Observer Review: 52 Wayss To Magic America By James Flint Essay, Research Paper

Tricks and treats52 Ways to Magic Americaby James FlintFourth Estate? 9.99, pp320James Flint & # 8217 ; s first novel, Habitus, was a elephantine, sprawling, advanced book that wove together diverse and phantasmagoric narrative togss and revealed the writer as gifted and ambitious, if non ever in complete bid of the sheer majority of his stuff. In his 2nd, 52 Ways to Magic America, he has narrowed the focal point, though non the aspiration ; here his large thoughts are contained within the range of a more additive narrative, the narrative of one adult male & # 8217 ; s try to follow his dream to Las Vegas.Marty Quick has been executing thaumaturgy fast ones since the age of nine, chiefly as a agency of deflecting himself from emotional hurting ; as his female parent was deceasing of malignant neoplastic disease, his glamorous American uncle Harry presented him with an antique transcript of Jarrett & # 8217 ; s Magic and Stagecraft Technical, and filled his caput with dreams of showmanship and all its glorification in America.The dream sustains Marty through a dull suburban adolescence to the finals of the Young Magician of the Year competition at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. There he walks off with the rubric and a new girlfriend, Terri Liddell, a Princess Di lookalike who becomes his helper through seasons of touring unquestionably commonplace locales, until a opportunity brush with Terri & # 8217 ; s dual in Blackpool introduces a new and unsafe component into their act and their lives.Flint quotes the nineteenth-century sage Robert-Houdin, whose O

bservation that ‘a conjuror is an actor who plays the part of a magician’ captures the essence of Marty’s dream. Stage magic as a metaphor for our willingness to be deceived, and all the attendant themes of illusion and reality, has been popular in fiction – one thinks of Robertson Davies’s World of Wonders or, more recently, Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil – and Flint has painted the backdrop to his story with a fine eye for detail.The round of boarded-up seaside towns and shabby little theatres that are the graveyard of a performer’s hopes carry echoes of Osborne’s The Entertainer, each new description reeking of a particularly English sense of disappointment and boredom: ‘one long parade of battered green rooms, chipped gilt work, stale cigarette smoke and those terrible, horrible, unpalatable acres of ancient red velour.’As with his earlier novel, Flint has an occasional tendency to strive for comic effect by over-complicating his syntax, or using 10 words where five would do – ‘…his new haircut, which he wasn’t altogether sure yet he was all that much in favour of’ – and sometimes it is unclear whether his use of cliche is ironic. But the novel’s strong sense of place, and his thoughtful evolution of its themes, are not obscured by these minor faults. His discussion of the history and execution of conjuring tricks is never laboured, but testifies to the same depth of research that he brought to his scientific themes in Habitus, and his characters are convincing and even oddly endearing in their banality.