74 pages • 2-hour read
The Magus
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, sexual content, suicidal ideation, ableism, and a brief allusion to pregnancy termination.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Nicholas “Nick” Urfe, the protagonist of the book and its first-person narrator, begins the book with his history. Born in 1927, Nick is the only child of a brigadier and his obedient wife. Unlike his mother, Nick chafed under his father’s values as he grew up, realizing that the brigadier’s insistence on tradition masked his lack of intellectual curiosity. At the peak of World War II, Nick was forced to enlist in the army, but he got himself demobilized as soon as he could, and enrolled to read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1948. When Nick was in his second year, his parents died in a plane crash over Karachi. Nick now had little family left.
In the absence of his parents, Nick found comradeship in a club of his college-mates who called themselves existentialists, imitating the existentialist angst of heroes from French novels and poetry. In retrospect, Nick thinks the young men were selfish, removed from reality, and pretending to be cynical because they felt inadequate.
As Nick graduated Oxford, practical worries reared their head. The brigadier had left behind no savings and a considerable debt. Nick took up a teaching position at a prep school in East Anglia, but felt so suffocated he resigned before the end of the school year and moved to London to look for jobs that could take him out of England.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Nick rents a flat in Russell Square and begins looking for overseas jobs advertised in the Times Literary Supplement and at the British Council. In September, the recruiter at the British Council tells Nick about an urgent vacancy for an English teacher at the Lord Byron school in Phraxos, Greece. Nick applies. In a curious twist of fate, he meets Alison, the woman who is to play a major role in his life, that same evening.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Nick reflects that he was quite sexually promiscuous by the standards of the early 1950s, finding it easy to charm women, because in addition to his decent looks, he possessed the cad’s trick of melting women’s hearts with a show of loneliness. However, none of his relationships lasted, as Nick did not believe in commitment. He told the women from the beginning that he was more interested in sex than love or marriage.
Back home after posting the Phraxos application, Nick gets invited to a party in the downstairs flat by Margaret (Maggie) and Ann Taylor, his Australian neighbors. At the party he meets Alison, a young Australian woman just returning from a recent long trip. Nick is struck by Alison’s waifish good looks. He and Alison fall into an easy conversation, with Nick learning that Alison is dating Maggie’s brother, Pete, who is away on his airlines job. Though Pete is keen to marry Alison, Alison is unsure about committing to him. Alison has recently applied for a job as an air hostess and plans to travel the world.
Nick is fascinated by Alison, both because of her obvious sexual magnetism and for her ability to draw out the truth in a conversation. He ends up telling Alison about his childhood and persistent sense of loneliness—this time not for effect, but because he wants to explain himself to her. Nick and Alison go upstairs to his flat and make love.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Nick and Alison embark on a romance, with Alison moving in with Nick. As the days go by, Nick is struck by Alison’s perceptiveness. She does not fall for his isolated-self ploy, recognizing it as a tool for emotional blackmail.
Alison confides in Nick that she met Pete in her first year at university in Sydney, fell pregnant, had a medical termination without his knowledge, and moved to London. As the talk turns to marriage and babies, Nick is aware of the implications of the conversation, but stays quiet. He and Alison often veer close to conversations about their future, but manage to avoid direct discussion. Nick’s hesitation with Alison persists despite the fact that he has never been happier in a relationship, especially physically. In hindsight, Nick’s older self can see he was already in love with Alison, but mistook the love for intense sexual desire alone.
The confusion that Nick and Alison feel about each other explodes when Nick receives an offer letter from Phraxos. Nick is in two minds about accepting. However, Alison puts on a nonchalant front and asks Nick to accept. Nick grudgingly asks Alison to marry him. She senses his hesitation and refuses, asking him to go to Greece. The next day, Nick phones the British Council about his acceptance.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
By the time his appointment at Phraxos is confirmed, Nick and Alison have started arguing frequently. One day, Alison tells Nick that she has been desperately unhappy since the termination of her pregnancy, and even contemplated death by suicide. Nick hugs Alison and promises he will not go to Greece. Though Alison knows the promises are false, she accepts them as a placebo.
