Spétses: The Magus

"...'Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn'

'To live alone?'

'To live. With what you are.'"

-- John Fowles, The Magus

I am not sure what I was expecting to find here, in a place where fiction and reality merge in my mind. I fell in love with John Fowles' Spétses, an island where the mythic and the mystic are brought to life on every page. Beautiful scenery haunted by mists of adventure were painted by his words. He created a world where reality was constantly questioned and nearly anything was possible because it was impossible to tell the truth from the lies. His Spétses breathed out uncertainty in hot thick pants that intoxicated all who read on.

The Spétses I spent two lazy days exploring was a tame shadow in comparison. A small touristy town on the edge of the coast makes up the majority of the populated area. Shops lining the streets sell trinkets to passers-by and the occasional restaurant owner stands next to his menu enticing anyone who will listen with descriptions of fresh fish and homemade Greek cooking. Hotels and B&Bs line the waterfront, their signs bragging of beachfront views and comfortable beds. The people travel almost exclusively on "motos," which seems to be the name for the scooters, motercylces, mopeds, and four-wheelers that are available for rent on every third corner. September is the end of the tourist season there so my visit came as most tourists were returning home with new tan lines and a suitcase full of sand.


I stayed at a lovely little hotel in the tiny town and felt spoiled after my time in the hostel in Athens. From there, my explorations of Spétses were done on foot and by bike. Five euros got me two days of tooling around the island on bike trying to find some hint of the monumental literary significance of this place. Yet there was no Magus themed tour in sight and the only indication that anyone had heard of Fowles' famous book was the single copy of it I found in the tiny bookshop which was curiously lacking a salesclerk.

Though Fowles renames the island in his book I could see the inspiration, even without a tour. The narrator describes his island saying, "Phraxos was beautiful, not just pretty, picturesque, charming - it was simply and effortlessly beautiful. It took my breath away when I first saw it, floating like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea." Yet even amid the beauty he sees its fault, "two eyesores, visible long before we landed," which he names as the hotel and the school which exist in both the novel and reality. The hotel, the Poseidonion, towers over the shore near the port, though it is slightly less out of place now that a town has built up around it. The school is no longer visible from the water but must have once broken the feeling of stillness that is the overwhelming feeling the narrator portrays in the novel.

This empty silence was no longer suffocating on the real Spétses, but I could still find it. In my day long bike ride along the twenty five kilometers of road the encircle the island I stopped at nearly deserted beaches that bordered the pine tree forests. It would be easy to imagine that these trees hid ghosts and mysteries like those the narrator encountered, if only one would wander into their depths away from the sunny seaside. Yet the few fellow travelers I had were there to swim and sunbathe, not search for fictional underground bunkers, a mansion full of deceptions, and an answer to the looming question: who am I?

"The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself."

--John Fowles, The Magus

I found myself contemplating the same questions the narrator did, even while I partook in the modern reality of the beach getaway town. Sitting in the sand with pen and pad, I scribbled. The sun set in a haze of my own feelings painted across the sky. It was then that I remembered Fowles' departing words. There, in that moment, I wondered how both stories really end.

"cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet"

-- John Fowles, The Magus;

 quoting an anonymous Latin lyric titled The Vigil of Venus 

September 16th-18th 2016