Book review: The Magus by John Fowles

The Magus is a long book. Almost 600 pages!

Part I: London and Greece

I didn't like the main character but I LOVED the writing of him as a self-centered, narcissistic intellectual with a good deal of self-awareness. I felt that I, as well as a lot of other young people, could relate to his ideas about the nobility of being alone as one who can't but inflict emotional pain on others through relationships, although he seeks affairs with women frequently. When he meets Alison, I again was enamored with the writing that I thought described her as certainly a girl with many flaws but that at the same time acknowledged her whole self in a way that made me love her and her influence on Nicholas. I began to really like him, maybe because of her influence, and them as a couple, and I forgot about what a jerk he self-described prior to her entry.

It was heartbreaking when they separated for his departure to Greece (I didn't like him very much again). The total change of scenery however was absolutely exquisite again with the detailed descriptions of life on an Greek island. The writing of this section and the description of the total solitude there made me feel that it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and, at the same time, that there are many challenges to living in such an isolated place that is actually riddled with poverty and petty relationships fostered by people living in close quarters for generations. Again, I think the author is skilled at acknowledging both the good and the bad at the same time of his subjects, which in this case was the island Phraxos. Nicholas was a poor thing, so to speak, and pretty despicable when he becomes depressed and tries to commit suicide.

Part II: the "mysteries"

The story with Conchis at Bourani is really tremendous. I was sure at one point that it was all magic and had no other rational explanation! Usually the reader's experience is the other way around, I think, where the characters fear the supernatural but the reader is assured that it's not. I thought the writing and the way that the different layers and scenes were introduced here were absolutely brilliant. I also was impressed by all of the references to music, art, literature and mythology; almost all of the former three categories I had no reference for but I felt that I was familiar with enough of the mythological references to follow the suggestions that they made of the story's direction. I was also excited to learn about additional mythological goddesses who are related to Artemis (my self-proclaimed patron goddess), like Astarte, Ashtaroth and Isis.

I loved the scenes of Alison coming to Athens. At that point in the story, Nicholas was beginning to really become enamored with Lily and what he imagined she was. But the context in which they were spending time together seemed so contrived -- in some way -- that I predicted she couldn't be possibly what he wanted her to be. And so the return of Alison, who we know he had thought of often and probably underestimated his love for, seemed really important, as if it would snap him back to reality.

He was pulled out of his little world of magic at Bourani and fall back in love with Alison (I thought) but it didn't end well. What I did love was the description of their time together. First, Nicholas didn't want to meet her at all because he (correctly) anticipated an unpleasant clashing to two worlds: his past life in England and with Alison and his current life on Phraxos and the intoxicating mysteries of Conchis at Bourani. Furthermore, he thinks he is committing himself to Lily/Julie and that she is too pure, in his mind, to justify a breach of his "commitment" by being intimate with Alison. All of this is of course either unspoken or not yet reciprocated by Lily/Julie, but Nicholas is convinced of the importance of these things. This boils down to him being completely intoxicated with the scene at Bourani.

When he meets Alison, he immediately finds things to criticize about her. However, just by being herself, which is open and honest and totally authentic with all the good and the bad, she slowly wears down his guard such that he can't help but start to like her again, despite his best efforts not to. I imagined this being shot as in a movie, with some beautiful sunlit images of Alison indicating how he can't help but respect her transparency with him and her natural lightness. Of course, he doesn't want to be worn down. 

"But I had, so to speak, to be irritated; so I seized on her buoyancy, her ability to bob up from the worst disappointments. I thought she ought to have been more subdued, and much sadder." 

Still, they spend an amazing day and evening together, unplanned, on Mount Parnassus and in the end he is worn down and realizes, with still an unbelievable amount of selfishness as well as immaturity, how he thinks he feels.

"It rushed on me, it was quite simple, I did lover her, I wanted to keep her and I wanted to keep -- or to find -- Lily. It wasn't that I wanted one more than the other, I wanted both, I had to have both; there was no emotional dishonesty in it. The only dishonesty was in my feeling dishonest, concealing... it was love that finally drove me to confess, not cruelty, not a wish to be free, to be callous and clear, but simply love."

He then goes on to confess about Lily/Julie. Although Nicholas has limits to his self-awareness, I think this is a great line that displays the self-awareness that he does possess:

"I had chosen the worst of all possible moments to be honest, and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final behing honest would bring... but love, that need to be understood."

