John Fowles - The Magus

Then she buried her face in her hands, as if some inexorable mechanism had started.

I was so sure. It was logical, the characteristic and perfect final touch to the godgame. They had absconded. I was so sure, and yet… after so much, how could I be perfectly sure? How could they be so cold? So inhuman? So incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game? And if I wasn’t sure?

I gave her bowed head one last stare, then I was walking. Firmer than Orpheus, as firm as Alison herself, that other day of parting, not once looking back. The autumn grass, the autumn sky. People. A blackbird, poor fool, singing out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of gray pigeons over the houses. Fragments of freedom, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.

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Born in Essex, England, in 1926, John Fowles was educated at Bedford School and at Oxford University. Following his studies in French at Oxford, Mr. Fowles taught in France and other places abroad before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, The Collector , was an immediate bestseller—a popular as well as critical success—and he became widely recognized as a new writer of major importance. Reviewing The Collector in The New Republic , Honor Tracy noted: “… it does look as if the new England has brought forth a novelist at last.” Next came The Aristos , a book at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from The Collector —a self-portrait in ideas which further established Mr. Fowles as a writer of uncommon range and versatility. Now, with the arrival of The Magus , expectations for John Fowles’s second novel will be abundantly fulfilled.

“Visitors who went behind the high walls of Saint-Martin had the pleasure of seeing, across the green lawns and among the groves, shepherds and shepherdesses who danced and sang, surrounded by their white flocks. They were not always dressed in eighteenth-century clothes. Sometimes they wore costumes in the Roman and Greek styles; and in this way the odes of Theocritus and the bucolics of Virgil were brought to life. It was even said that there were more scandalous scenes—charming nymphs who on summer nights fled in the moonlight from strange dark shapes, half man, half goat…”