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.
