Who of these exactly are under Conchis' control and to what extent? Maybe that Edwardian girl likes Urfe or maybe she's acting.
For a while he claims he's running an experiment in psychology. Are they ghosts? Are they actors? Are they illusions, post-hypnotic suggestions? Conchis is a hypnotist and a Jungian. Dead puritans and Edwardian girls appear. Mysterious things start happening to Urfe. And he goes, even after he'd been explicitly warned not to. But most importantly he finds the Greek/English gazillionaire, Maurice Conchis, who invites him to stay weekends at his villa. He takes a job as English master at a school on the (imaginary) Greek island Phraxos, leaving behind one girl, Alison, and finding there another girl, Lily. He's orphaned and has literary ambitions. Here's the story: Nicholas Urfe has recently graduated from Oxford and is knocking about a bit in England, needing a job, wishing to go abroad. He expresses doubts about its merits: " The Magus remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels." Still, it is the one Fowles novel that shows up on the Random House/Modern Library greatest novels of the 20th Century in English. I actually read the second edition, that of 1977, but Fowles in his introduction says it was not substantially changed in either theme or narrative from the 1965 version.
Impossible to stop reading? I did rather find that to be true. The blurb on the cover, from the New York Review of Books, says, "Brilliant and colossal.Impossible to stop reading." Brilliant and colossal? Hmm. I really wanted to dislike it more than I did.
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