93 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the original unedited version, May 12, 2002
This review is from: The Magus (Mass Market Paperback)
I was just looking over the reviews of this book on Amazon. They are by and large excellent reviews written by thoughful, educated readers. This book is for the learned and patient and yes knowledge of obscure literary references, mythology, and languages is helpful but not necessary. The reviews here are very helpful and if you read a few of them I do not doubt you will be inspired to find a copy of the book...
What I wanted to point out is that this book is the edited version. Why did Fowles edit a masterpiece? In reading the forward I deduce this was in many ways a reactionary edit. Fowles must have been over tired of his readers whining about "what does it all mean?"
READ THE ORIGINAL FIRST. Fowles edit of this book seems spiteful and mean spirited. he rips from our hands the original intention of the book in the final pages. making the 600 plus page journey nearly pointless.
We do not need clarification...especially in the way which Fowles pens it in this revised version. The original is the best literary work I have ever read...I cannot fathom the thought of editing it. It doesn't make sense. How often have you heard of such a thing for a work of fiction? It is like drawing a pencil mustache on the Mona Lisa.
Please read the original first.
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151 of 160 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great literature, November 19, 2000
This review is from: The Magus (Mass Market Paperback)
So infrequently does a work of fiction actually change the reader. This book gets under your conscious mind and toys with your perceptions, and in the end, ensures that you no longer take anything quite for granted anymore. The entire book is a wild ride of changing realities, where nothing is certain but constant change. It's a shame they give so much away in the synopsis on the back of the book, because it ruins a crucial plot point in the novel - one that would have been better had I not been expecting it.
The novel begins with young Nicholas Urfe as he tries to find a living he can at least take some interest in. He meets a young woman that nearly penetrates his outer shell of dispassionate world-weariness. As a gesture of independence, he lets her get away and he takes a job on an Greek island. There, he gets involved with a strange old man and his associates, and finds himself the victim of manipulative games and masquerades. He resolves to penetrate each and every deceit, and is led on a strange journey beyond his wildest imaginings.
After reading this book, I immediately wanted to share it with everyone I knew. It got me thinking about how much of my life I take for granted, how little of my own motivations I truly understand myself. Having read this book, I feel richer for the experience. I hope it can do for others what it's done for me.
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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Trickster Fiction, March 26, 2001
This review is from: The Magus (Mass Market Paperback)
John Fowles describes The Magus, published in 1965, as his first novel. The protagonist is Nicholas Urfe, a young, middle-class Englishman, an Oxford graduate. The book begins in England, describing Nicholas' confused affair with Alison. They part and Nicholas takes a job teaching at a private boys' school on a beautiful Greek Island, Phraxos. On one of his island wanderings, he comes across a remote villa, owned by Conchis, the Magus or magician of the story. Conchis, an elderly man with enormous wealth, hypnotic presence, and mysterious background, entices Nicholas into a series of surreal, often fascinating, often bewildering events, the reality and meaning of which continually elude both Nicholas and the reader. Alison reappears in the story along with many new and mysterious characters, most notably a phantom-like young woman with whom Nicholas falls in love.
In an illuminating foreword, written in 1976, Fowles acknowledges the "obvious influence of Jung." Jung theorized that human behavior is based on archetypes -- characters or patterns found in humankind's collective unconcious, embodied in its myths. One of the more fundamental archetypes is the character of The Magician - a archetype related to the shaman, or trickster, or even the divine fool -- an entity capable of moving between worlds and manipulating reality. The Magus explores this archetype both through the character of Conchis, but also through the author himself who plays trickster to his readers, with plot twists, misdirection, and ambiguity. The character Nicholas is a curious blend of archetypal patterns -- the emotionally regressed adolescent, the sophisticated intellectual, the callow seducer of women, the "mark" ensnared by his own stupidity and questionable motives. The object of Nicholas' idealized love might easily be viewed as his anima, a term Jung uses to describe the man's interior female.
I had some problems with this book. Like many other reviewers, I found that it sometimes seems overwritten. Also,it is filled with obscure and distracting literary allusions and untranslated passages in non-English languages. (More tricks?) Nevertheless, I found the book remarkable in several respects. For me, the most stunning feature of the novel was Fowles' ability to so effectively, vividly, evoke the "soul of place" of Phraxos, and the island's profound impact on the character of Nicholas. The island itself evokes the archetype of the magical wilderness, a place of haunting natural beauty and dark secrets like the psyche itself. Fowles' prose conjures a sense of profound grief, which I suspect harkens back to the lost enchantment of ancient Greek pagan culture and its mythopoetic richness. It's interesting to note that, while Fowles disavows the notion that this is a biographical work, he reports that he spent a short period teaching at a private boarding school on a similar Greek island, Spetsai. There, by the way, he encountered a villa on which he based "Bourani," the mystical villa of his story. Fowles also notes that this is a book that especially invites readers to project their own meanings and interpretations. Like many Trickster works of art, the reader finds himself both provoked and thrilled. The Magus' manipulation of Nicholas seems at once benevolent and at other times sadistic and unconscionable. One of the variations of the Magus archetypal is the magician as guru-teacher, e.g. the Zen master or Don Juan in the Castaneda works, who ruthlessly manipulate their students in order to bring enlightenment.
I am almost certainly like any other reader in projecting my own subjectivity onto this complex and often mesmerizing tale. For me, the point can be found late in the book, when Nicholas stumbles across a fable left behind after Conchis departs - a story of a young prince who lives in a kingdom with "no islands, no princesses and no God." Without depriving the reader of finding and reading the fable for him or herself, I'll simply say that, for me, Fowles could have ended the book with the fable (or even simply told the fable rather than writing the book). The point of the fable: There is no truth beyond magic and, with that realization, we all can become magicians.
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