The Magus
John Fowles's 1965 Masterpiece
A Dud
Nicholas Urfe is a middle class British youth rebelling against the staunch military patriotism that his father, a brigadier, insists on positing. He attends Oxford in 1948 and there decides that he is “good” at English and decides to pursue poetry and literature, a trajectory decidedly against his father’s wishes for another military man in the family. Along with his haughty poet persona, Nicholas also develops a talent for seducing, sleeping with, and then dismissing a series of women. Escaping one of these entanglements is what inspires Nicholas to take a teaching job on the remote island of Phraxos, Greece. All is in readiness, but Nicholas cannot help one last fateful entanglement.
Alison
On his way home from the interview for the Greek job, Nicholas meets a fellow drifter named Alison, an Australian in London to whom he is immediately and completely attracted. Their romance is a whirlwind one, and both guard themselves heavily against being too vulnerable. When the time comes for Nicholas to depart for Greece, each lover continues to pretend that they do not need the other, and they part but continue to write—at least for a short time.
On Praxos
There is nothing in the way of diversion for a young dandy like Nicholas on the paradise island. The all-boys school where he is teaching English houses few other professors that speak English, much less seem like prospective comrades. Nicholas takes to walking out in the wilderness of the island surrounding the school and stumbles upon the mysterious estate that he later discovers belongs to the enigmatic Conchis. The estate becomes Nicholas’s weekend haven and he finds himself transported into a living drama each week. Other players surface after the first few weekends, the most engrossing of whom are a set of twins whose true names and natures Nicholas never learns for sure. One of them becomes a love interest fervent enough to supplant Alison in Nicholas’s mind, which plunges him into the deepest theatrical intrigue imaginable, which follows Nicholas back to the school and then back to England.
John Fowles
Fowles was born in 1926 in Essex, England and attended Oxford in 1947 and then went into training to be in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on VE Day, when World War II ended in Europe, and was assigned to a rural camp in Devon for two years. After his military service, Fowles became disillusioned with the place he was set to take in established society and redirected his life by taking an obscure job teaching on an island in Greece. Here, he met his future wife Elizabeth Whitton, who was married at the time of their initial involvement. Fowles’s experiences on Spetsai Island in Greece would serve as the basis of The Magus. Fowles’s success with another novel, The Collector, allowed him to stop teaching and write exclusively. He produced several novels, three of which (The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman) were adapted for film. The Magus was unsuccessful as a movie. Fowles wrote for the rest of his life and was highly involved in his community of Lyme Regis, where he died in 2005.
Other Works by Fowles
The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower
The Magus Front Cover
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