He goes on to accept a post teaching English at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos. While looking for another job, Nicholas takes up with Alison Kelly, an Australian girl he meets at a party in London. After graduation, he briefly works as a teacher at a small school, but becomes bored and decides to leave England. The story reflects the perspective of Nicholas Urfe, a young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet. Despite critical and commercial success, he continued to rework it, publishing a final revision in 1977. He worked on it for twelve years before its publication in 1965. He based it partly on his experiences on the Greek island of Spetses, where he taught English for two years at the Anargyrios School. He started writing it in the 1950s, under the original title of The Godgame. The Magus was the first book John Fowles wrote, but his third to be published, after The Collector (1963) and The Aristos (1964). In 2003, the novel was listed at number 67 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. In 1999, The Magus was ranked on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 93 on the editors' list and number 71 on the readers' list. Considered an example of metafiction, it was the first novel written by Fowles, but the second he published. Urfe becomes embroiled in the psychological illusions of a master trickster, which become increasingly dark and serious. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.The Magus (1965) is a postmodern novel by British author John Fowles, telling the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young British graduate who is teaching English on a small Greek island. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence.
It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope- an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular.
I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. “I acquired expensive habits and affected manners.
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