![]() ![]() Fowles is typically urbaneĪnd disarming, conceding that the most popular of his books is also the one he's been least satisfied with, and that even with this substantial revision it will remain "a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."Ĭharmed by such modest candor, assured by its author that his book has no more "significance" than a Rorschach test-which at least for this reader means no significance at all-we begin to read, doubting that it can be as callowĪfter arising some days later from finishing the novel, one feels-as is usually the case in reading Fowles-ambivalent. We are used to the frequent changes made by an Auden or a Lowell in the text of their poems īut for a novelist, even 13 years after the event, quite thoroughly to rewrite and republish a large novel that is also a cult book for many younger readers-this is worth some explanation. Not only exceeds the original (1965) by 70-some pages but includes a foreword explaining the "somewhat unusual course" he has taken. Except John Fowles, evidently, because this revised version Hatever one's opinion of "The Magus," no one ever wished it any longer. ![]()
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