John Fowles ([1966] 2004) The Magus

This book is worth reading for Fowels’s foreword written in 1976. He describes it as ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’.  But he makes no apology and neither should he. This is a magical book that keeps shape shifting. The narrator Nicholas Ufte is the kind of public school dolt that makes me want to bolt, but here he holds me spellbound. There’s lots of Shakespeare and classical allusions. Cochis is a Prospero like figure on the Greek island of ‘Bourani’ where Ufte teaches English in a quasi-like-public school. His testing of  Ufte through masques seems to rely on an Ariel like figure which brings to life people and episodes from his past and had me thinking they were ghosts. Prospero broke his staff.  Ufte sees through Cochis’s deception and realizes it’s money and not magic that is working behind the scenes, but can’t figure how it’s done, nor why. Neither can he help falling in love with one of the ‘actors’ Lily and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t, but there is a beautiful girlfriend, Alison, perhaps not quite as exquisite, that he’s left in  the lurch in drab old Blighty. This is a love test, with echoes of The Turn of the Screw, and Great Expectations with Cochis changing shape to play a Miss Havisham type character. There is a further complication in that ‘Lily’ has a copy in ‘Rose’, her twin sister and it is her that Ufte first embraces in a passionate kiss. If Ufte is a reliable narrator Conchis is an unreliable one whose story keeps changing the text, the understanding of the text and the performances of the actors. Alison’s suicide seems to be a kind of denouement, but the narrative carries on for a couple of hundred pages and Ufte begins to seem more like a  Malvolio figure boxed into his own kind of madness.  The trial scene seemed to me dated and of its time. And the last part seemed to me overlong. Ufte’s adoption of a poor wee Glasgow lassie, Jojo, for example, seemed to show him in a good light, but served no greater purpose. Fowles, in his foreword, says he thought of calling this book ‘The Godtest’. God rolls the dice and leaves the stage. He also says he never thought he’d become a publishable writer. ‘My strongest memory is of having to constantly abandon drafts because of an inability to describe what I wanted.’ Jesus help us.