The Magus by John Fowles and adapted for The BBC

 The Magus by John Fowles and adapted for The BBC

Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:

-              https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEVa4_CsRStSBBDo4uJWT8BSWtTTn0N1E   and   http://realini.blogspot.ro/

Nicholas Urfe is the hero of this complicated, postmodern work that I have finished again, this time in an abridged format.

The adaptation for The BBC Radio was not just excellent, but it helped breeze through what is otherwise a challenging narrative.

On one side, outstanding adaptations can help one deal with challenging accounts and simplify a difficult to follow plot.

Obviously there is a major downside and much is lost when twenty hours of reading is reduced to just three, as here.

Albeit the main character is also the narrator Nick Urfe, the title of the account is given by Maurice Conchis –if that is his real name-who is The Magus.

At the start of the story, we meet Alison Kelly, who is an Australian that seemed somewhat liberal and fast.

The night she meets the hero at a party, he is warned that she is engaged to his neighbor’s brother and she makes mistakes.

Indeed, Nicholas gets to bed with Alison and the next day she feels ashamed and even asks him:

-          With how many men do you think I slept with over the past month/

-          Ok, a fundamentalist, conservative, ultra- orthodox point of view is stupid and passé, even outré, but she seemed a bit amoral to me

Nicholas travels to the Greek island of Phraxos, to work as a teacher at the Lord Byron School and meets with the other main personage, if not the more important and intriguing one, the Magus who adds spice and meaning to the whole creation.

He is from the start and remains a mysterious apparition, a magician who offers and takes part in a show that is much more complex than the usual fare with balls, cards and pigeons, for he is using humans for his magic performance.

What he puts on a virtual stage is a new, outlandish play that is created by him and the cast, some of them ignorant of the fact that they play a role.

There is no audience, the participants who take part knowingly see past the roles and make their contribution, pushing the boundaries and using and abusing to a great extent the guests that are unaware of the Big Game.

In a way, this has reminded me of The Game, the film with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn wherein we have what I see as a similar situation, with Nicholas van Norton being taken for a horror and joy ride, in a game that keeps him thrilled, tense and scared until it is revealed that his brother just paid for a huge cast to act around him.

A certain approach can be made with The Truman show, with Nick having a similar staged life on the island, whereas Truman has a world created all for him and especially his huge audience.

Nicholas meets first one gorgeous woman and then another, the identical twin sister of the first, who propose first one story, then another and yet some other version emerges, with this reader still wondering:

-          What was really going on there?

First there is a suggestion that there is a ghost, and then Julie- as the woman is supposed to be called- is portrayed by The Magus as a patient, whom he treats because she suffers from schizophrenia and she imagines things, people, and threats.

To complicate matters, there is June, the twin sister who keeps enticing Nick and advances all sorts of versions to what was happening around.

There is also a trip in time, to the period of the Nazi occupation when horrible things, involving torture and the murder of scores of people and which had Maurice Conchis play a crucial and brutal role.

The psychological ordeal suffered by Nicholas Urfe is terrifying, although he may emerge from all this with Post Traumatic Growth, instead of the more likely, commonly experienced after such a trial Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

One of the girls that dance, swim and act around this strange, perverted paradise is very correct when she says:

-          This is an experience that can never be repeated, tried, initiated anywhere else…and the expense, the effort, creativity, deviance is unique to this context

The play is as fascinating as the book for this auditor and it was a pleasure to listen to the very good cast.

To end with what I see as a funny anecdote, regarding the film adaptation that I understand is not as outstanding as this play:

     

Asked whether he would do everything the same if he had to live his life all over again, Peter Sellers thought for a moment and said:

-          “Yes. But I would not see The Magus.”