The Magus

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.