I'm torn between a 4.75 and a 5 purely on the basis of Joe's depictions and whether the race card was necessary. While this concern speaks for our current morals, that is not to esteem a work based on the degree to which it pacifies these principles...

Let us speak of what we do know, The Magus as a reader's experience is a trip into a depraved Carroll Wonderland (or, more contemporarily, Mona Awad's Bunny), led by a sadistic Gatsby on Lehane's Shudder Island. 

Much through reading this, I could not understand why Fowles appears absent from the Bookstagram Dark Academia world. It took some time into the labyrinth before I realized why: it is not that Fowles is incomprehensible; his language is clear and his plot pointed (he'd noted in an interview with the BBC at one point, how contemporary literature is most successful when it includes mystery, something that the readers can follow; it is not just the ability to craft words wonderfully like Joyce and Woolf, but also to have a traceable narrative). Fowles is not inaccessible in his language. He evokes curiosity and intrigue, and keeps you turning every page. You will be seduced, horrified, disturbed beyond belief, and yet somehow all the more fascinated at the Magus's macabre. If it is a bit much, well, that is the point. 

"History had superseded the ten commandments of the Bible" (p.641)