The Magus

The Magus is one of those novels that is frustrating to review. Describing the plot seems to give away too much, but the plot and its conclusion isn't as important as the journey. However, as might be expected, describing the journey is fruitless since each person's reading experience will be different. I can detail my reaction, though, and hope that interest in material that could cause such a reaction will attract other readers.

Perhaps due to its creation history (written 1952, published 1966, revised 1977), this book doesn't fit neatly in any category. It's too advanced for a modern novel, but it doesn't possess the sly self-awareness of a post-modern novel. In some ways, it is a commentary on the failings of novels to address the ambiguity of reality, although its characters are never as blatantly unreliable as those in Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's as if the novel is in between stages, just like the protagonist of the novel.

The story is about a young man who goes to a remote Greek isle as a teacher in the 1950s. While there, he encounters an enigmatic figure (the Magus of the title), and afterwards his life is never the same. The Magus appears to be conducting an elaborate game, but once involved, the protagonist can no longer distinguish reality from the game and cannot even separate the supernatural from the mundane. When the game appears to end, the protagonist must reassemble his life and make sense of a world in which he no longer belongs.

At its most basic level, the story is one of initiation. The title itself is a reference to humankind's history of wise men and the rites necessary to become one. The Magus is attempting to introduce the protagonist into a larger world, and the game is his means of doing so.

The game is a labyrinth of allusions, symbols, and parables; however, the reader cannot tell if there is any underlying meaning. The Magus intentionally fills it with references to Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, but using any of those references to impose a structure on the game only leads to dead ends. Once the protagonist (and reader) think they have a mental construct that makes sense of events, a new facet is revealed that destroys the construct and plunges events back into confusion. By the end, it is apparent there will be no easy answers: meaning must be created, not imported.

As I look at my struggles to review this novel, I am struck by the similarities to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Both are filled with vast amounts of information, but even after the reader finishes, it is impossible to tell which bits of information were relevant and which were distractions. Some pieces of the stories managed to be both and other pieces were somehow neither: meaningful meaninglessness and meaninglessness meaning. If that's confusing, that's because the plot of both novels are attempts by humanity to impose meaning upon the chaos of the universe.

In paperback, this book is 650 pages long, but it was one of the fastest books I've ever read. Each time the plot stabilizes, a new twist is revealed that throws doubt on what has happened before. It took a few days to read the first half, and then a single sleepless night to finish. The book has much going for it: the characters are compelling, the story is well-plotted, the writing is elegant, and black humor provides occasional relief. This book will stick with the reader, and I cannot recommend it enough.