The Magus

The Magus is a novel by the English writer John Fowles, published in 1965 and revised in 1977.

Urfe is not especially likeable, and the novel lets him be a conventional young man with literary opinions until the owner of the island estate, a man who has spent his life arranging events, gives him something better to think about than himself. The visitor has no way of knowing which parts of what he sees have been staged, since the setting has actors, costumes, histories and a woman whose part in the arrangement he cannot settle. Fowles wrote this book first of all his novels but published it third, after The Collector and a book of philosophy, and he worked on it for about twelve years, drawing on the two years he spent teaching at a school on the Greek island of Spetses. Even after it was successful he kept revising it, and the 1977 version is the one usually read. The novel is generally described as metafictional, since its entertainment and its argument are the same thing: a story about a man being deceived that keeps asking the reader why he wants the deception to make sense.