The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of “The Magus”
I was recently directed to “The Magus” by John Fowles. It’s a book that you’ll either love or hate, but its significance isn’t in its merit as a work of fiction. Many people on the outer rim of new media’s entertainment circles look to this book as the genesis of a new kind of theater. I’ll dive into this a little more in other writings, but for now let’s focus on the book’s take on things.
While the book calls it the “meta-theater” at one point and the “godgame” at another, the purpose is simply to destroy a person’s sense of what is real and what is not. On a certain level this can be fascinating as you unravel the web of lies and deceit in the quest to find something real or some purpose to it all.
This is accomplished via a variety of interactions with people pretending to be someone acting as someone who is pretending to be someone else. Every time you think you’ve discovered the “real” person, you’re in fact looking at a carefully crafted fictional character concealing yet another invented character. The hope is that you become emotionally attached to one or more of them, at which point they betray you, regain your trust, and betray you again.
Etcetera.
The twists and turns in the book are such that you will not be able to put the book down until you are finished. In part this is because every time you think you know where the story is going it veers off wildly in a new direction, compelling you to seek out the ending.
Unfortunately, the author felt that since the point of the whole thing is to leave a person with no sense of what anything means, he leaves the book up in the air in order to give the reader a proper sense of eternal bewilderment. Picture Romeo and Juliet, but with the curtain falling as Romeo discovers Juliet unconscious and is in the process of deciding to kill himself… but you never find out if he does, or what happens to Juliet.
Oh how droll. How avant-garde. How … completely disrespectful of your readers.
But I digress… the good, the bad, and the ugly of “The Magus” by John Fowles follows.
*SPOILER WARNING* – Do not read any further if you’d like to avoid having details of the book revealed.
The Good
If you’re a fan of literature and classic works of art you’ll love this book. Everything from paintings to mythology to sculpture to music is referenced here. You’ll be in classic fanboy heaven.
Apart from that, as stated above, it really is a page-turner and one of the most unique things I’ve read in ages. It’s an emotional roller-coaster ride, altering between moments of tension, relief, betrayal, boredom, sadism, and outrage. You will experience something here.
The Bad
I’m using sub-headings to keep this organized.
The Characters – There are two likeable characters. They come into the book right near the end. One, a landlord, is glossed over quickly. The other, a disheveled but bright young lady, is around just long enough for us to really want to get to know her better. Then she’s simply cut out of the narrative.
That’s it. There are no other decent people in this book. The protagonist is a self-absorbed snob you spent a good 100-150 pages hating before he even takes his little trip and does anything interesting. His great love is a total flake. His other great love is a sociopath, as is pretty much everyone else. None of them die. They all really, really need to.
The Plot Holes – There are two big ones, and they’re severe.
- The protagonist would have, in the real world, lost his mind. He would have developed several neuroses, if not a total psychotic breakdown. He most certainly would never, ever have trusted anyone ever again. Instead he’s just slightly more honest, and his persecution complex changes form slightly.
- There’s a difference between “irony” and “contradiction”. It’s revealed that the people behind all of this live by two rules of life: never lie, and do as little harm as possible. Meanwhile they lie compulsively, even when it isn’t necessary, and inflict massive emotional trauma on someone that was “coming along” just fine when things were still fun.
The Ending – As mentioned above, there’s no ending. Romeo eternally contemplating suicide, the climax reached, will they make it? You’ll never know. And that’s the point. In the real world, things don’t end like that. In the real world the story continues, always and inevitably until we die. By ending at the point he did he establishes that they have created “unreality”.
Well, except that it’s artificial. The characters haven’t created unreality, the author has. In fact, this book I’m holding in my hands is so fake has absolutely nothing to do with our world at all. Wow. Useless.
Sociopathy As Enlightenment – If the propagators of all of this drama believed they were doing something “important”, they’d be concerned about the protagonist’s growth. They don’t appear to be. In fact, they pretty much forget all about him at the end. If they don’t actually care about him, then they did all of this for their own amusement. They tortured him for fun, and they’ll do it again. This is referred to as “intelligence”.
Miscellaneous Contrivances – There’s the scene where they say he can judge them, but then they make it impossible for him to actually pass judgment. It’s mentioned later, and the contradiction ignored. There’s his basic negative comparison near the end of people in England being different from Greece, but most young people go through that when they spend a few months in a foreign land… and yet we’re somehow meant to see this as a result of his experiences. It goes on and on… things that are supposed to have meaning that absolutely don’t, when you think about it.
The Ugly
The book is written in the first person, giving rise to two big problems. The first and most obvious is that we see everything through the main character’s eyes, and he’s an irritating little twerp. This kills subtext as well, making it impossible to just look at what’s happening and draw our own conclusions. “They were mad, I could tell,” rather than “he grimaced and shot me a dangerous look”. I’m not saying things didn’t get described (oh HOW they were described; the book is 650 pages long), I’m just saying that we’re constantly given the protagonist’s take on every little nuance.
If you can put up with that, then there’s the other hurdle: the literary references. Everything, everything, everything is related to some kind of literature or classic work of art. I don’t know what it is about “cultured” people that makes them think we want to hear them draw comparisons between the classics and everything else. If you’re one of them, let me give you a little object lesson:
Let’s say I saw a woman throw a lance with some skill. If I was the author of this book I might say: “She was as Artemis, a huntress of singular skill.”
Equally, I might say: “She was just like Princess Leia, beautiful but deadly with a blaster.”
