The Magus

By John Fowles

The Magus (1965) is a postmodern novel by British author John Fowles, telling the story of
Nicholas Urfe, a young British graduate who is teaching English on a small Greek island.
Urfe becomes embroiled in the psychological illusions of a master trickster, which become
increasingly dark and serious. Considered an example of metafiction, it was the first novel
written by Fowles, but the third he published. In 1977 he published a revised edition. [1] In
1999 The Magus was ranked on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching
number 93 on the editors' list, and 71 on the readers' list.[2] In 2003, the novel was listed at
number 67 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.[3]

The Magus was the first novel John Fowles wrote, but his third to be published, after The
Collector (1963) and The Aristos (1964). He started writing it in the 1950s, under the original
title of The Godgame. He based it partly on his experiences on the Greek island of Spetses,
where he taught English for two years at the Anargyrios School.[4][5] He worked on it for
twelve years before its publication in 1965. Despite gaining critical and commercial success,
he continued to rework it, publishing a final revision in 1977.

John Fowles Biography 

John Fowles was born on March 31st, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England. The son of a
tobacco importer, Fowles’ family lived a middle-class lifestyle when he was a child. As a
child, Fowles’ cousin Peggy became his nursemaid and close companion, although she was
eighteen years older than him.

Fowles attended Bedford School during the Second World War when he was in his early
teenage years. He was an excellent student and, after graduating, was preparing to join the
Royal Marines when the war ended and he was sent to Okehampton Camp in Devon instead.

Fowles completed his military service in 1947 and returned to school, attending New College,
Oxford, later admitting that this time in the military only made him want to become and
“anarchist”. At Oxford, Fowles’ began reading the French existentialists such as Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus and developed an interest in writing. When he graduated, however,
he began working as a teacher, taking a job on the Greek island of Spetses.

During this time, Fowles’ wrote poetry that he later had published and met his future wife,
Elizabeth Christy whom he married in 1954.  He left the island in 1953 and returned to
England. For the next ten years after his marriage, Fowles taught English as a foreign
language at St. Godric’s College in Hampstead, London.

Through this time, Fowles continued to write novels and his first, “The Collector” was
published in 1963. British and American crowds loved the novel and Fowles was able to quit
his teaching job and become a professional writer. “The Collector” was adapted into a film in
1965.
Fowles published several more books throughout the 1960’s, including his most well-known
work, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” at the end of the decade in 1969 and “The Magus”
in 1968. With “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, Fowles became an international success
and the novel was adapted into a film in 1981 that did very well in theaters.

Fowles went on to serve as the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum from 1977 to 1988 when
he retired after suffering a mild stroke. In 1990, his wife, Elizabeth died of cancer and Fowles
was sent into a deep depression. Eight years later, he married again to a woman named Sarah
Smith.

On November 5th, 2005, Fowles died of heart failure at the age of 79 in Axminster Hospital
in Dorset, England.

Characters

Main

 Nicholas Urfe – The protagonist, a 25-year-old Englishman who goes to Greece to

teach English and one day stumbles upon 'the waiting room.'
 Alison Kelly – Nicholas' recent Australian girlfriend, whom he abandons to go to
Greece.
 Maurice Conchis – Wealthy intellectual who is a main player in the masques.
 Lily Montgomery / Julie Holmes / Vanessa Maxwell – Young woman who is involved
in the masques and with whom Nicholas falls in love.

Other

 Joe – young black gypsy, involved in the masques.

 Maria – Conchis's maid.
 Demetriades – fellow teacher at the school.
 Lily de Seitas (older) – Lily's mother.
 Rose de Seitas – Lily's identical twin sister.
 Benji de Seitas – the younger brother of the Seitas twins.
 Kemp – Unmarried woman who rents Nicholas a room in London.
 Jojo – Young girl whom Nicholas pays to accompany him.

