The Magus
by John Fowles
Summary
Nicholas Urfe, a restless young Oxford graduate, takes a teaching post on the small Greek island of Phraxos mainly to escape a relationship in London he does not know how to end, and finds himself drawn instead into the elaborate psychological games of Maurice Conchis, a wealthy, secretive recluse who lives nearby. Conchis stages increasingly disorienting performances for Nicholas alone, restaged scenes from Nazi occupation, masque like enactments drawn from Greek mythology and the Marquis de Sade, and a rotating cast of actors, including a woman named Lily who Nicholas cannot ever be certain is playing a role or telling the truth. What begins as entertainment tips gradually into something closer to a trial, forcing Nicholas to confront his own cruelty toward the women in his past. Fowles refuses to resolve the novel cleanly: the ending is deliberately ambiguous about whether Nicholas and the woman he has fallen for are reconciled, and Fowles declined for years afterward to settle the question the book itself leaves open.
Fowles writes with a controlled, literary intensity that keeps a reader nearly as disoriented as Nicholas himself, never entirely certain which layer of Conchis's game is real. It reads slowly and demands real trust from a reader willing to accept a novel that withholds its own resolution on purpose, and that demand has always divided its audience: some find the uncertainty the whole point, others find its great length exhausting.
Jonathan Cape published The Magus in 1965; Fowles, dissatisfied with the original text, published a substantially revised edition in 1977.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize marked The Magus on either its 1965 publication or its 1977 revision, and none is recorded as having shortlisted it; the Booker Prize, the award that would later define British literary fiction, did not exist until 1969, four years after the first edition.
The novel found its real audience through readers rather than juries, eventually placing 71st on the Modern Library's readers' list of the century's hundred best novels in 1999 and 67th in the BBC's Big Read poll in 2003. A 1968 film version starring Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn was widely considered a failure, memorably enough that Peter Sellers joked that if he had his life to live over he would do everything exactly the same except not see The Magus, a line often misattributed to Woody Allen. Fowles's later novel The French Lieutenant's Woman did win real prizes, including the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 1970, a record that belongs to that book rather than to this one, which has always depended on cult devotion rather than institutional recognition.