Magus (Fowles)

The Magus
John Fowles, 1966
Little, Brown & Co.; Random House
~650 pp. (varies by publisher)
ISBN-13: 9780316296199 (Little, Brown & Co.)
ISBN-13: 9780440351627 (Random House)

Summary
Filled with shocks and chilling surprises, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature. In it, a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching position on a Greek island where his friendship with the owner of the islands most magnificent estate leads him into a nightmare. As reality and fantasy are deliberately confused by staged deaths, erotic encounters, and terrifying violence, Urfe becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his life.

A work rich with symbols, conundrums and labrinthine twists of event, The Magus is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining, a work that ranks with the best novels of modern times. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—March 31, 1926
• Where—Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, UK
• Death—November 5, 2005
• Where—Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK
• Education—University of Edinburg; B.A. Oxford University
• Awards—Silver Pen Award

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times (of London) named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles. Gladys Richards belonged to an Essex family originally from London as well. The Richards family moved to Westcliff-on-Sea during 1918, as Spanish Flu swept through Europe, for Essex was said to have a healthy climate. Robert met Gladys Richards at a tennis club in Westcliff-on-Sea during 1924. Though she was ten years younger, and he in bad health from the World War I, they were married a year later on 18 June 1925. Nine months and two weeks later Gladys gave birth to John Robert Fowles.

Fowles spent his childhood attended by his mother and by his cousin Peggy Fowles, 18 years old at the time of his birth, who was his nursemaid and close companion for ten years. Fowles attended Alleyn Court Preparatory School. The work of Richard Jefferies and his character Bevis were Fowles's favorite books as a child. He was an only child until he was 16 years old.

Education
During 1939, Fowles won a position at Bedford School, a two-hour train journey north of his home. His time at Bedford coincided with the Second World War. Fowles was a student at Bedford until 1944. He became Head Boy and was also an athletic standout: a member of the rugby-football third team, the Fives first team and captain of the cricket team, for which he was bowler.

After leaving Bedford School during 1944, Fowles enrolled in a Naval Short Course at Edinburgh University. Fowles was prepared to receive a commission in the Royal Marines. He completed his training on 8 May 1945—VE Day. Fowles was assigned instead to Okehampton Camp in the countryside near Devon for two years.

During 1947, after completing his military service, Fowles entered New College, Oxford, where he studied both French and German, although he stopped studying German and concentrated on French for his BA. Fowles was undergoing a political transformation. Upon leaving the marines he wrote, "I...began to hate what I was becoming in life—a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist."

It was also at Oxford that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing, like Fowles', was motivated from a feeling that the world was wrong.

Teaching Career
Fowles spent his early adult life as a teacher. His first year after Oxford was spent at the University of Poitiers. At the end of the year, he received two offers: one from the French department at Winchester, the other "from a ratty school in Greece," Fowles said, "Of course, I went against all the dictates of common sense and took the Greek job."

During 1951, Fowles became an English master at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on the Peloponnesian island of Spetsai, a critical part of Fowles's life, as the island which would later serve as the setting of his novel The Magus. Fowles was happy in Greece, especially outside of the school. He wrote poems that he later published, and became close to his fellow exiles. But during 1953 Fowles and the other masters at the school were all dismissed for trying to institute reforms, and Fowles returned to England.

On the island of Spetsai, Fowles had grown fond of Elizabeth Christy, who was married to one of the other teachers. Christy's marriage was already ending because of the relationship with Fowles, and though they returned to England at the same time, they were no longer in each other's company.

It was during this period that Fowles began drafting The Magus. His separation from Elizabeth did not last long. On 2 April 1954 they were married and Fowles became stepfather to Elizabeth's daughter from her first marriage, Anna. After his marriage, Fowles taught English as a foreign language to students from other countries for nearly ten years at St. Godric's College, an all-girls in Hampstead, London.

Writing Career
During late 1960, though he had already drafted The Magus, Fowles began working on The Collector. He finished his first draft in a month, but spent more than a year making revisions before showing it to his agent. Michael S. Howard, the publisher at Jonathan Cape was enthusiastic about the manuscript. The book was published during 1963 and when the paperback rights were sold in the spring of that year it was "probably the highest price that had hitherto been paid for a first novel," according to Howard. The success of his novel meant that Fowles was able to stop teaching and devote himself full-time to a literary career. The Collector became a film in 1965.

