The Magus

A multi-day walking trip requires a page-turning thriller. It is one of the most intriguing mysteries I’ve ever read. It dragged me into another world and then deeper into a story within a story. Lying in uncomfortable beds in noisy hostels while backpacking in Australia, I was beguiled and forgot my own reality.

Years later, this book stayed with me and influenced my debut novel despite, I think, never really understanding it. However, writing this review has made me start reading it again. I’m already baffled, but I'm hooked!

I love suspense thrillers with a strong opening hook, and this spell-binding and intoxicating adventure into a Greek Heart of Darkness kept me guessing up to the last page and beyond (everyone disagrees about the enigmatic ending).

An almost Faust-like adventure, set in, to me, the most intoxicating landscape on the planet. I found it an utterly mind-bending mystery that blended reality with fantasy, love, and fear like no other. It made me want to move to Greece.

Every young man’s dream of living on a Greek island in the 60s before the tourist invasion ruined the idyll forever.

The antiquity, the sun, the resin-flavoured wine, the turquoise sea, and the sweetness of the islanders’ welcome is the background to a tale of mystery and magic, sexual promise and deadly intrigue.

This book changed my life. I went to the islands as soon as I could after reading The Magus, and sixty years later wish myself still there.

A young man takes a job as an English teacher on a Greek island, and is quickly drawn into a bewildering mystery involving the island mythological roots, and an impossibly beautiful woman who seems to want him as much as he wants her.

This mix proved irresistible to me when I read it as a young man, teaching English abroad. The novel ultimately weaves a web of psychological intrigue so powerful there can be no answer to the riddles it sets. Which is perhaps why the ending blurs reality so that I still don’t really know the why for what… show more.

The Magus is a novel about a young Englishman Nicolas who takes a teaching position on a Greek island and is drawn into the web of a reclusive millionaire who plays bizarre psychological tricks on him which blur the line between illusion and reality.

Through this process, Nicholas loses his grip on reality and his life begins to fall apart, thus beginning a journey of self-discovery. I read this book as a young man in one sitting. It took me all night and into the next day. I simply couldn’t put it down.

It dawned on me that this was… show more.

Like most people, I love a good scary story. Ironically, I consider this non-horror novel to be the scariest book ever written. That alone is an extraordinary accomplishment.

The Magus centers on a young teacher who moves to an isolated Greek island where he becomes so manipulated by a Svengali-type character that he loses his sense of self and even of reality.

For me, it did something else. Something personal. It got to me. It totally wigged me out. It triggered my own instinctive fears and apprehension about losing control to malicious mental trickery. Now that is scary.

The first time I read The Magus—I’ve re-read it twice—I barely slept until I finished it. I’m not exaggerating. Conchis, the rich and eccentric psychiatrist (or is he?), and Julie, the mysterious seductress, seemed yanked out of my own unconscious mind. At twenty-something, I identified so strongly with Nicholas, the similarly-aged protagonist, that I felt toyed with and tortured along with him. I was desperate to see how, and if, he would emerge from his sometimes-blissful, sometimes agonizing ordeal. Darkly erotic, The Magus is one of the most psychologically unsettling books I’ve ever read, and one of the best-written.… show more.

At the time I read this book I was a fan of old sci-fi and some historical fiction. The Magus was recommended to me and, honestly, I didn’t think I’d like it. It wasn’t ‘my genre’. Then I started reading it and knew I was right – it was quite boring. But I read on, and it really started to suck me in. A story about a young teacher being manipulated on an isolated Greek island by an older gentleman and a colourful cast of strange characters, the writing is just magical and evocative and the story is like nothing… show more.