THE MAGICIAN'S WIFE. - Softcover

Brian Moore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006551106 ISBN 13: 9780006551102

Publisher: HarperCollins: Flamingo, 1998

Synopsis

General FictionLarge Print Edition*A Literary Guild SelectionFew contemporary writers are both as versatile and as unfailingly provocative as Moore. starred, Publishers WeeklySet in the 1950s and based on an actual historical incident, The Magicians Wife is the story of how famed illusionist Henri Lambert and his wife Emmeline are drawn into an elaborate plot to further the drive into North Africa. While Henri goes to desperate lengths to further the French cause, Emmeline is seduced by the golden land and sheds her patriotic notions. The result is an exciting and exotic work of fiction brought to vivid life by a master storyteller.

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Review:

Brian Moore is best known for his mysteries of faith and fanaticism. The Statement focuses on a murderously uncontrite Vichy collaborator whom the French Catholic church has long sheltered. And in The Color of Blood (1987)--set in an unnamed Iron Curtain country--a cardinal wonders if people aren't using religion "as a sort of politics." Religion and politics again feature in The Magician's Wife, but this time they are accompanied by their long-time companion, illusion. Once again, France is the setting--Second Empire France, though, along with its prospective colony, Algeria.

Moore opens the novel with a bizarre detail. It is 1856 and Emmeline Lambert watches a mechanical gatekeeper salute a departing dignitary. This nuts-and-bolts major-domo is the creation of her autocratic husband, Henri, formerly France's greatest magician, retired and hard at work on such minor contrivances. "Now he was an inventor, a scientist," Emmeline thinks. "But would a real scientist spend his days making mechanical marionettes?" Her impatience with his compulsive tinkering is only one part of a troubled marriage, which seems to consist largely of fossilized accommodations and painful discretion.

According to their visiting dignitary, however, the prestidigitator's country needs him. Colonel Deniau, head of Arab affairs and in many ways the real magician of the tale--or the magician's enchanter--has a mysterious project in mind. The plan is to flatter Henri into creating a series of mind-blowing tricks. According to the colonel, an Algerian marabout, or living saint, is "said to possess miraculous powers" and might call for a holy war. If Henri outperforms the Algerian, he will seem the greater marabout" and convince them that God is not on their side but France's."

The Magician's Wife is a condemnation of colonialism, of which illusion is always a key ingredient. Moore's novel, however, is far from a tract: he infuses his drama of the past with our present anxiety. He also creates, quite literally, a magical narrative. Though the Algerians may consider Henri the devil incarnate, and his wife may slight his legerdemain, you will be awed by his fantastic skills and the apparent effortlessness with which the author relates them.

About the Author:

Brian Moore was born in Belfast. He emigrated to Canada in 1948 and then moved to California. He twice won the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction and has been given a special award from the United States Institute of Arts and Letters. He won the Author's Club First Novel Award for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Great Victorian Collection. The Doctor's Wife, The Colour of Blood - winner of the Sunday Express 1988 Book of the Year - and Lies of Silence were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Six of his novels have been made into films - The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Cold Heaven, The Statement and Black Robe. Brian Moore died in 1999.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0006551106
• ISBN 13: 9780006551102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224