The Magus

Nicholas Urfe takes a teaching post on Phraxos mostly to escape Alison Kelly, a woman he's treated carelessly in London, and the island's wealthy recluse Maurice Conchis draws him into a sequence of staged scenarios, masques, hypnosis, actors playing shifting roles as sisters, doubles, and wartime ghosts, that Fowles never lets the reader, or Nicholas, fully separate from reality. The uncertainty is deliberate: Conchis's 'godgame' works only if its subject can't tell where the performance ends, and Fowles extends that same uncertainty to the reader, given no more reliable a vantage point on events than Nicholas has himself.

Conchis's own wartime account, a story about a Nazi occupation of the island and an impossible choice he claims to have faced under German command, is delivered with total conviction and later partially contradicted, and Fowles never resolves which version, if either, is true. The unreliability isn't a puzzle to be solved so much as the novel's actual argument: Nicholas has spent his whole life treating other people, Alison especially, as supporting characters in his own story, and Conchis's elaborate theater exists to force him into the position of someone else's supporting character for once, with no script and no certainty about how it ends.

Conchis's household includes a young woman Nicholas knows as Lily, later Julie de Seitas, who may or may not have an identical twin sister also working the games, and the confusion Fowles builds around whether Nicholas is dealing with one actress or two is never fully cleared up even after the novel's other mysteries get partial explanations. It is the clearest instance of Fowles refusing the reader a stable text to stand on, doubling a character the way the whole godgame doubles reality, until Nicholas's growing feelings for whichever woman he's actually talking to become as compromised by uncertainty as everything else Conchis has staged. Fowles drew the confusion partly from his own years teaching English on the real island of Spetses, folding a genuine, unresolved entanglement of his own into a fiction about staged entanglement.