How true. It's as if he believes he deserves a medal or an award for this confession, because selfishly he can only think of the hurdle he has cleared to be honest; he cannot think through how his confession will make Alison feel. And so this is a great failure, ending with Alison storming out of the hotel the next morning without forgiveness. Following this, he goes back to Phraxos where he is quickly re-enmeshed in the mysteries there.

Fast forward to page 343: he receives a letter from Ann Taylor, Alison's flatmate back in London, with newspaper clippings of "Air Hostess Suicide." Alison has committed suicide.

It's hard to figure out the source of his emotion when he gets this. There is a lot of guilt, because he believes his confession is what drove her to kill herself. But I believe he also suspects that the loss of her will be a wound so deep that he can't quite even imagine the depths of it and suspects that it was affect him terribly. Of course, in his manner he tries to think of other things, like Lily/Julie, and to not face his sadness because he doesn't have the emotional equipment to really deal with it. He shifts all of his projections completely on Lily/Julie. I think he has the right feelings but of course he is aiming them at the wrong person.

"And Julie; she now became a total necessity. Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me."

When I read this part I almost didn't believe it. I felt as Nicholas did, but for entirely different reasons. And this describes my experience for a lot of the book. I felt like I was riding the wave of experience with him and very much in sync with his feelings as the protagonist  although I was the reader, but my feelings were for much different reasons. The mysteries at Bourani, the feeling of hating it but also not wanting it to stop, and interminable dragging on through some parts of the book to heighten the suspense and the sense that something must happen: I felt really like I was right there with him.

Part III: the end

But how the eff does this all wrap up? Some themes I noticed:

• Europe (Greece in particular) v. England: Greece and other European peoples with more free-flowing manners and emotions were frequently contrasted against the British to portray the latter as stiff, good at lying and unable to properly express themselves

• Gender tensions: Nicholas has a serious double standard for sexual liberation between men and women; it seems to be okay for him to have many liaisons, but he is turned off by women who are too overtly sexual (e.g. Alison) and turned on by Lily/Julie who, in her role as a 1915 English maid, is perfectly puritanically conservative and reserved. This gets back to theme number one, about the English emphasis on propriety, puritanism and reservedness. This is one of multiple examples of gender compare/contrast; is Nicholas's downfall related to his male gender? All of Conchis's "victims" are male. It certainly seems like he, at least, has a point to make about gender. Furthermore, at one point Conchis suggests that if it were up to women there would be no war, because women are adept at seeing the relationships between things -- almost that they are more evolved than men -- and to them the futility and pointlessness of war is immediately obvious (in a way that it is not to men). To such leaders, war would never proceed because women see through the bravado, machismo and glorification of war that may be used to mobilize men.

• Sexuality and competency with emotions: Best illustrated by the gods-in-masks trial scene at the book's end, much is made of Nicholas's tendencies to sexually prey on young women and maybe that this is rooted in his adolescent emotional competencies. This scene was crazy to me until they laid it all out in clear language, really turning the tables on him because the relationship he perceived with Lily/Julie was really no different from any other in his life, although he thinks it is profound in a new way for him. They often refer to psychology in the book and use it to explain Nicholas's behavior in that monologue, in particular that his sub-optimal relationship with both parents have led him to be a terrible partner to young women in the most important relationships in his life. Additionally and in a different scene, Lily de Sades goes on obliquely about the purpose of the godgame somehow in relation to how enlightened her family (she herself, her husband, and now her daughters) are sexually; she has had relations with Conchis, her husband with an Indian mistress -- all with full consent of the other partner -- and her daughters are uninhibited enough to sleep with their friends, e.g. Joe the actor, and to perform sexual acts for Nicholas's benefit, so to speak, in the play. This seems pretty wild for 1953 England. (And Nicholas is disgusted for at least three reasons: it's uncouth behavior for young women in terms of conventional standards, it's a taste of his own medicine, and it's used to draw him into an elaborate trap in the play.) I'm not sure what Lily de Sades means in the end by saying that they have a great mission to carry out with Conchis: is it that they think the world needs liberation from puritan shackles? (The opposite of which is Dionysian bacchanalia?) Yet another point here is that Alison is the opposite of Nicholas: she's sexual and she has competency with her emotions. She knows what she wants and she know how to be a partner and she can see through him in a second. By contrasting Nicholas against Alison, it seems like John Fowles is really trying to demote a way of seeing life and living it (Nicholas's) and to promote the opposite approach (Alison's), although they each have their flaws and no way is perfect.