The Magician

Written by W. Somerset Maugham

Narrated by Tom Parker

This is a tale of two magicians, of high school extortion and violence, and of a criminal trial in which the guilty go free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: Jun 24, 2005
• ISBN: 9780786116546

W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Born in Paris, he was orphaned as a boy and sent to live with an emotionally distant uncle. He struggled to fit in as a student at The King’s School in Canterbury and demanded his uncle send him to Heidelberg University, where he studied philosophy and literature. In Germany, he had his first affair with an older man and embarked on a career as a professional writer. After completing his degree, Maugham moved to London to begin medical school. There, he published Liza of Lambeth (1897), his debut novel. Emboldened by its popular and critical success, he dropped his pursuit of medicine to devote himself entirely to literature. Over his 65-year career, he experimented in form and genre with such works as Lady Frederick (1907), a play, The Magician (1908), an occult novel, and Of Human Bondage (1915). The latter, an autobiographical novel, earned Maugham a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading authors, and continues to be recognized as his masterpiece. Although married to Syrie Wellcome, Maugham considered himself both bisexual and homosexual at different points in his life. During and after the First World War, he worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service as a spy in Switzerland and Russia, writing of his experiences in Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1927), a novel that would inspire Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. At one point the highest-paid author in the world, Maugham led a remarkably eventful life without sacrificing his literary talent.

Reviews for The Magician

[almin-70827 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

although Maugham forgot he even wrote this book, I enjoyed it. It had some supernatural elements involved that were well thought out and presented. I listened to the audio; the narrator was very good with great distinctions between characters voices and was not over top, which could easily have happened with the character of the magician.

[uvula_fr_b4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Magician is apparently an exception that proves the rule to Somerset Maugham's usual oeuvre: a sensational, proto-pulp (or a neo-gothic) thriller that, after a deliberate build-up, actually delivers in its hellzapoppin payoff. Stuffy and unimaginative English surgeon Arthur Burdon travels to Paris to visit his one-time ward, current fiancée, Margaret Dauncey, as well as renew his friendship with the retired Breton physician and autodidactic occultist Dr. Porhoët; while there he makes two new acquaintances: Margaret's roommate, Susie Boyd (who is a vacationing teacher at least a decade older than Margaret), and the repulsively corpulent, alarmingly charismatic Oliver Haddo, a wealthy squire and a casual acquaintance of Porhoët, who met while they were each studying the occult in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Haddo is deliberately provocative, even rude, but has a wealth of worldly anecdotes (he is a keen lion-hunter, for example) and a recondite erudition to entertain and silence any would-be critics, over and above his slightly mesmeric stare. Due to a contretemps with Burdon -- Haddo kicks Margaret's dog while visiting her and Susie in the company of Porhoët and Burdon, in consequence of which Burdon physically attacks Haddo, who fails to defend himself -- Haddo conceives a terrible hatred for Burdon, and plots a convoluted, wholly improbable, but nonetheless awful, vengeance against him. Haddo woos and wins Margaret away from him, acting less the passionate and sentimental lover than a Svengali (who debuted in George du Maurier's 1895 novel Trilby; his fame far outshone that of the novel's titular character, notwithstanding the fact that she had a type of hat named after her) who clouds her mind and breaks her will. Burdon, though spiritually wounded nigh unto the breaking point himself, nonetheless doesn't contest the marriage, believing Margaret to be in full possession of her faculties, and honestly in love with Haddo. Eventually Susie, who has fallen in love with Burdon, convinces him otherwise, and he calls upon Porhoët's expertise to assist him in bearding Haddo in his ancestral home of Skene, in Staffordshire, in the West Midlands, England. Interest is added to The Magician by the knowledge, which Maugham confirmed in his "Fragment of Autobiography" some fifty years after The Magician's initial publication, that Haddo is a caricature of Aleister Crowley, the self-described "Great Beast," whom Maugham knew in passing. Crowley was so incensed by this mocking and unflattering portrait of him that he undertook to review The Magician in the pages of Vanity Fair, signing himself "Oliver Haddo;" Maugham claimed to have never read the review. While Maugham claimed, in his "Fragment," to have spent "days and days reading in the library of the British Museum" to research The Magician, he still produced such idiocies as Porhoët declaring that Haddo "'had studied the Kabbalah in the original'" (Chapter 1) -- as though there was an "original," ur-text of the Kabbalah. Nonetheless, Maugham manages to reward the reader's suspension of disbelief with a slow-burn building up of tension and suspense that is magnificently rewarded with a climax that is at least the equal of most of the sensational works that were of a time with The Magician; the conclusion of The Magician is more thrilling and eerie, for example, than that of the first two Fu Manchu novels or, come to that, than Dracula's (or Alraune's). Maugham very wisely limits Haddo's time on-stage, and, more importantly, limits his tirades about his esoteric activities, so that the reader is nearly as ignorant and impressionable as Burdon and Susie (and, for all his time spent at the Arsenal, Porhoët), and so can react with the appropriate levels of horror and revulsion when they slink through Haddo's attic workshops at Skene. The Magician was much more enjoyable, on the whole, than the only other work I've read by Maugham thus far, the short story collection The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Seas Islands (1921); I'm somewhat apprehensive of reading more Maugham due to the glum feeling that I'll probably not enjoy his other work as much.

[mbmackay · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dated, mystical nonsense. Should stick to his short stories.Read Samoa Oct 2003

[la2bkk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was a bit disappointed in this short work. Perhaps it was inevitable given my expectations after reading Of Human Bondage. In any case, while the story was interesting and read well (as do most of Maugham's efforts), the work lacked any real depth and read more like a dime store novel than a serious exploration of the occult or supernatural.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I hadn't read anything by W. Somerset Maugham and he was on my queue for awhile. I decided to start with "The Magician" because Alistair Crowley (upon which the character of Oliver Haddo was loosely based) is also one of the inspirations behind Jeff Martin's new album '777'. The story is well paced and offers a keen portrayal of the fine line between the rational and the occult, the skeptical and the magical, the Victorian life of manners and the underbelly of the mystical, and how easy it is for someone to cross between each of these. At times it is overworked and seems like a Scooby Doo episode, but this can be excused for it is always well written. I will have to see the movie and see if it stacks up.

[fig2_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An unsettling contrast of sweet ordinariness and unhinged evil. Creepy.

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this rather melodramatic and contrived novel, written in 1908 about magic and the occult in Edwardian England/Paris. It does have some dated prose and it tends to heap on the detail in rather list like form at times. Margaret is rather contrived and the author never convinces us why she acts the way that she does, but that is part of the magic/hypnotism story.But it is interesting to read what must have been a topical novel at the time.