The Magician

by W. Somerset Maugham

Overview

In Paris around 1900, Arthur and Margaret are engaged to be married. Everyone approves and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Until Oliver Haddo appears. Sinister and repulsive, Haddo fascinates Margaret's spinster friend, Susie Boyd. Yet it is not Susie who ultimately falls prey to his peculiar charm. It is Margaret, and a fate worse than death awaits her in the form of the evil Haddo.

The Magician is one of Somerset Maugham's most complex and perceptive novels. Running through it is the theme of evil, deftly woven into a story as memorable for its action as for its astonishingly vivid characters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412199346
Publisher:	eBooksLib
Publication date:	04/21/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	283 KB

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

Maugham tells his tale of the weird and the horrible with simple sincerity and a constant matching of the unhallowed practices with the clean, sweet things of common life that make its effect uncommonly impressive.”

New York Times

"Maugham tells his tale of the weird and the horrible with simple sincerity and a constant matching of the unhallowed practices with the clean, sweet things of common life that make its effect uncommonly impressive." —The New York Times

From the Publisher

Maugham was a very successful and well-regarded author, but even he, looking back on this early novel, had little good to say about it. Narrator James Adams makes the most of the novel's strong point, its dialogue, with an array of adept accents and moods. Even so, the villain, Oliver Haddo, comes across as more bombastic than evil. Only towards the end, when Adams has some genuine emotion and drama to work with, does the story start to come to life. As a rare fantasy story from Maugham's early career, the novel is an interesting artifact, and the research into the history of magic and alchemy is exhaustive. But not even Adams's fine reading can raise it above the level of a curiosity. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2013 - AudioFile