The novel centers on Nicholas Urfe, a callow Oxford graduate who falls in love with and then leaves an Australian woman named Alison Kelly. Though The Magus is largely forgotten now, in the mid-twentieth century it was a best-seller beloved by the intelligentsia as a thumping (if very long) good read, and a postmodern puzzle box. Fowles wants to destroy master narratives, but he’s too fascinated with mastery to do it. The novel is a tour de force of iconoclasm, the very excessive omnipotence of which reminds the reader that the Puritans who smashed stained glass windows were at least as reverent as their targets. It’s no real surprise, then, that when John Fowles’ 1965 novel The Magus puts a stake through its all-knowing father, He just comes back as an equally wise-ass zombie. Killing God is easy it’s keeping him in the grave that’s the hard part.
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