Skip to main content

The Magicians



If Aldous Huxley can connect the search for a evening suit with 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' (in Time Must Have a Stop http://ncolloff.blogspot.ch/2014/11/time-must-have-stop.html ), J.B. Priestley can be allowed to connect a boardroom coup with an encounter with the Fourth Way.

Charles Ravenstreet is the managing director of an electrical equipment manufacturer until shareholders, some considered to be his friends, depose him for a 'bean counter'. At a loose end and quickly exhausting the casual pleasures of his new leisure, he finds himself dispirited, afloat in an unsympathetic world. Perhaps a new business venture will revive his engagement?

Enter the sinister Lord Mervil and associates who seek him out to help them manufacture a drug purported to quell all anxiety with no apparent side effects. This provides the opportunity of both great profit and the quiescent society that can be guided by the 'elite' that Lord Mervil favours.

But here the fates intervene in the form of three elderly men, holding a conference at a pub, local to Ravenstreet's country manor, which is hit by an aircraft in a freak 'accident'. The three elderly men, following an intuition, have survived but now without a place to stay, find themselves invited by Ravenstreet to stay with him.

The three men are the 'magicians' of the title, practitioners of certain mental arts that give them uncanny insight into Ravenstreet and set him on a path of self-discovery and on to opposing Lord Merrill's scheme.

The magicians are undoubtedly modelled on Gurdjieff (as seen through Maurice Nicoll of whom Priestley was an avid and discerning reader - two of Nicoll's books that were once Priestley's belong to me) and the theme of time resonates through the story. The magicians know, and demonstrate to Ravenstreet, that nothing that is experienced is ever lost. It awaits a particular kind of remembering and with the right attention and feeling, your reality can be changed.

They give Ravenstreet two opportunities, described in separate chapters, coming at significant junctures, to return to critical moments in his life, and relive them with new, renewing eyes, such that future possibility, it is suggested, is indeed changed. These moments are described as 'time alive' that is, in itself, beautifully apt. How do we come to experience our time with a wholly encompassing life? A time that is never lost but often obscured in forgetting. They are both strikingly moving chapters that invite a similar movement - I find myself being considered by similar critical moments and wondering about the effects of one's choices and whether being cast back, concretely, would indeed be transformative. I expect they would be - I can see it glimpsing, glimmering, and will bring myself to its attempt. Rarely do novels have this simple effectiveness.

Meanwhile, the story unfolds, Mervil and his associates are confronted with themselves and as, sadly, is often the way, though disturbed, they fork off either into self destruction or self-defence, finding a way to renewing insight is the narrow gate towards paradise that is difficult to find.

All this is wrapped up in a novel that, at some points, creaks with its particular age. One defect is perhaps its approach to the feminine - their characters are insufficiently drawn and it grates - you stand outside them and a little to the right. Sometimes,  however, it scintillates with as acute a pattern of social criticism as can be imagined.

But, at heart, this is a novel with a metaphysical and practical vision at its heart - awaken to your life as a continuous whole and enter it with awareness at any point on its trajectory for that offers the key to freedom.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more