John Fowles' The Magus
John Fowles' tale of betrayal, desire, and existence
Continuing the trends of Two Existential Love Stories, John Fowles' The Magus is an ambitious psychological tale of love and betrayal.
The Magus
Though much more ambitious than High Fidelity or The Sheltering Sky John Fowles' The Magus is at heart a magnification of many of the themes I discussed in Two Existential Love Stories. Nicolas Urfe, Fowles' protagonist, is a young man fresh from University who takes a position teaching English in Greece. Bored with the stifling atmosphere of London at mid-century, Nick finds more than he bargained for upon meeting his Greek host, the enigmatic Maurice Conchis.
Themes of Love and Loss
While the story's depth cannot be plumbed in so short an article, what is most important with relation to the other authors' novels is the way in which Fowles' protagonist deals with love and loss. Nicholas had met a beautiful, intelligent, and witty woman at the novel's first party, only to leave her for Greece on a whim we are at first unable to understand. Traces of Rob Fleming come to mind as Fowles describes the scene just after they settle down for the first month: "The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought."
A Fine Line
And yet at novel's end, long after Fowles has weaved nearly five hundred pages of dizzying betrayal, deception, and intrigue, Nicholas and Alison meet in a tranquil park in their native England. Yet, like Port and Kit, Rob and Laura, the reunion is of the shakiest sort. Neither one can trust the other after all the Magus has put them through, yet Nicholas realizes only too late that perhaps this was what the wily Greek was trying to teach him all along: "I had a sense of an abyss between us that was immeasurably deep, yet also absurdly narrow, as narrow as our real distance apart, crossable in one small step."
A Hard Lesson
If only he could bridge that gap, I was tempted to say, he could get back with the woman he really loved and who above all seems to loves him. Yet I was braced by the thought, forgetting that these kinds of prescriptions are the very kind of which Fowles, like Hornby and Bowles, is trying to rid our thoughts. "Oh, you're nice now. For a week or a month. And then we'd start again," Alison tells Nick when he confesses his love to her.
Whom Can We Trust?
What is most amazing about The Magus is how its author is able to portray this razor's edge on which his characters' love is based. Forever shifting from devotion and mutual comfort to the emotional abuse that Alison decries at book's end, Fowles' characters' romance is among the few convincing ones around. And the same can be said for those in High Fidelity and the Sheltering Sky, both of which communicate the frightening repercussions of the inevitable irreconcilability of even the closest partners' wishes. Can we ever truly know someone? Could love be as empty as the desert sands of North Africa? I admit, these are not comforting thoughts.
References:
Fowles, John. The Magus. Bay Back Books, Revised Edition, 2001. ISBN: 0316296198
