The Magus by John Fowles

Plot summary

The story is written from the perspective of young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet Nicholas Urfe. After graduation, he briefly works as a teacher at a small school, but quickly becomes bored and decides to leave England. While looking for another job, Nicholas takes up with Alison Kelly, an Australian girl he meets at a party in London. The relationship fails to prevent him from accepting a post teaching English at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos. The relocation, however does not bring him joy – bored, depressed, disillusioned, and overwhelmed by the Mediterranean island, Nicholas struggles with loneliness and contemplates suicide. Finding himself habitually wandering around the island, he stumbles upon the estate, and soon its owner, a wealthy Greek recluse Maurice Conchis. They develop a sort of a friendship, and Conchis slowly reveals that he may or may not have collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
Nicholas is gradually drawn into Conchis's psychological games, his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona, and his eccentric masques. At first, these various aspects of what the novel terms the "godgame" seem to Nicholas to be a joke, but, as they grow more elaborate and intense, Nicholas's ability to determine what is real and what is artifice vanishes. Against his will and knowledge, he becomes a performer in the godgame. Eventually, Nicholas realises that the re-enactments of the Nazi occupation, the absurd playlets after de Sade, and the obscene parodies of Greek myths are not about Conchis's life, but his own.

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