Characters Analysis 

Nicholas Urfe – the main character of the story. Nicholas is a 25 year old man who lives in
England and loses his parents at a young age. Living off the insurance payout from his parents
deaths, Nicholas is able to take a teaching job on a remote Greek island where he meets Mr.
Conchis and falls prey to his psychological experiment. The nature of the novel, and therefore
the nature of Nicholas, is not always clear. At time, Nicholas is decisive and intelligent, at
others he seems to be dim witted and lackadaisical. He falls in love very quickly and deeply,
at first with Alison and then, later with Julie. He seems to truly feel for the former, however,
as the climax of the book (his confrontation with Conchis) comes after he has been told that
Alison committed suicide. Nicholas’s relationship with Conchis is also an interesting one. In
the beginning, he visits the old man not out of pity, but out of a strange fascination. He wants
to hear Conchis’s stories and tales as he finds the man very odd and wishes to solve the puzzle
of his existence.In this way, Nicholas was experimenting and studying Conchis before
Conchis was ever doing the same to him. In the end he confronts the man and demands to
know the truth of the performances. At this point, Nicholas has been driven half out of his
mind with the loss of his grip on reality and the idea that his girlfriend killed herself. Nicholas
returns to England after learning about the experiment, but can’t seem to put the experience
behind him for a while. Almost as though he’d been traumatized, he still wonders if he is in
Conchis’s game.

Mr. Conchis – the antagonist of the novel. Conchis is the wealthy, odd, intellectual man who
lives in a large villa on the island and hires actors to create performances in order to run a
psychological experiment on Nicholas. Conchis’s reason for being fascinated with Nicholas in
particular is never made clear. Perhaps it is because Nicholas is merely the first person to visit
him in a long time. Whatever the reason, he seems to be a little insane himself as he puts quite
a lot of effort into running the experiment without Nicholas’s consent. Conchis has a dark
past. He was the former chief of the island, who was exiled after he let almost the entire male
population die when he would not kill one man during the war. One thing that is genuine
about Conchis’s character was his guilt over this incident. He also appears to have had a wife
who died shortly after their wedding, although the details of this are never made clear
either. Conchis ends the book by fleeing the island in shame after his experiment is found out.

Julie Holmes/ Vanessa Maxwell – Julie is a young woman that tells Nicholas that she was
hired as an actress with her twin sister, June to perform in Conchis’s masquerades. She
originally takes on the role of his late wife. At the end of the novel, June tells Nicholas that
Julie is a doctor named Vanessa Maxwell.

John Fowles's novel 'The Magus' is a mystery thriller that also represents a psychological study. The
narrative structure of the work includes a character who is self-centered, and cunningly dismissive
toward women, and British. Nicholas Urfe enters a journey of discovery where he learns certain
truths about himself. Fowles's novel explores the mystery of life as it unfolds as a struggle for the
main character within the work. As the novel begins, Nicholas is in England visiting Alison. Fowles
characterizes Alison as emotionally manipulative. He balances the affair and his new job in Greece
with relative ease until he contacts his predecessor, who informs him about life on the island.
Nicholas's friend fails to elaborate fully concerning the warning, which causes him to be curious. He
dumps Alison and heads to the island where he embarks upon some local expeditions. Over the
course of the novel, Nicholas falls in love with Lily; he is kidnapped as part of an experiment to test
how his feelings of anger transcend without also taking vengeance. By the end of 'The Magus,'
Nicholas believes that it is now important for him to live a life of integrity.

John Fowles was deeply interested in the theories of Carl Jung when he was struggling with
this book—and it was a struggle, as he freely admits in his preface to the revised edition in
1977. He was continually rewriting and abandoning drafts as inadequate to the myth he
wished to express. The confusion of many readers suggests that perhaps he never did get it
quite right. Nevertheless, that the story is somehow analogous to what Jung called the process
of individuation seems quite clear. The immature person naively assumes that the conscious
Ego is the Self, the center of being. In order to be whole, such a person must explore the
unacknowledged part of the psyche—in symbolic terms, a journey into the underworld of the
subconscious. That world is haunted by archetypal forms, primitive drives, images derived
perhaps from racial memories but intuitively perceived as applicable to one’s own emotional
and moral state. Only thus can the adolescent psyche acquire mental and emotional maturity
and assume moral responsibility.

The modern, empirical, pseudoscientific orientation of masses of people tends to breed

individuals who look only at “things,” especially among men. (Conchis points out to Nicholas
that men look at things, but women look at the relationships between things, which he implies
is a better orientation.) The more poetically inclined soul, such as that of Nicholas, is aware of
the symbolic forms through literature but tends to escape...

