MAGOG

This is a long, manic, uncompromising, often hysterically comic allegory about the ease and emptiness of success. Magog abandons his vaguely crooked Civil Service Career (dabbling in Israeli gun-running) to become savior of the British film industry by the lucrative but not terribly aesthetic technique of converting movie studios to parking lots. Then on to millionaire realtor-developer to plagiarizing archaeologist to Master of a new Cambridge college to the literal and figurative lover of what are most likely his children (via his brother's wife) to searcher after mystical revelation. The man does everything, and he does it well, though not as ruthlessly as he might. It is still too ruthless for brother Gog who abandons his life and wife to wander around Wales playing with salmon and inventing wild but no doubt veracious theories about everything. The tragedy of this very amusing allegory that dabbles with ideologies and revolution is that of people who know that their extraordinary capabilities outstrip their ordinary consciences -- the 20th century malady perhaps -- and one that seems to have no cure.