Against the counsel of his publisher, Fowles insisted that his second book published be The Aristos, a non-fiction collection of philosophy. Afterward, he set about collating all the drafts he had written of what would become his most studied work, The Magus (1965), based in part on his experiences in Greece.

During 1965 Fowles left London, moving to a farm, Underhill, in Dorset, where the isolated farm house became the model for "The Dairy" in the book Fowles was then writing, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). The farm was too remote, "total solitude gets a bit monotonous," Fowles remarked, and during 1968 he and his wife moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he lived in Belmont House, also used as a setting for parts of The French Lieutenant's Woman. In the same year, he adapted The Magus for cinema.

The film version of The Magus (1968) was generally considered awful; when Woody Allen was asked whether he'd make changes in his life if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he jokingly replied he'd do "everything exactly the same, with the exception of watching The Magus."

The French Lieutenant's Woman was made into a film during 1981 with a screenplay by the British playwright Harold Pinter (who would later receive a Nobel laureate in Literature) and was nominated for an Oscar.

Later Years
Fowles lived the rest of his life in Lyme Regis. His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1981), and A Maggot (1985) were all written from Belmont House. His wife Elizabeth died in 1990.

Fowles became a member of the Lyme Regis community, serving as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1979–1988, retiring from the museum after having a mild stroke. Fowles was involved occasionally in politics in Lyme Regis, and occasionally wrote letters to the editor advocating preservation. Despite this involvement, Fowles was generally considered reclusive. In 1998, he was quoted in the New York Times Book Review as saying, "Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."

Fowles, with his second wife Sarah by his side, died in Axminster Hospital, 5 miles from Lyme Regis on 5 November 2005. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Great, good, lavish, eerie fun.... The Magus is a stunner.... It is at once a pyrotechnical extravaganza, a wild, hilarious charade, a dynamo of suspense and horror, a profoundly serious probing into the nature of moral consciousness, a dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul..... Read it in one sitting if possible—but read it.
Eliot Fremont-Smith - New York Times

Mr. Fowles's narrative gift is genuine, his manipulation of suspense is of a high order.
Brian Moore - Washington Post

Fast and frightening.... An emotional maelstrom of high intrigue.
Newsweek

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Magus

1. Talk about the significance the novel's title. A magus is a magician or a trickster—one of mythology's enduring archetypes. How does the title relate to the events of the book? (See question 13.)

2. Why does Nicholas decide to leave his life in England and take up a position as an English teacher on Phraxos?

3. What kind of person is Nicholas? What is he seeking...or running away from?

4. What are Nicholas's feelings upon visiting the cloistered elegance of Maurice Conchis's villa? What is it that draws him to return again...and again?

5. What is Nicholas to learn from the gamble with the loaded gun, the die, and the cyanide pill? When Nicholas refuses to take his own life, why does Conchis agree with his decision? (See question 14.)

6. Did you believe the twins' story about being kept as prisioners on Bouranis and made to perform at Conchis's will? What about the later one that Conchis is a psychiatrist doing research? In other words, were you continually tricked and bedazzled as was Nicholas?

7. Talk about Nicholas's reaction to the news that Allison had committed suicide. Is his response appropriate? Is he remorseful, sad, relieved, accusatory?

8. Discuss the meaning of the judgement ritual, the stripping, offer to flay Julia, and lovemaking in front of Nicholas? What is the point of it all?

9. What is the point, in the end, of Conchis's entire charade? What lesson is he attempting to teach Nicholas? What does Nicholas, for his part, learn?

10. Is Maurice Conchis's trickery benevolent or sadistic?

11. Is Nicholas wrong to demand that Allison choose "them or me"? Why does she reject his demand? What is the future of their relationship?

12. Were you satisfied or dissatisfied with the ending? (When the book was first published, Fowles has said he received angry letters from readers complaining about the book's indeterminant conclusion.)

13. What ideas about the nature of life might Fowles be attempting to express in The Magus? All mentors and great teachers, in religion, history, or literature, even in pop culture, use a combination of magic, fable, and tricks to teach their proteges life's wisdom. How does Conchis fit into this tradition?

14. Finally, Fowles wrote to a reader that "to be free (which means rejecting all the gods and political creeds and the rest) leaves one no choice but to act according to reason: that is, humanely to all humans." How does this apply to what Nicholas learns from his time on the island?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)

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