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.

Caleb Booker