Mixed Feelings

The Magus a novel by John Fowles.  Back Bay Books.  656 pp. ****

I can’t remember ever being as exasperated by a book that I basically liked as I was by The Magus.  What I read—after my enthusiastic reading of The French Lieutenant’s Woman—was that, while that was considered his greatest novel, The Magus was his most popular, and had its own set of fans.  It was actually the first novel he set out to write, and he spent years on it, though he published The Collector first.  I was hooked when I saw in the front pages that it had been enthusiastically reviewed by both Brian Moore and Guy Davenport, who said, “What makes the book so unabandonable is its ability to surprise, and never twice in the same way. . . . Thoroughly enjoyable all the way through.”

It’s interesting, at least to me, that Davenport raises the possibility of abandoning the book (and creates a new word in the process), something I almost never do.  The book is, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, beautifully written; we’re in the hands of a prose master, and that’s normally enough for me.

But the novel’s basic premise is that there is a man, or perhaps, even a collective of people, who believe they have a right to stand in judgment of another human being and set about changing his character and behavior.  They do so by altering reality in weird ways, staging scenes, creating hallucinations, getting him to the point where he doesn’t know if he’s observing reality or something these folks have created.  I find such an attitude arrogant in the extreme, and I certainly don’t admire the people who have it.  I say that even though I don’t basically disagree with their judgment of the person.

The man in question, Nicholas Urfe, is a literate and adventurous Englishman who has graduated from university and, not sure what he wants to do, heads to Greece for a year to teach English and live in an entirely new landscape (which he loves, and describes beautifully).  The job taxes him, but not overly much (his students know basic English and are just trying to increase their fluency).  He winds up spending weekends with a wealthy and fascinating man named Maurice Conchis, who has hosted English language instructors from the school in the past (a couple of them have given Urfe veiled warnings, but weren’t terribly specific).  Conchis is himself well-educated (though he has abandoned novels, and claims to have burned every novel he owned), wealthy to the point where he doesn’t need to worry about anything, aging (he claims to have had a couple serious heart attacks), and a marvelous storyteller.  He sets about telling Nicholas the story of his life.  That’s when he begins altering reality.  If I had to give a name to what he’s doing, I’d call it a mind fuck.

Conchis describes a love affair he once had with a young woman named Lily.  Then he absents himself, and a woman who looks exactly like Lily appears.  Nicholas sees through the ruse, eventually corners her and gets her to admit it’s all an act, then proceeds himself to fall for her, and she for him.  Except that, as we soon find, she’s not falling for him at all, but playing him along.  She also has an identical twin sister, just as beautiful, who becomes part of the charade.  And so on.

These aren’t spoilers because they don’t begin to describe how elaborate the set-up is.  As we get into the novel and begin to understand, our big question is why would anyone do this?  Just as a pastime?  The epigraphs to the three sections of the novel are from the Marquis de Sade (they’re in French; my French isn’t up to them), and what Conchis and his compatriots are doing seems to be, literally, sadistic.  At one point, toward the end of the novel, a woman calls it the God-game.  That’s an apt description.  Except that it’s being done by a human being, who says he doesn’t believe in God.  He doesn’t have all-knowing wisdom.

There were nevertheless scenes in this novel that stopped me cold, and sent me off looking for a pen so I could underline and come back to them, something I rarely do.  For instance, as he was describing his experience of trench warfare in World War I (something which, eventually, we’re not sure he even did), of looking death right in the eye, he says this, about spending the night in a fetid trench:

“But what I thought was fever was the fire of existence, the passion to exist.  I know that now. . . . But I possessed that night an almost total recall of physical sensations.  And these recalls, of even the simplest and least sublime things, a glass of water, the smell of frying bacon, seemed to me to surpass or at least equal the memories of the greatest art, the noblest music, even my tenderest moments with Lily. . . . To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a miracle.  Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, till then unimagined new sense—something not comprehended in feeling, seeing, the conventional five.  But a far profounder sense, the source from which all the others spring.  The word ‘being’ no longer passive and descriptive, but active . . . almost imperative.

“Before the night was ended I knew that I had had what religious people would call a conversion. . . . But I had no sense of God.  Only of having leapt a lifetime in one night.”

That certainly sounds authentic.

Somewhat later—a hundred pages in book time—Conchis, with Nicholas’ permission, hypnotizes him; he may also put him under the influence of a drug.  Not many descriptions of drug experiences seem to work, but this one does.  It’s a long passage, and I won’t include all of it, just the place where he arrived.

“An enormous and vertiginous sense of the innumerability of the universe, an innumerability in which transience and unchangingness seemed integral, essential and uncontradictory. . . . A condition of acute physical and intellectual pleasure, a floating suspension, a being perfectly adjusted and related; a quintessential arrival.  An intercognition.”

In a later episode, Conchis speaks of another experience that shakes his world.  He had been a scientist, a physician (or so he said); now he saw something more to human experience.

“But in a flash, as of lightning, all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared to me like a thin net.  That great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle.  It was full of a mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities.  The net was nothing, reality burst through it.  Perhaps something telepathic passed between Heinrich and myself.  I do not know.

“That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire.  For me, too, it revealed a world beyond that in which I lived.  For me, too, it brought a new humility akin to fierceness.  For me too a sense of the vanity of so many things our age considers important.  I do not say I should not have arrived at such an insight one day.  But in that night I bridged a dozen years.  Whatever else, I know that.”

These passages kept me reading avidly in a novel whose overall conceit both bored and annoyed me.  Inasmuch as we ever come to see why Conchis is conducting this mind fuck, we eventually find out that it is because Urfe seduced a woman and led her on (though she was perfectly compliant) then dropped her, perhaps because he was afraid of intimacy.  At the time, I thought Nicholas was making a mistake, but it’s hardly an unusual one for a young man.  Eventually, though, Conchis sets that incident in a larger context.  And I did find what he said to be interesting.

He begins by saying, “What I am now about to tell you may help you understand why I am bringing your visits to an end tomorrow,” a statement which proves not to be true (for the umpteenth time.  That’s a major part of what I found annoying.  The guy was never straight with people).  He goes on, “I should like you also to reflect that its events could have taken place only in a world where man considers himself superior to woman. . . . “That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity.  Men love war because it allows them to look serious.  Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.  In it they can reduce women to the status of objects.  That is the great distinction between the sexes.  Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects.  Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other.”

With this statement, Conchis is connecting various episodes we have gone through.  He makes a final connection powerfully.

“It is an extra dimension of feeling men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real woman—and absurd.  I will tell you what war is.  War is a psychosis caused by our inability to see relationships.  Our relationship with our fellow men.  Our relationship with our economic and historic situation.  And above all our relationship to nothingness.  To death.”

That statement bowled me over, connected much that had happened throughout the novel, and, for me, summed everything up.  Unfortunately, it was on p. 413 of a 563-page novel, and there were various other highjinks still to go through.  I got tired of them.  And it seems to me that there’s a vital plot element that’s full of holes.

I will say, however, that I found the final pages of the book, and the ending, excellent, and quite appropriate.  I still think The Magus is a major novel, by a superb novelist.  But this book takes self-indulgence to a new level.