ABSTRACT
The Magus is a compelling, grandly ingenious and oddly childlike book, as self-contradictory as a drawing by Maurits Escher. Le Grand Meaulnes, the one completed novel of Henri Alain-Fournier, is a haunting fiction of double erotic quest and loss – a romantic novel which, like The Magus, triumphantly refuses maturity, yearningly mourns the failure of the uncompromising emotions of childhood at the same time that it magically asserts the terrible pathos of their ascendancy. Great Expectations is about the destruction of illusion; The Magus is also about the complicity of all fiction in illusion, a complicity from which it tries to shake itself free. John Fowles has said that he wished in The Magus to provide, as Le Grand Meaulnes does, ‘an experience beyond the literary’; and also that ‘The Magus was of course a deliberately artificial, model-proposing novel, a good deal more about fiction than any “real” situation’.
