purpose they might profess.


In summary, this was a frustrating novel that had weird pacing, no plot resolution, unsympathetic characters, and a weird sense of self-righteousness that was merely irritating. There were good parts about it (the writing, as mentioned above, and Nicholas' relationships with his socialist landlady Kemp and a young Scottish girl named Jojo, which were beautifully done and come way to late into the novel to redeem it), but all in all it was not a good book.


Next up is Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, which I'm almost done with and which I'm really liking.