The Magus is told from the point of view of Nicholas Urfe, who is bored with life. Having
attended Oxford and taught for a year at a public school, he decides to take a position as the
English teacher at the Lord Bryon School in Greece, on the island of Phraxos. Nicholas looks
up a former teacher there, and is warned to "Beware of the waiting-room", without
explanation. Nicholas is not deterred, but during the last few weeks before he leaves, he meets
Alison Kelly, an Australian girl who is about to begin training as an airline stewardess. They
are both sophisticated about sex and somewhat cynical, but each experiences some regret as
they go their separate ways.
During his first six months on Phraxos, Nicholas finds the school claustrophobic but the
island beautiful. He realizes that he cannot write good poetry and that he is having difficulty
forgetting Alison. In a funk, he visits a brothel in Athens and contracts a venereal disease. He
seriously contemplates suicide. The first of the novel's three parts ends at this point.
The mysteries begin as Nicholas goes swimming and someone leaves a book of poems,
evidently meant for him to find. As he looks in the woods nearby, he finds a gate to a villa
with a nearby sign Salle D'Attente, French for "waiting room." One of his colleagues at the
school explains that the villa is owned by a rich recluse named Maurice Conchis. Nicholas
decides to look him up and finds, inexplicably, that he is expected. After some conversation,
as Nicholas is leaving, he finds an old-fashioned glove on the path and surmises that someone
has been watching them.
Invited back for the next weekend, Nicholas is astonished by Conchis'collection of art and by
his claim to be psychic. After dinner, Conchis tells Nicholas about an episode in his boyhood
when he was fifteen and met a fourteen-year-old girl named Lily Montgomery, whose image
haunted him afterward. They were both musically inclined and fell in love, but in 1914, she
led him to feel that he ought to volunteer for the army. Conchis explains that he deserted at
the battle of Neuve Chapelle, and offers Nicholas a chance to gamble with his own life by
rolling a die and promising that he will take a cyanide pill if the die comes up six. It does, but
Nicholas refuses to take the pill; Conchis seems to approve his decision, and reveals that the
die was loaded against the roller--as was World War I against the soldiers. That night, as
Nicholas is going to sleep, he hears voices singing a war song and smells a foul stench.
The next day Conchis encourages Nicholas to read a pamphlet by Robert Foulkes, written as
he was waiting to be hanged in 1677. Nicholas takes it with him on a walk, falls asleep, and
awakes to see a man in 17th-century dress staring at him from across a ravine. The man
disappears before Nicholas can reach him.
At dinner that night, Conchis tells of his wartime pretense to be on leave so that he could
return to England to visit Lily. As Nicholas retires, hehears a harpsichord accompanied by a
recorder, and investigates, to find Conchis and a beautiful girl dressed in Edwardian clothes,
but he declines to interrupt them.
The next weekend "Lily" joins them after dinner and speaks in the language of the early
1900s. Their conversation is interrupted when a horn sounds, a spotlight illuminates a nymph
who runs by, pursued by a satyr, and another woman seems to shoot the satyr with an arrow.
Nicholas is bewildered but decides that Conchis must be re-creating masques for his own
amusement. Lily refuses to explain, and Conchis talks in parables. He describes an attempt to
found a Society for Reason after the war, and he tells the story of a rich collector whose
mansion is burned by a resentful servant. Nicholas begins to fall in love with Lily, who
professes to be as mystified by what Conchis may be up to as Nicholas is. Conchis explains
that she is a schizophrenic whom he indulges by letting her manipulate men in the controlled
environment at Bourani, but that Nicholas must not believe what she tells him. For the
weekend's culminating experience, Conchis hypnotizes Nicholas, who experiences the
separateness of himself from everything else. Nicholas leaves eager to return for more
adventures.
Alison has invited Nicholas to Athens the next weekend. Nicholas finds the villa closed up, so
he meets her and falsely tells her that he is suffering from syphilis. They have an enjoyable
weekend climbing in the mountains, at the end of which, back in Athens, Nicholas confesses
his lie and tells her about Bourani and Lily. Alison is hurt, and gives him an ultimatum: She
will quit her job and join him on Phraxos, or she will leave him. When Nicholas hesitates, a
violent argument ensues, and she refuses to let him back in their hotel room.
When Nicholas returns to the villa, Conchis drops the pretense that Lily is a schizophrenic
and tells him that she and her twin sister are actresses named Julie and June, whom Conchis
has hired for a theatrical experiment. The first evening, Conchis tells Nicholas the story of
Henrik Nygaard, a blind madman who believes that he talks with God. Afterward, Nicholas
goes to a passionate rendezvous with Julie in the woods, where he is shocked to discover that
Julie has sent her twinsister instead. June explains that they feel like prisoners, always
watched by Conchis' black valet, Joe, repeatedly told to learn lines and to prepare for
