The Magus

by John Fowles (1965). Published by Little Brown & Company.

26 May 2007. Up to page 227 of 607.


A good author can manipulate the reader’s general interest into a sort of hunger. One way of doing this is to create suspense. You see this a lot in the Harry Potter books. Halfway into the book, you’ve got about seventeen different storylines going at once and are smacking your arm like a junkie waiting for the next little hit of information on any subject whatsoever. Here, the author is playing on the natural instinct of the human mind to constantly orient itself. By being stingy and tantalizing with information, JK Rowling hooks us firmly and well.
John Fowles traps his readers in a different sort of way. The first section of his book, “The Magus,” follows the life of a jaded and selfish young man named Nicholas Urfe. The story is quite believable. We see how Mr. Urfe falls in love with a feisty young Australian girl named Alison, only to leave her in order to run away to a solitary Greek island named Phraxos, where he plans to teach English and nurture his own poetic talent. Shortly after he gets to the island, he comes to the sobering realization that he has no poetic talent worth nurturing. Furthermore, the people of the island bore him to death; the children he teaches are more interested in their job prospects than in literature; the other teachers are all stick-in-the-muds. He contemplates suicide but can’t bring himself to do the deed.
The whole story is told in the first person, and the language is so rich and spirited that, while we can’t bring ourselves to really like Nicholas Urfe, we do think he might be a tad harsh when he labels himself untalented. Indeed, he seems to be a man of wonderfully acute and active intelligence. The danger is that all this intelligence is now trapped on an island with nothing to apply itself to. We’ve come right into a cul-de-sac of the soul, and we’re only a tenth of the way through the book. We can’t help but imagine that the rest of the book will be an excruciatingly detailed meditation on loneliness and boredom and routine, with a prose whose eloquence and beauty grow in inverse proportion to the suspense quotient.
So by the time the character of Maurice Conchis makes his entrance, we’re SO ready for a little bit of magic.
Maurice Conchis is an old man who lives an apparently solitary life in a mansion almost hidden from view. He is surrounded by books and beautiful paintings, periodically immersing himself in elaborate harpsichord music and in the undersea life of the nearby reefs and islets.
It certainly seems that Conchis is the Magus described in the book’s title, but what sort of magic does he have at his command? At first, it seems that the magic referred to is only the magic of enlightenment, of friendship, the magic of hope and engagement in life. But that’s only part of what’s going on, because Conchis also starts dropping hints that he’s a more literal type of magician; that he’s discovered a secret method for gaining contact with the spirit world.
Soon we’re caught up in a game of many-layered ambiguity. As Conchis spins out the story of his early life at a leisurely pace, the characters he describes begin appearing in real life. But Nicholas Urfe refuses to believe they’re actually ghosts, and he soon puts his intellect to the task of figuring out how exactly Conchis has organized this extensive charade. At the same time, he finds himself falling in love with one of Conchis’s “ghosts,” the delightfully coquettish Lily, who corresponds to Conchis’s first love, a woman whose erotic coercion prompted him to enlist in the army as a foot soldier in the first world war.
So is Conchis a teacher? A charlatan? A dandy? A philosopher? What is the purpose behind the elaborate masque that he constructs around poor Nicholas Urfe?
I can’t tell yet, but it seems as though Conchis’s masque is very much meant to be a collection of all the kinds of magic that fiction and literature can offer to rescue us from boredom and despair. Fowles seems to be gleefully mixing up a potion that includes just as much of the profane as it does the profound: mystery and romance, mythological symbolism and historical intrigue as well as serious meditations on death, free will, and the inevitability of evil all come together around Conchis, and the real magic behind it all is the way that the reader’s mind comes alive when faced with the many emotional and intellectual challenges presented by this truly fascinating book.

