The Magus

After everything Dr. Sexson said about the Magus by John Fowles I had to start the book. Amazon had not yet delivered my own copy much to my disappointment. After a frantic trip to the MSU library where I was severely disappointed, I biked to the public library to check out one of two tattered copies of the novel. I started, read the first 150 pages, couldn't put it down, and now... now I've finished it.

I am currently at a loss to accurately express both my feeling for, and interpretation of, this novel. I have been for the last two weeks on a confusing and exhilarating roller coaster unable to discern truth from deception, and sometimes even the essential difference between the two. And yet it seems to me that somehow that is what John Fowles intended. He purposefully confuses reality and the "play," the theater reality which Conchis creates, and the reader is left with the feeling that there is a very blurry line between "reality" and "deception."

My attempts to trace this novel to it's mythic roots also has become a jumbled mess. When Dr. Sexson said that he choose this novel because it contains everything he wasn't kidding. There are references to, illusions to, and out right discussions of many different classic tales and myths. The one I found to be the most reoccurring (though I hesitate to call it the operate myth in the novel because of the complexity of the story) story is that of Shakespear's The Tempest. Conchis takes on the roll of the Prospero, the magician, the Magus. He manipulates the world and the lives of Miranda, or Lilly or June or whatever her real name is, as well as everyone else on the island. There are direct references to The Tempest and times where Nicholas mentions Conchis as Prospero.

Outside of this, in just the courtroom at "Nicholas' trial" there are symbols of Neolithic gods (Herne the Hunter), a man with the head of a stag (possibly the Celtic god Cernunnos),  a witch, a man with a crocodile head (possibly Sobek a ancient Egyptian god), a vampire, a sexless African nightmare, a fish-woman-bird presumably eight months pregnant (maybe a weird mother earth symbol? Not sure on this one), a man wearing a black cloak with white astrological symbols holding a staff with a snake eating it's own tail (possibly a magician, though the snake is called the Ouroboros) and a man with a goat head (that Nicholas thinks might be sacrificed as a Christ figure). In essence even in this one scene the number of possible tracings and allusions are numerous. 

I know most people have not finished reading this book so I will wait to further dissect the details of possible tracings and the end of the novel (which is driving me crazy!). I am very curious to know other peoples opinions of the book and if my guess at an operate myth is at all close.