The Magus

"Yes, and he revised it in 1977. This is a classic from my year off between school and university. I went interrailing and ended up on a Greek island with a battered copy of The Magus in my backpack—which I think everyone of a certain age should probably do—and I read it there. It’s the story of Nicholas Urfe, who’s a university graduate from Oxford and gets a job teaching English on a Greek island. There are problems with the first part of the book. I’m not sure revisions are a good idea, but he could have addressed the misogyny at the beginning when Nicholas is still in the UK and he’s at parties with his Australian girlfriend. That made me a bit uncomfortable. But once you get onto the island, and he starts playing these mind games with Conchis—who is this mysterious, wealthy recluse living on the far side of the island—I just loved it. In terms of storytelling, it has a sort of Tales of 1001 Nights /Scheherazade quality about it, tales within tales. The layers are peeled back: every time you think you’ve understood what’s going on, another layer of falsehood is peeled back to reveal that what you thought was a truth is anything but. SPOILER ALERT It’s been branded a ‘psychosexual’ thriller. There is that element with this beautiful woman who he falls in love with. Then she has a twin. And then you realize they’re actors. Then you meet them and they’re not actors. Conchis calls it the ‘godgame’ that he’s playing, and it is in danger of being a bit pretentious, certainly toward the end. But I just loved it. I reread it again a couple of years ago, back on holiday in Greece, this time with the family in tow, and felt it withstood a second reading. I guess that principally it’s the mind games—the godgame—that I love. The Magus has also been described as a Jungian psychological thriller—and it does play with the unconscious and the conscious. But you can get out of it what you want. There are loads of metaphors in it and allusions to Greek mythology . You can let those wash over you if you like, or you can embrace them all. But the basic tenet is of a young person going to have this dream job teaching English at a school and then getting drawn into this weird, weird game which you just don’t know where it’s going. I love that. I wanted to choose books that shaped and influenced me as a writer and that was one. Aged 18 or 19, that was the book that sowed the first seeds in my mind. I read it and thought, ‘One day I’d love to try and do something like that—play with the reader and have that layered approach, like an onion, where you keep peeling and peeling.’ In a sense, John Fowles is as much The Magus , the magician, as Conchis is. When you read this book, you do feel you’re in the presence of an illusionist."