The Magus

At Villa Bourani, the host is charming and the stories are irresistible, but nothing is offered without a price. WITH AN AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman adrift after Oxford and a failed love affair, takes a teaching post on the Greek island of Phraxos. What begins as escape soon becomes a far more unsettling encounter. At Bourani, a villa on the island, Nicholas meets Maurice Conchis, a cultivated and enigmatic recluse. Through stories, performances, seductions and staged mysteries, Conchis draws him into a psychological ordeal in which reality and illusion are almost impossible to separate. The island gives Nicholas the drama he has been half-wishing for, then strips away the safety of being merely amused by it. In Fowles's hands, this literary mystery becomes a disturbing study of performance, desire and the stories people tell in order to avoid themselves. 'A major work of mounting tensions in which the human mind is the guinea-pig... Mr Fowles has taken a big swing at a difficult subject and his hits are on the bull's eye' Sunday Times