2 June 2007; pp. 227-351

It’s important when reading this book to keep remembering that as the reader, you have an advantage over the narrator. You, after all, are reading a work of fiction. Anything goes. And if the fiction you’re reading is a book called “The Magus”, you at least have to entertain the fact that some real magic is going on.
You have to remind yourself of this fact to keep from getting annoyed by the way that poor Nicholas Urfe keeps dragging his feet, concocting less and less plausible theories to explain the strange things that are going on around him. How is it that he sees the beautiful Lily—supposedly a ghost conjured up from Mr. Conchis’s past—down by the beach and moments later standing up on the balcony of Conchis’s mansion, looking wistfully to sea? Nicholas U of course rules out the supernatural and becomes convinced that “Lily” has a twin sister. He suggests the matter to Conchis, who at first scoffs at it, but soon the twin sister reveals herself, and Nicholas Urfe feels smugly confirmed that he worked out the secret.
To me, though, it seems more likely—because it’s more interesting—that Nicholas hasn’t discovered the existence of twins, he’s created their existence. At one point, Conchis tried to convince Nick that Lily is actually a schizophrenic, compelled to always put on new masks and pretenses. And at one point, Lilly refers to herself as Astarte, a Semitic Goddess of mystery who corresponds to the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. The reference to Astarte appears playful, and almost passes unnoticed amidst the many other mythic and cultural references dropped around this book, unless you recall that John Fowles has dedicated the book “To Astarte.”
So for my money, Lilly (who later claims that her real name is Julie Holmes, sister to June Holmes) is most probably the goddess Astarte herself, a sort of mad goddess who needs the enraptured imagination of a clever young man like Nicholas Urfe in order to guide the constant changes of her own identity.
All of which would be a fascinating intellectual game that we as readers could play alongside poor Nick Urfe, if it weren’t for the fact that Urfe seems to have chosen the wrong game to play. He’s determined to have sex with Lilly–Julie. He thinks about her constantly. The more he thinks about her and how to get her away from Conchis, the more Conchis fades into the background, and also the promise of a gift of wisdom and enlightenment that Conchis seemed once to extend. Earlier in the book, Conchis seemed to have something to say, something about morality and mortality. He had survived the horrors of the trenches in the First World War; he had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second. In one creepy incident, he uses a loaded die and a cyanide tablet to bring Urfe face-to-face with the fear of death.
There’s a sense that if Nicholas weren’t so dead set on sexual conquest, he might listen more to Conchis, and Conchis would then have more to say. But instead, he keeps pursuing Julie through all her various identities. And as he does so, he keeps encountering more and more frightening characters, including a man dressed as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, and a troop of men dressed as Nazi soldiers (Nick, of course, is convinced that they’re actors in Conchis’s hire).
The book seems both a fantastical retelling of the story of “Faust” and more especially “The Tempest.” But the references to the World Wars suggest that the turmoil of the twentieth century make it impossible to escape fully into fantasy. Heaven may still be something phantasmagoric, but Hell has already been brought into being in this world in the recent past, and new generations discover this at their peril.
This is a fun book to review, although it’s so unusual that it’s hard not to want to just summarize the whole thing.
The emotional spine of the book is the relationship between Nick and his old flame Alison, who tries to draw him back into her life during a weekend trip to Mount Parnassus. Nick seems to view her as nothing more than a distraction and an annoyance until at one point something she does reminds him of a poem he once read, at which point he decides he has to have her as well as Lilly.
The argument that ensues is the most real thing in the book. Alison accuses Nick of being too cowardly to be capable of love, and Nick proves her right by only being able to respond with lame attempts at wit and romance, constantly calling her ‘darling,’ and calling himself a worthless bastard. Which is only an excuse because it’s obvious that this is a man who is actually quite in love with himself.
Before the argument with Alison, the game between Conchis and Nick seems like a wonderful second chance at life and fulfillment. But once we see that Nick has the chance to be with this woman who loves him, and blindly wounds her by chosing a woman who seems only to be a fantasy, or who rather seems to be fantasy itself, we can’t help but felt hat the game has become hollow. And at this point, Nick shifts from being someone we have difficulty liking to someone we sort of hate.

