The Magus is told from the point of view of Nicholas Urfe, an Oxford graduate who, after

teaching for a year at a small, public school decides to take a position as the English teacher at the
Lord Bryon School in Greece, on the island of Phraxos. However, 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. During his first six months on Phraxos, Nicholas finds the school claustrophobic but
the island beautiful. He seriously contemplates suicide. The first of the novel's three parts ends at
this point.
The mysteries begin with the second part, where Nicholas befirends a rich recluse named
Maurice Conchis. Nicholas decides to look him up and finds, inexplicably, that he is expected. Their
friendship is based on discussions about art, poetry, and on Conchis’ tales about his life and about
war. 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. That night, as Nicholas is going to sleep, he hears voices singing a war song
and smells a foul stench.
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, he hears 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.
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.
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 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 in the
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 welcome,
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 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 expla- nations. 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.
The structure of The Magus is characterized by self-consciousness, complexity, mystery and
fictional games. The most striking feature of the novel’s complexity is the sheer proliferation of
texts: there are numerous stories that the reader is invited to examine through the act of reading,
classical mythology, biology, Marxist ideas on society, theories of drama and role-playing, fiction-
making, psychology, philosophy. Another sign is that there are three narrators: Nicholas, who
narrates the entire novel in the first-person narrative form; Conchis, who is inscribed in the text
and whose narrative is reported within quotation marks; finally, there is an omniscient narrator
who intervenes very briefly in the last chapter of the novel in order to guide Nicholas, as well as
the reader, out of the novel’s maze.
Moreover, The Magus also integrates two distinct perspectives, one represented by
Nicholas, the other by Maurice Conchis, the magus of the title, and his accomplices in the
godgame. Nicholas interprets his experiences through a stereotypically masculine, conventional
lens, while Conchis and his accomplices, operate through an unconventional and interpersonal
perspective that Conchis himself identifies with women’s ways of knowing and being. The ultimate
success of The Magus depends upon various textual maneuvers that are deployed throughout and
practiced by the narrators in order to create an existential freedom for the characters. The first
stage of these textual maneuvers is related to the general structure of the novel, that is, the ways
in which the narrators tell their stories. The second involves the construction of a setting as a form
of an “alternative world” whose fictionality is constantly paralleled by other fictional texts that are
deployed metaphorically in the novel. The third and perhaps the most important reflector of the
novel’s structure is the godgame, which makes up the psychodrama and portrays a hierarchy
predicated upon gender difference and resultant politics of seduction (Lenz, 76).
The first passage of the novel illustrates two major characteristics of the novel’s structure.
Firstly, it focuses on the main character-narrator as an individual who is involved in an active
process of constructing his own life. Secondly, and most important, we learn that Nicholas wants
to reconstruct his own past experience because he is disillusioned by the norms of his middle-class
background and his Victorian parentage. He rejects the present situation and seeks a dramatic
change in his character, he is determined to rewrite and rearrange his life. And when he says he is
not the person he wants to be, he exhibits his first desire to start a quest to discover who he is and
what kind of person he is meant to be.
The main feature of the novel is its tripartite structure. The first part is narrated entirely by
Nicholas, and consists of the first nine chapters, starting in London where he meets Alison, and
finishing in the Greek island where he takes a teaching job. The second part constitutes the major
portion of the novel and begins in chapter 10 and ends with chapter 67. This section is also
narrated by Nicholas, but inscribed within this narrative is the figure of Conchis, the second
narrator of the various stories that deal with his own life and the history of Europe under the
German occupation. The third and final section of the novel consists of chapters 68-78, where
Nicholas returns to London. The last chapter of the novel introduces the third type of narration:
the omniscient narrative. Here, an unidentified narrator speaks directly to the reader about the
hero, who should be left alone to find his own way out of the novel’s maze.