improvisations, but never told what it all means. The next day the twins tell Nicholas their
backgrounds and show him documents to support their statements. After a day of being
shadowed by Joe, even while they are inside an empty chapel, the twins leave with Conchis
on his yacht, vowing to insist that he begin to be forthright with them all.
The next Wednesday the yacht returns, and Julie meets Nicholas at night to assure him that
there will be no more pretense of schizophrenia; however, Nicholas is to join the twins in the
improvisation the next weekend, after which all will be explained. Julie again avoids sex with
Nicholas, pleading her menstrual period. On his way back to school inthe dark, Nicholas is
stopped by a patrol of soldiers in Nazi uniforms, who proceed to beat up a captured partisan.
To Nicholas's dismay, he receives a letter on Friday that he will not be welcomed, after all, at
the villa that weekend.
Nicholas receives two letters the next Thursday, one from Julie indicating that Conchis has
told her that Nicholas was sick and the other from Alison's roommate telling Nicholas that
Alison has committed suicide. He does not reveal this to Conchis the next weekend, but
demands to know the truth. Conchis explains that he is experimenting with a new form of
theater, without audience, in which everyone is an actor.
Conchis continues the supposed story of his life with the narrative of the German occupation,
when he served as mayor of Phraxos. A crucial event, interpreted differently by different
characters in the novel, occurred after the killing of three Austrian soldiers by guerrillas.
Conchis was told that the lives of eighty villagers about to be executed in reprisal would be
spared if he would club the guerrilla leader to death; he refused, and took his place with the
hostages, but managed to survive the mass execution.
Conchis then explains that Julie is his mistress and that they are all about to leave. When
Nicholas tries to confront Julie, she disappears, playfully demonstrating one of their hiding
places in an old bunker. Inside, she denies what Conchis has said, but as she climbs out of the
bunker, she is grabbed and Nicholas locked in. When he gets out, he finds the villa shut up
and a skull and a doll hanging from a nearby tree. Nicholas does not know what to think and
returns to school.
Several nights later, June appears at the school in distress, concerned about Julie. She says
that they have lied to Nicholas and falsified documents about who they are. Nicholas explains
that their games have cost the life of Alison. She apologizes, and explains that Conchis is
really a psychiatrist doing research and that Julie is at his house in the village, to which June
offers to take Nicholas. When he arrives, Nicholas and Julie make passionate love, after
which she tells him that Julie is not really her name, and walks out. Three men walk in and
restrain Nicholas as they administer an injection that makes him lose consciousness.
Some days later, Nicholas revives, is dressed in ritual garb, and is taken to a chamber
decorated with symbols, where he is seated on a throne facing 12 figures in bizarre costumes.
As they unmask, they are introduced as psychiatrists, including the former Lily as Dr.
Vanessa Maxwell, who reads a clinical diagnosis of Nicholas's psychological problems. She is
then stripped to the waist and tied to a flogging frame, as Nicholas is handed a cat-o'-nine-
tails and invited to judge her--and the others--by choosing to flay her or not. He declines.
Then Nicholas is tied to the frame, to watch Lily and Joe make tender love in front of him.
Afterward, he is again made unconscious.
Nicholas awakens on the mainland, alone. He returns to the school and gets himself fired. He
goes back to the villa and searches for clues. Although he finds a typescript of a story about
how a prince learns to become a magician by accepting that life is full of illusion, Nicholas
goes on looking for explanations. The second part of the book ends with his discovery that
Alison is still alive, her supposed suicide evidently part of the charade.
In the last part, Nicholas continues his research. Nicholas finds no record of Conchis'
supposed credentials in psychology. He interviews one of his predecessors at the Lord Byron
School, now living as a monk in Italy, but the monk is not interested in helping Nicholas. He
finally succeeds in locating a house in which a Montgomery lived during World War I and the
inhabitant directs him to one of the Montgomery daughters, a Mrs. Lily de Seitas. At first, she
toys with Nicholas, but when he finds out that she has twin daughters of her own, she admits
that she is a friend of Conchis--and of Alison. Nicholas is angry, partly over her refusal to tell
him where Alison is, but he gradually overcomes his resentment and they meet again.
Nicholas begins to appreciate what has happened, and even declines to discuss it with his
immediate predecessor at the Lord Byron School. Finally, Alison appears when he least
expects her, and they have a confrontation in Regent's Park, where he at first imagines that
they are being watched from Cumberland Terrace. Nicholas issues her an ultimatum--"them
or me." She rejects the ultimatum, and Nicholas walks away from her. When she follows him,
he slaps her without understanding why. Then he realizes that they are unobserved and asks
forgiveness. The novel ends at that point, with their future relationship uncertain.