#93 - The Magus

John Fowles (1926-2005) was born into the interwar English upper-middle class. He was educated at the Bedford School (appropriately, the same school attended some seventy years prior by Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers, the Golden Dawn occultist) and New College, Oxford. He had the good fortune to graduate from a preparatory course for the Royal Marines the very day that Germany surrendered in World War II, and subsequently spent his twenties teaching English at, among other places, a private school on a Greek island, before becoming a full time writer.
He was, by all accounts and the testimony of his own journals, a thoroughly irritable and grouchy man, full of hatred for his publishers, his considerable success, his readers, and the human race in general. His other novels include The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Collector, and Daniel Martin. The Magus was the first written but the second to see print, being published in 1966 and revised a decade later. (I read the revised edition for this review.)