Some people say that people who get dressed up and go to science fiction conventions need to get a life, but I just dare you to hang out with a “cultural sophisticate” for an afternoon some day. These people make fanboys look positively disinterested. Imagine Star Wars references in every other paragraph. For an entire book. That’s what it’s like to read this book for those of us who think of Homer as a fat stupid man from Springfield.
The Punchline
Read this book if you want to learn more about the premise behind the “meta-theater” or “godgame”, that elusive art-form that is secretly alive and well in the modern age. Just remember that this is the first word on the art-form, not the last! Taken at face value it’s a horrid thing to do to a person. Taken with some slight adjustments to the intent and premise, however, and it becomes an enjoyable and positive thing for everyone. If there was a book about this type of play, “The Magus” would merely be a mention in the introduction.
More on this topic to come.
If you don’t care about those things, this is a painful read. While it becomes really compelling at around page 120-150, and manages to hook you really deeply, you pay a price. The last quarter will have you completely infuriated and you never, ever get to exorcise those emotions. Rather, you are left depressed, desperate, and hanging in a flurry of intellectual masturbation.
Apologies to this book’s fans.
You might want to consider moving your spoiler warning three paragraphs up. I hit the sentence that begins, “Unfortunately…” and felt as if I’d been deprived of my own discovery one of the main points (or lack thereof) to this work. Reading the rest of the post though, I suppose that you may have saved me wasting a fair bit of time.
Hi Benjamin! I understand what you’re saying, and I do apologize if I gave a bit too much away.
The difficulty here is that the book has such strong supporters – which means that for every negative review there are a few positive ones from art and literature majors proud of themselves for “getting it”.
This means that, when the book turns what was once fun into a Machiavelli fan club, you’re left at least holding out for some kind of closure. I felt it was worth warning people that they wouldn’t get it… and I don’t think I’m spoiling the book by telling people it doesn’t have an ending. At least I hope I’m not.
…its just a story, the enire thing is a wonderful toying with story. Whats there to get?
Why elevate it into snobbish literature – just so you can throw stones at it? Surely you can pick some other book for that, like any Booker prize winner the last few years….Id give you some stones for that….
Man. Might I humbly suggest you have missed so many points in the book that, well, perhaps you ought to reconsider this review?
This is not supposed to be a “realistic” story. It is, in many ways, an intellectual exercise presented as a mixture of fable, parable, fantasy and, as you rightly observe, ripping good yarn. Is Urfe an obnoxious twerp? Of course he is. He’s *supposed* to be. That’s the *point*. And if the “point” of The Magus can be reduced to one overall notion (it can’t, but let’s give it a go) it is to illustrate an acted-out deconstruction of a flawed personality such as Urfe’s.
Would he really have lost his mind after these experiences? Maybe, maybe not. I actually think you underestimate the strength of the human mind and especially the resilience of a mind like Urfe’s: this cussed, self-serving, arrogant pseudo-intellectual. It is made quite clear that Urfe is not merely disorientated and messed around by Conchis’s masque; he is *seduced* by it too. He keeps going back for more long after he’s realised that he is a rat in a maze; that he can trust nothing. He does so precisely because Conchis has taken great care to make the Godgame seductive as well as unnerving and, occasionally, frightening. Conchis also realises that Urfe is intelligent enough and analytical enough to see through some of the charades and to take self-congratulatory pride in having done so.
The incident with Alison (and please, you shouldn’t put spoilers in like “nobody dies”) is, perhaps, the one time where they seriously might have pushed it too far but they correctly gambled that Urfe was too full of himself, too secretly proud of his callousness with women to do anything lastingly stupid. They knew that he would, at some deep level, be a little *pleased* about it. And so he was. Oh and there is no way Alison could reasonably be described as a “total flake”. That’s ridiculously exaggerrated.
Your problem with the book being written through Urfe’s eyes seems to indicate another point missed. This was a beautiful contrivance because Fowles writes with such attention to detail that he enables us to read between the lines. Although Urfe is describing things from his perspective we are allowed to see things he misses, or rather to see how he is often deluding himself and interpreting situations in flawed ways. I thought it was simply brilliant how Fowles achieved this. Countless times I found myself reading Urfe’s self-justifications and dismissals and thinking, “Oh really? Is that what you think she’ll do? Is that how you see this? Doesn’t look that way to me.” That is damned good writing. It’s *subtle* writing though, and as such it demands we pay attention. And if we do, the satisfaction to be gleaned is huge.
As for Conchis/De Seitas’s “commandments”… you’re being too literal. Ironically, you’re making the same mistake they tried to show Urfe he was making. Not only did they not say they never lie (I don’t know where you got that from) but their whole technique is to use “lies” to make their very point about honesty and truth: the uncertainty of those things *and* the value of them.
As for the literary references… well, I first read the book when I was very young and sure, many of those references were initially over my head, but here’s the thing: the book was so good that it made me educate myself about those references. I’m grateful to Fowles for that and I have spoken to a lot of fans of the book who say the same thing. It was an education as well as a delight to read. The Magus is not an easy read. Well, it is if you only give it a superficial reading, if you only go for the “page-turner” aspects of the book, but if you allow yourself to become immersed in Fowles’s wonderful, intelligent language and you allow yourself to roll with the literary punches it is a breathtaking experience. I first read the book when I was about 20. I am now 50 years old; I have just finished perhaps my fifth re-reading of it and it still strikes me as one of the greatest novels I have ever read.