A few days later, Nick meets Mitford, his predecessor from Phraxos, hoping to get a sense of his new job. Mitford, an army man, describes Phraxos as a regular, dull Greek island, but the Lord Byron school as top-notch in terms of discipline. The island has villas—summer homes of the wealthy—at its far end. Though these stay empty for most of the year, Mitford met an occupant of a villa once, someone who collaborated with the Germans during the war, and had a massive fight with him. However, Mitford supposes Nick will not run into the collaborator. Mitford advises Nick not to fraternize with the sex-workers in Athens, because of the risks of sexually transmitted diseases.
As Mitford bids Nick goodbye, he tells him not to let the school get to him, as it did the English master before Mitford. Mitford also dramatically asks Nick to “Beware of the waiting-room” (36). He leaves before Nick can ask him what he means.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Alison and Nick spend their last night together in mutual misery. Nick callously tells Alison that he will not ask her to wait for him because he is unsure that he will be able to offer her a future on his return from Greece. Alison and Nick promise to write to each other every day.
After Alison departs for training the next morning, Nick leaves her a cheque to buy a scooter, a pair of earrings, and a note telling her he is sadder at their parting than he can express. Despite his declaration in the note, the truth is Nick feels giddy with relief at escaping Alison. He also feels he has scored a win over her, as she loves him more than he loves her.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Nick arrives in Athens. The Greek landscape mesmerizes him. Unlike the tame beauty of nature in England which inspires muted admiration, the light, trees, and hills in Greece are so wildly magnificent one can either love them or hate them. Happy as Alice in a newly found Wonderland, Nick barely gives a thought to Alison.
If Athens is beautiful, Phraxos, eight hours by steamer, is sublime, filled with pristine beaches, coves, hillocks, and lush green woods. However, as Nick takes up residence at the school, he is disappointed by his students, who are resolutely prosaic, with no interest in poetry. To escape the claustrophobic environment of the school, Nick often goes for long walks on the island.
Nick and Alison write to each other, but the letters are dissatisfying, and soon appear more of a dull chore to Nick. At half-term, Nick visits a brothel in Athens with Demetrius, the other English teacher at Lord Byron. In December, he receives a letter from Alison that she has resumed an intimate relationship with Pete. Nick tears up the letter in anger, and writes back that Alison is free to do as she pleases.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary
After Alison’s letter, Nick’s sense of enchantment with Phraxos dulls a little. Despite its natural beauty, he finds the island backward. Though Nick does not actively think of Alison, he cannot erase his feelings about her. Even Nick’s experiments in writing are a disaster. The poems he wrote over the winter appear amateurish to him now.
He visits the Athens brothel again in February out of sheer loneliness. In March he discovers sores in his mouth. Remembering Mitford’s warning about sexually transmitted diseases, Nick suspects he has contracted syphilis. He visits the island physician, who advises Nick to visit a clinic in Athens. Nick grows even more miserable and begins to contemplate death by suicide.
The day before spring term is to end, Nick procures a 12-bore gun from the school’s gatekeeper and goes to the top of a hill to end his life. Just as he is about to fire the gun at his head, he is interrupted by the song of a local girl. Taking the song as a sign, Nick realizes he does not really want to die. He fires the gun in the air instead and climbs down the hill.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Nick visits an Athens clinic, where the doctor confirms he has syphilis and gives him expensive antibiotics for the treatment. Nick returns to Phraxos, anxiously waiting for the medicines to start working. In the meanwhile, he turns 26 and receives a birthday card from Alison.
Nick resumes his exploration of the island, swimming in the sea and visiting the forests. The solitary island seems Nick’s paradise to conquer, as if he were Robinson Crusoe (from the eponymous 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe). It is during this period that “the mysteries began” (55).
