John Fowles, The Magus

I first read The Magus in 1993 or so. It had been recommended to my friends and I several years earlier by Mr Pozdrowski, our high-school English teacher. His recommendation was something along the lines of 'Here's some good literature that you'll also think is cool.', and the list included the kinds of authors you'd expect; Kerouac, Anthony Burgess, probably a little Joyce or Dostoevsky. In any case, I plunged into the Magus at the ripe age of 20 and took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Now I'm a little older and I can step back from my second reading of Fowles' work with a more critical eye. To begin, I picked up the Magus again not so much to re-engage Maurice Conchis, the enigmatic millionaire cum self-proclaimed magus, but because Fowles evokes a romantic portrait of Greece that I can't get enough of. If I had to spend the rest of my life on an isolated Greek island, I'd be the last to complain. The Magus stirs up in me all the same feelings I felt when Nisha and I explored the tiny island of Ioannina, in northern Greece, and on my multiple visits to Corfu. What strikes me most is the sense that if we had pressed further south on our vacation, the magic and mystery of the islands only deepens.

That being said, I knew what I was getting into on my second trip to the trough, although I had forgotten many important thematic aspects. The Magus is, in a sense, a modern myth. The placement of a failed English poet in the land of the classical gods is no accident, and on multiple occasions I went to the net to learn more about the stories of Hermes and Apollo. In passing, Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God has become top priority reading for me, just to further my understanding of the many classical references. Incidentally, Campbell is another one of my former teacher's recommendations in the non-fiction genre.

I've been very careful not to give away any of the plot so far, because the book is best experienced for the first time in a state of naive innocence. That being said, I do have many serious complaints about Fowles creation of the antihero, Nicholas Urfe. To begin, Urfe suffers from the most serious disease of English (that is, British) superiority. Urfe's first person perspective is continuously tainted by an air that all things not bourgeois British are helplessly provincial, even distasteful. While I recognize that many of the failures in Urfe's character are intentional on Fowles' part, there are times when Urfe's nonchalant classist, racist and clearly sexist views are taken for granted, as if Urfe is sharing a widely held point of view. (Think James Bond without the charm- pure pretension.) I failed to grasp this perspective on the first read (like I said, hook, line and sinker), but can now identify as something painfully pretentious about the author himself.

On another point, Fowles's clearly Freudian deconstruction of Urfe's character leaves a lot to be desired. I know very little about psychiatry, but I couldn't help but wonder to what extent Fowles himself is playing armchair shrink. Perhaps, given that more than a century has passed since Freud revolutionized psychology and psychiatry, one finds his ideas somewhat cartoonish, but Fowles seems to have subscribed fully to a caricature of Freud which is more fantastical than scientific. Once again, I have to qualify that position with the fact that I really don't know much about Freud.

In any case, The Magus is at times well worth the read. I doubt I'll pick it up again for some time, but I do hope I manage to find myself on Phraxos again some day.

3 out of 5

Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:10:30 -0500
From: rmcohoeNOSP@MPLEASEuwo.ca
To: simra@cim.mcgill.ca
Subject: The Magus

Hey,
Just wanted to let you know that I really like your booklist.  You have some 
gerat stuff on there.  ALso i thought I should point out that the Magus, by 
John FOwles, is not based upon Freudian psycholgy, but on the writings of 
Jung. I am actually writing a seminar about whether the book is essentially 
just a book ABOUT archetypes, as you suggest, or an archetypal piece of 
literature, within which the collective unconscious influences the author's use 
of Jungian concepts.

Cheers,
Rebecca Cohoe