The Magus

by John Fowles

His even teeth gleamed falsely, vividly in the intense sunlight. Stupidity is lethal, he implied; and look at me, I have survived.

But all games, even the most literal, between a man and a woman are implicitly sexual;

but we could outperfidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

‘Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.’

It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.