Spidery Spirit

THE MAGUS by John Fowles. 582 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

The art of John Fowles is arachnid. In The Collector, his brilliant first novel, the central character is a spidery psychopath who ensnares a pretty girl and plays with her as a child plays with a doll, not consciously meaning any harm, until the poor thing falls apart. In his second novel, Fowles repeats his pattern but not his success.

The 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 two months to run its course.

The drama begins in the psychiatrist's villa, where the young man is easily persuaded to fall in love with a beautiful young woman who may or may not be a ghost. A few pages later she turns into the goddess Diana, and with her crescent bow and shining arrow slaughters a satyr who comes galloping along. All at once, the young man is captured by a troop of German soldiers and forced to witness the brutalization of some partisans they have captured. A little later, just as he is about to make love to the gorgeous ghost, he is seized by a powerful Negro who sometimes wears the mask of Anubis, the dog-faced divinity of ancient Egypt. Roped to a bed, he is injected with a mysterious drug, and . . .

And so it goes for about 400 of the novel's 582 pages. When the therapy ends, the young man seems just as silly and at least as sick as he was when it started. Fowles tries terribly hard to make the reader care about all this. He displays to advantage both an extensive culture in the occult and a singular power of imagery. Yet too often he carelessly permits that power to 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.

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