Word: magus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MAGUS by John Fowles. 582 pages. Little, Brown...
...Collector succeeded because Fowles limited his principal personae to one spider and one fly. The Magus fails because he spins a flimsy, far-flung net of narrative and then gets all tangled up in it. At the center of the tangle is the Magus, a swami-style psychiatrist who owns part of an Aegean isle, stocks it with 30 or 40 of his disciples, and with their help plays Prospero to the unhappy young man who is the novel's narrator. Kill or cure is his intention, and to further it he mounts a colossal psychodrama that takes about...
...corrupt him: he stands too long admiring his spectacular descriptions. Fowles's faults, however, are mostly the faults of inexperience. At 39, he is a novelistic tyro, a London schoolmaster who published The Collector at the relatively advanced age of 37. Considered as a second novel, The Magus is forgivable and even promising. It takes a considerable talent to make so much go so wrong...
...first recorded heretic, a converted Jew named Simon Magus, tried to convince St. Peter that Christ's message could be welded to the wisdom of the Greeks...