16 June 2007; p. 235-end

In order to discuss this book, I have to mention another book I read a long time ago: “Illuminautus!” by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea. Today, the book is known mainly as a cult classic. It breaks all the rules, it fails majestically, it reads like bad 70s porn, it’s full of adolescent attempts at far-out chaotic montages of images that are almost unreadable. The sex is raunchy, the violence is graphic, and the whole this seems to have been plotted in a drugged-out haze.
But at the time I read it, I was only twelve years old, and it was the book that got me truly interested in reading. Although it’s not the sort of book I would like to reread now, it does hold a special place in my heart, and it’s important for me to think about it and understand what made it so meaningful at the time.
Cut down below all the psychedelic and the stew of conspiracy theories, get passed all the injudicious slang and you’ll find the story of Hagbard Celine, a renegade sea captain and philosopher who’s created his own alternative world inside a golden submarine, the “Leif Erickson.” Many of the book’s subplots are about people who are somehow abducted or tricked by Celine, and are subsequently put through a barrage of weird psychological situations, often involving sex, drugs and the threat of death.
What makes the book remarkable is the fact that Celine turns out to be a teacher at heart. His mind-games are tailor-made for his subjects. He sets out to identify a person’s own fears and taboos, and break them open; he teaches cops to hate authority; he teaches rapists to empathize with their victims; he teaches believers to be skeptics and skeptics to be believers.
The most interesting student of Celine’s is George Dorn, a headstrong intellectual hippie radical who begins to learn from Celine to stop living in his head and start living in his senses, who begins to learn bravery and confidence.
Corny as it sounds, this theme of learning and personal growth raises the novel up a notch from just being a piece of shock anarchic trash. Throughout his career, the late Robert Anton Wilson was always moved by the idea most people live their lives imprisoned in a rigid set of ideas. In dozens of books and articles he tried to incorporate Celine-like games to create satori-like revelations, to wake people up to . . . something vague and hard to define, yet exciting. The revelation, perhaps, that we are free.
What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of a character like Hagbard Celine. By the time we’re adults, we all recognize to some degree that there are pivotal moments in life, galvanic moments when you realize who you are or you drastically change the course you’re going to take in life. For many people, these are moments of trauma; many report having such experiences in war; becoming a parent can trigger such moments; sometimes, just a conversation with someone very significant can be enough to trigger a massive change in perspective.
There’s usually an element of chance in the way these moments enter our lives . . . but what if someone created a system to engineer such moments, to accelerate the progress of humankind by creating carefully controlled psychological moments of crisis and enlightenment? Hagbard Celine is just that; he’s a sort of super genius whose purpose in life is to raise consciousness, an authority figure whose goal is to teach people to question authority, an entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars into getting people to cross personal thresholds, an old man who seeks not to censor the impulses of youth, but to enhance them.
The character of Hagbard Celine always seemed to be the most original, unprecedented part of “Illuminautus!” so I’m both proud and disappointed to have discovered at last his direct predecessor in John Fowles’s Maurice Conchis.
As in “Illuminautus!” the story of the Magus is ultimately one of teaching. Nicholas Urfe finds himself caught up in a sort of game of secrets and lies with this strange, possibly crazy old man on the island of Phraxos. As in “Illuminautus!” there is a recognition of the fact that a young man’s mind is much more receptive and malleable when he’s in a state of sexual excitement; Maurice orchestrates a bevy of beautiful women who play on Nicholas’s vanity, social pretensions, and predatory urges. Alternate explanations keep be offered for what is “really” going on. Conchis presents himself at various points as a psychic conjurer of ghosts; the well-meaning ward of a beautiful madwoman; an avant garde theatrical director creating a drama without an audience; and as a psychologist engaged in a bizarre and unethical experiment with Nicholas Urfe as the subject.
Each of these identities is somewhat accurate. Also, as readers, we should be alert to the fact that Conchis prefers his name to be pronounced with a soft “ch,” so that it resembles the word “conscious.” He represents the evolutionary process by which a young man like Nicholas rises from narrow selfishness to a more nuanced awareness of sharing a world with other people, a world where freedom and love are not simply abstract concepts and where there are no pat answers to ethical dilemmas.
Conchis’s own ethical dilemma took place during the German occupation of the island during WWII, when a sadistic German soldier presented him with the choice of personally executing three freedom fighters or standing by and watching as the Germans execute eighty civilians—including woman and children—in their stead.
It’s easy to see that John Fowles was a more artful and meaningful writer than Wilson and Shea ever were. “The Magus” is a masterful work, partly because it is a more focused work. He is able to tie together ideas about love, politics, free will and the existence of God without sacrificing believability because he shows the way that all these issues can tie into a single person’s life.
In contrast, “Illuminautus!” is a sprawling, disorganized work that makes a failed attempt to chronicle dozens of characters being subjected by Celine in parallel journeys of self-discovery. Although this weakens the novel, we shouldn’t see “Illuminautus!” as a failed rip-off of John Fowles’s work. Fowles is concerned mainly with the individual; in his novel, set in and informed by the moral climate of a world that had just recently witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, learning is a lonely and painful experience reserved for the few.
“Illuminautus!” on the other hand is a novel grounded firmly in the 1960s when it seemed for a time as though whole western cultures were prepared to undergo a revolutionary change into something more open and exciting. If you ever saw Robert Anton Wilson speak before an audience, you realize that he was a very social man interested in broadcasting his ideas to the many than enclosing them in gilded envelopes and passing them on to a chosen few. The grand awakening promised in the 1960s by people such as Robert Anton Wilson’s mentor Timothy Leary never occurred, probably never had a chance of occurring, but the impetus to believe in it is a beautiful things.
It doesn’t matter you find more truth in isolationist books like “The Magus” or “Steppenwolf,” or communalist books such as “Illuminautus!” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or (I’d argue) “Harry Potter.” What matters is seeing what makes these books special: in all these books magic itself serves as a symbol for something sealed away from us, something capable of nurturing us and bringing us toward ripening maturity. Because of this they speak to those of us who grow up feeling trapped in life, hemmed in by a culture riddled with prejudice, mendacity and self-centeredness. At their worst, books of this class tempt us to regress into childish fantasizing; but at their best, they encourage us to bring forward a child’s spirit of openness and exploration to matters which are very much adult.