Part 1 Analysis
The book’s opening, “I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents” (5), is reminiscent of the introductory passages of the Victorian bildungsroman or coming-of-age narrative, such as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. The stylistic parallel indicates that Fowles’s novel is in part a bildungsroman, tracking the growth of its protagonist, Nick. However, the latter half of the opening line of The Magus shows the novel is also a parody of the bildungsroman genre: Nick’s parents are described as “born in the grotesquely elongated shadow […] of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria” (5). Not only does the cynical description of the parents contrast with the sentimentality of many Victorian novels, the influence of the era itself is derided as “grotesquely” prolonged while Queen Victoria is mocked as “monstrous.” Furthermore, as the narrative evolves, it also becomes clear that Nick, a self-centered rake, is unlike the flawed but chaste protagonist of most traditional bildungsroman.
As the opening line shows, the novel often evokes a genre to immediately satirize it, attempting to show that form and meaning are elusive in fiction and, by extension, in life itself, thereby introducing the theme of Narrative Instability as Metaphor for Reality. The evocation of genre is a metafictional exercise, meant to establish that what the reader is studying is itself deliberately crafted fiction. While Fowles experiments with the genre of the novel, the narrative style itself is fairly straightforward and linear, told from Nick’s first-person perspective. Fowles makes use of the frame tale or the story-within-a-story device to flesh out other narrative voices, such as Nick’s recap of stories told by others.
The novel also uses extracts from letters, books, movies, and other media to enliven the narrative, with different media presenting a new version of the same story, often changing characters’ perception of the truth. For instance, the contents of Nick’s first letter to Alison clash with his commentary on the letter, creating a sense of confusion about Nick’s true feelings, generating narrative instability. When Nick notes that his passionate letter “was supposed to sound spontaneous” (39), it raises questions about who is speaking the truth: the Nick in the letter or the Nick being cynical about his own confession that the letter was meant to “sound” spontaneous but was perhaps much more calculated.
Nick’s restlessness and frequent lapses into disillusionment introduce the theme of The Quest for the Authentic Self Amid Illusions. The novel’s tripartite structure, divided between England, Greece, and England again, mimics a classic hero’s journey, where a hero leaves home to seek something in an unknown land, faces tests and trials, is changed in the process, and returns home to negotiate reality on new terms. While in a classic and medieval quest, a hero would encounter dragons and monsters, in The Magus, the trials are psychological games and temptations. At the same time, the heroic-journey plot is self-parodic, since Nick is not necessarily the classical hero on a grand quest, but a modern young man grappling with self-centered concerns.
Part 1 of the novel revolves around Nick and Alison’s relationship, positioning Nick as a disaffected and arrogant young man with a problematic attitude toward women. For instance, Nick describes Maggie as “one of those fat girls who mother thin girls” (13) and sexualizes Alison constantly. Nick also frankly admits to using women for sex, asserting that he is redeemed by his honesty. This unflattering portrayal of Nick is deliberate, as it sets up his character for chastisement and redemption. The change in Nick is foreshadowed by the narrative distance between the older Nick narrating the story and the younger Nick on the page.
Nick and Alison’s shared confusion is a symptom of their era and society, in which notions of romantic, chivalrous, and chaste love have collapsed, yet regressive attitudes toward sex remain. An example of the push-pull between sexual freedom and sexual shame is Nick’s subconscious decision to cast Alison in the role of the femme fatale, and Alison to think of herself as a “tramp” (21). While both characters celebrate the sexual freedom of the postmodern world, they still judge Alison by Victorian standards. The unhappiness Nick and Alison experience in this section further illustrates the particular crisis of the post-World War II world, where traditional ideas about goodness have been uprooted, leading to a pervasive sense of ennui, or listlessness. The listlessness quickly flips into despair, which is evident in Nick and Alison’s contemplation of death by suicide.
While the text grapples with dense themes such as Postmodern ennui, it balances them with a twisty, quick-paced plot, filled with detailed, immersive description. Fowles deliberately uses the structure of the mystery narrative to delve into psychological themes, attempting to ensure that the reader does not feel weighed down by the complex subject matter.
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