The tripartite structure and thematic design of the novel are coherently linked through a
circular design. At the structural level, the novel begins and ends in London. On the thematic level,
Nicholas’ entire life and his quest for freedom seem to be moving in an enclosed circle (Salami,
75). The novel begins with Nicholas trying to challenge himself, to build himself up, and to secure
his relationship with Alison. At the end of the novel we see him nearly in the same position, still
confused about what has happened to him, and uncertain about his future. The only change that
occurs between the beginning and the end of the novel is Nicholas’ attitude towards Alison. At the
beginning she is nothing but an object in his fantasies, but at the end she becomes a free woman
and he is prepared to accept her.
The second involves the construction of a setting as a form of an “alternative world” whose
fictionality is constantly paralleled by other fictional texts that are deployed metaphorically in the
novel (Salami, 73).
The Magus explicitly constructs an alternative world both as an escape from reality and as
a metaphor for the process of fictionality, the implications being that an escape from reality is a
fictionalization, a way of constructing a different account of reality. For Nicholas, reality becomes a
narrative, a fictional construct, and narrative itself controls his reality, his life. Indeed, it is
constantly emphasized in the novel that Bourani is an art world, a metaphor. Conchis frequently
stresses that the masque is only a metaphor. Nicholas discovers the various metaphorical patterns
that link Conchis’ texts to the experiences he himself is undergoing. This is how Conchis’ fictional
texts control and mould Nicholas’ subjectivity. Thus, the people in this world live in a fictional
world and only act as if they were in a real world. The Magus is about Nicholas’ attempts to
distinguish between the two worlds, to learn what makes a world fictional. He narrativizes his own
experience in order to authenticate his reality, to identify his own position in the world (Salami,
74).
The third and perhaps the most important reflector of the novel’s structure is the
godgame, which makes up the psychodrama and portrays a hierarchy predicated upon gender
difference and resultant politics of seduction. Nicholas is enchanted by Conchis’ game and he
wants to be a part of it. Towards the end of the novel, his greatest resentment towards Maurice is
“Not that he had done what he did, but that he had stopped doing it” (Salami, 74). Thus, he
becomes deeply involved in the games, in the excitement of detecting the novel’s mysteries. But
the terrible thing for him is that when the game ends, he is left alone, with nothing, losing his job,
Lily, and any hope of finding the origins and meanings of various stories he hears during the
godgame, particularly those connected to Alison’s death.
The process of constructing women as subjects overpowered by men is clearly seen
throughout the novel. The first scene that embodies this sex/power representation is concretized
through Nicholas’ first reaction to his contact with Alison (p 35). This is further illustrated by the
parallel Conchis draws between male power and its exploitation of femininity by the destructive
power of war. He expresses his contempt for a world that is destroyed by war, the machine that is
controlled and dominated by men. He says 413.
The image of Nicholas as being turned from victimizer into victim is embodied by the scene
of the trial. He reacts violently against the humiliation of his own male power by Julie, the female
figure who strips him of his own masculinity. He considers himself superior to her, but here she is
the one who can overpower him. According to him, in his male world, woman is constructed as an
object, a commodity possessed by man; the godgame thus alters the limitations of Nicholas’
knowledge of his own self in relation to other human beings. Through physical torture and
psychological pressure, he begins to understand himself and to understand others. However, he
fails to abandon his male power, and this can be seen in his reconstruction of Alison as an ideal,
trustworthy woman, the opposite of Lily (553). This is further dramatized in the scene after he
finds out her suicide was a lie: 565. What draws him to Alison is precisely the fact that she cannot
be classified, or put into a box and labeled. She is unnamable (656) (Salami, 90).
Rather than advancing specific social and political ideals, Fowels’ second novel, The Magus,
immerses readers in a tale so convolutes and complex that they have employed and incredibly
diverse range of perspectives in response. Narrated by Nicholas Urfe from an unspecified present
location, The Magus illustrated the narrator’s complicated and mysterious experience on a Greek
island as he perceived it at the time. As Nicholas re-enacts his experience of what he comes to
know as “the godgame”, he subjects readers to a radically disorienting, exciting, and disturbing
psychodrama that calls his and the readers’ values, prejudices, and ideals into question (Lenz, 80).