Requiem for a Dream

by Hubert Selby Jr, 1978. Published by Thunder Mouth Press. 279 pages.

Reviewed 11 May 2007

When I first started reading this book, I saw the faces of a lot of my friends light up. That’s a GREAT book, they told me. It was a little surprising, because my previous experience with Hubert Selby Jr. was reading “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” When people talk about reading “Last Exit,” it’s with a sense of residual devastation. It’s like recollecting a famine or a plague, a notable event but not one that you’d call enjoyable.
It wasn’t as though “Requiem for a Dream” seemed like a bright and cheerful book. The main plot follows the parallel addictions of an aging Brooklyn widow and her son. He’s a heroin dealer who’s hooked on the drug himself, and she’s a lost soul who gets addicted to amphetamine tablets prescribed to her as diet pills. It’s clearly a book about downward spirals, and yet people come away from it with a “Holden Caulfield” reaction; they feel as though they’ve spent valuable time with someone who really understands them.
Maybe it’s because “Requiem” strolls along at an amiable pace. There isn’t the sense of dread that pervades “Last Exit” from beginning to end. In “Last Exit,” we know almost immediately that the characters are already living in Hell. We know it, but the characters don't quite, and the plot rushes us toward the moment of ugly revelation. Here, on the other hand, there’s a sense of innocence. Although the book opens with a disturbing scene (Harry Goldfarb locking his mother Sara into her closet so that he can steal her television and sell it for money to buy heroin) the clouds seem to lift when we see Harry and his dealing partner Tyrone shooting up with their friends who work at the morgue. The drugs seem to disarm these supposedly rough and dangerous characters; it makes them cuddly and giggly. There’s a feeling of rightness, of return to sanity. Later in the book, as things become more desperate, I found myself almost hoping that Harry and his friends would score so that they could escape back into their protected world.
There are strong religious undertones in this book, which opens with Biblical quotes and reaches climax with a near-death experience in which Harry finds his soul caught between light and darkness. But as with “Last Exit,” the cause of our downfall is not partaking from the tree of knowledge; rather, it’s ignorance. In a key scene, Harry brings a new television set to his mother. She’s overjoyed, not by the set, but about seeing her son. Harry feels a flash of something like love, something that seems almost like a heroin high. Although the moment seems to capture his attention, he never comes back to it.
In “Last Exit,” another character named Harry finds himself in a gay bar and notices for the first time that the place he’s in makes him happy. In discovering his own homosexuality, this Harry seems to grow as a person, but he’s too naïve to translate discovery into understanding. Rather, it’s as if the newfound energy gives him only the power he needs to bring on his downfall.
A consistent idea in Selby's work seems to be that our desires are not sinful. Indeed, desire is like a compass pointing us toward salvation. But we have somehow lost the key to read the compass, or maybe we have been maliciously misled into believing that love and charity can be substituted with addiction and brutal domination of our fellow human beings.
In “Requiem,” television plays the role of the seducer, of the malicious misleader. As the heroin addicts grow less and less capable of dealing with the world, the orbit of their lives constricts itself until its radius is nothing but the short line between the tv set and the sofa. And then there’s Sara Goldfarb, who’s so enthralled by a bogus offer to appear on a television game show that she becomes a pill popping imbecile, condemned at last to electroshock therapy and brain-numbing Thorazine at the hands of the same medical establishment that encouraged her addiction in the first place.
Sometimes when Hubert Selby is talking about Sara, you get the sense that he’s become a bit like Erskine Caldwell, looking down on his benighted subjects and tsk tsk-ing about the way they’ve all been duped so bad by the Man. But at the same time, the book is more universal than “Last Exit,” less focused on revealing the secrets of a squalid demimonde and more interested in using the Brooklyn setting and characters to diagnose the illness that effects us all. Whereas heroin and amphetamines wreak havoc on people’s lives, Selby keeps reminding us that their effects on the system are predictable and well understood. The more sinister drug lurking in the wings is television, evolving, irresistible, always reaching out to a wider audience, distorting the needle of our inner compass, consuming us by equating consumerism with joy.