Customer Reviews

The Magicians

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In this wonderful book, which could be regarded as both a fantasy and a diatribe against modern meaninglessness, Priestly delves once more into his obsession with time. Charles Ravenstreet is relieved from his postition as head engineer at the electrical company that he has devoted his life to, and having neither wife nor children, he thinks that his life is over. He then is drawn into a very questionable business scheme that is both dangerous and immoral. The head of the scheme, Mervil, seeks to become one of the ruling "elite" by the manufacture of "Sepman 18", a drug much like Huxley's soma, which is used to keep the people satisfied and happy until they die. But an aircraft accident brings three very old and very powerful gentlemen into contact with Ravenstreet. With their assistance, he comes to realise that his past, and everyone else's, is not over and done with. By experiencing "Time Alive", he is able to go back (literally) to the past and relive his past again, and possibly change these events, in an Ouspensky-like recurrence. By a series of strange turns, he also discovers that he has a grown son (through an affair long ago) and two grandchildren as well as a new daughter-in-law. Eventually, Ravenstreet comes to realise that far from being over, his life has just begun, and his pessimistic, nihilistic modern-day philosophy is abandoned in favour of a more life-affirming one and also comes to understand, that in the tradition of J.W. Dunne's "Serial Universe" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five", our lives are not contained entirely in passing time. A profoundly philosophical novel, "The Magicians" is John Boynton Priestly at his finest.

"Priestley is a man of large and powerful abilities, and in his plays and novels he has given a picture of the externals of his time, and of their internal stresses and longings.... In THE MAGICIANS this sense of longing is particularly poignant, and though the resolution of Ravenstreet's problem is neither complete nor clear, it is honest: man's salvation in a despairing world lies, to a great extent, within his own power; let him exert that power and external help will be vouchsafed to him."