The Magus Book Review

A winding, mysterious tome of a book, The Magus is certainly some form of magic, for its ability to keep readers hooked through a story that arguably spans decades. Following a man determined to believe that life is more than it is, readers fall into a story of deception, one that makes us reevaluate what it means to be alive, and what the value of the truth is.

John Fowles (1926-2005) wrote several widely acclaimed and bestselling books, among them the novels The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Daniel Martin. 

This daring literary thriller, rich with eroticism and suspense, is one of John Fowles's best-loved and bestselling novels and has contributed significantly to his international reputation as a writer of the first rank. At the center of The Magus is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where he befriends a local millionaire. The friendship soon evolves into a deadly game in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas finds he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival. 

One of my favorite aspects about this novel is how we never know what's going on, and we never know how much we actually like Nicholas or the other characters, but we can't convince ourselves to put the novel down, because we just absolutely have to know how it ends. That's the most masterful thing about this 600-page novel, is that even if we find ourselves wanting to dismiss it, want to put it down, it is quite literally impossible to abandon this novel. Like Nicholas, we are desperate to determine the ending, to glean meaning from the novel the same way we desire meaning from our lives, and won't stop at anything to get that meaning. The more I think about the ending of the novel, the more I am sure that this is the entire point of the book, and the reading experience.

I will always be partial to Greece—the culture, the language, the food—due to some of my childhood experiences, and seeing a book so deeply set in Greece definitely excited me. Recognizing small phrases from the language and seeing how Fowles integrated the place so deeply into Nicholas's experiences there was fun to recognize. I thought his masterful use of allusion, in addition to deep reality, is part of what made the novel so unsettling. We believe we're in Greece—the small phrases the townspeople speak in, the excursion to Athens, the countless references to mythology and the old stories definitely do a lot to convince us that we're in the then-present day Greece. And yet, Nicholas is also existing in a sort of unreality in Bourani, where maybe there are ghosts, certainly there is mystery, and it seems we travel back in time every time Conchis opens his mouth to tell a story. 

This is where the horror and suspense come into this story—because the more time Nicholas spends with Conchis, the more the lines between what's real and what isn't starts to disappear. In fact, even for readers, we're not able to tell what is the truth. In a sense, the entire novel is about unraveling the truth from adventure and mystery, and making shocking revelations along the way. This story is certainly heavily layered, and it requires keeping a lot of different details and facts straight, but if one is able to do so, then they'll feel just as confused, shocked, frustrated, and curious as Nicholas does every time he makes the walk to Conchis and Bourani over the weekends.

One of my only main issues with the novel was its lack of accessibility, in the language sense. There are a lot of block French quotes, and quotes in other languages, that remain untranslated within the novel. I understand that's most likely meant to engage the reader in the reading and discovery process, to put themselves in a translator role the same way we're trying to translate meaning as we read. However, when it leaves the epigraphs of parts undefined, and when it leaves the last words of the novel completely ambiguous, I find that frustrating and inaccessible for readers who usually merely pick up books for pleasure. That is not to say this book was not a pleasure to read—in fact, I found my reading experience of this novel vastly different from all the other hundreds of books I've read—but it just leaves something to be desired when good portions of it remain a mystery, in addition to the mysterious ending. 

For more John Fowles, check out The Collector, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Daniel Martin. 

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*