Partly because I had an argument with someone about the ending, and it didn’t seem right to settle this by simply turning to the last few pages. Furthermore, in his introduction to the revised edition (1977) – I had long since lost its predecessor – Fowles describes it as ‘a novel of adolescence by a retarded adolescent’. Returning to a book you’ve not opened for fifty-odd years is potentially as hazardous as meeting a long-lost lover. How flattering to have so much time and energy expended in order to make you a better person! Even the indignant narrator, Nicholas Urfe, who compares what he’s been through to ‘exposure in the village stocks’, can scarce forbear to cheer: ‘that all this could be mounted just for me’.īut that was in another country. If, as I did, you came of age in the Sixties, then one rite of passage you may have undergone was reading John Fowles’s bestselling Bildungsroman, The Magus (1965), which provided, it was said, an experience ‘beyond the literary’ – in my case, a vicarious ego trip.
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