Glen David Gold - Carter Beats the Devil review

Magical Mysteries
Peter Preston on Carter Beats the Devil, the debut of Glen David Gold, a superb conjuror

The Guardian
Saturday 1 September 2001

Carter Beats the Devil
Glen David Gold

Here is a book - a first novel, no less - to blow you away. It seeks to stun and amaze and deceive and, always, to entertain; and it seldom misses a trick in 600 pulsating pages. The style may be School of Doctorow, with florid flushes of John Irving, but the essential conceit is wholly original.

We begin and end in San Francisco, 1923, with the sudden death of Warren Gamaliel Harding (a US president to make George W Bush look imposing). Two hours before some mysterious illness carries him off, Harding appears on stage with Charlie Carter the Great, master magician, and confides an awful secret to him. Cue much mayhem and hectic adventuring.

But Gold's real aim is to recapture the lost era of the great illusionists and escapologists, of Houdini, Thurston and Devant, to evoke the time when audiences believed what they saw; a time when real magic was somehow possible and its prime purveyors were among the most famous people on earth. And his plot - garish, crude, infernally clever - is precisely honed to the task: it is a triumph of misdirection, a nest of boxes constantly springing fresh surprises.

Stage illusions were a popular art; they worked at pace, with drive and rolling drums. Gold's prose has precisely that energy. He creates his own rich, strange world where anything is possible, where characters from fact and fiction mingle.

Every one of these tricks - the vanishing elephant, the lion who becomes a man, the motorbike disappearing into thin air - comes rooted in fact. What was Houdini like? How did he do what he did? The feisty little runt is given flesh. Since this is also, in part, a quasi-biography of Carter, we meet him young and set out on the dusty road of small-town touring with him, watching the rich boy with an ambition tinker with Kards and Koins till the moment of great illusions arrives. It's a novel that works on every level: as an evocation, an instruction, a revelation; as fun.

Because conjurors guard their secrets, it's hard to tell too much of the plot without giving too much away - except to hint that we're at that cusp of the 20th century where television came to sweep vaudeville into oblivion. Yet the convolutions don't matter hugely. The logic of events is always bizarrely random anyway. Nothing makes sense if you stand back and analyse it - but Gold allows no such luxury. He is at his best in page after page of description of acts and actions, where the reader has his or her own seat in the stalls.

He also has a gift for anecdote and dialogue. "Where's your American national identity?" asks Charlie's Belgian wizard of special effects, Ledocq. "We Belgians believe in idling and progress, no more, no less. But Americans, they all say 'I seen everything, you can't pull one on me, I'm a real wise guy' and then two minutes later we show them a chess-playing automaton and they lose every ounce of savoir faire. 'Hey, that automaton is marvellous, what's that?' and the truth is they really don't want to know how it works." It is the Son of Star Wars renamed national missile defence all over again. A gawping public will still buy anything from snake-oil salesmen with imposing apparatus.

Are there points to criticise here? Perhaps, in the sense that the mood swings so violently, that characters come and go without reason. Where's Houdini himself? Gone suddenly, a quarter of the way through, only to return as an afterthought. The madcap whirl of 1920s politics, where presidents were jokes and federal agencies were Keystone Kops, is Ragtime revisited. Sometimes Gold seems to have wandered too far from any possible relevance, to be simply enjoying himself.

But it's impossible, at the end, to carp. This is the most exuberant stew of a novel: strange, tasty, addictive. Do we ever know its central protagonist, the man who called himself Carter the Great? No, not quite; but then, he was a man of mystery when two dollars bought you an evening of miracles. Glen David Gold has poured thought and toil and inspiration into telling - or seeming to tell -his story, and he leaves himself with only one resounding problem at the close. After such a debut what does he do for his next trick?

• Peter Preston, a former editor of this paper, is also a former member of the Leicester Magic Circle and a writer on magical matters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/01/fiction.reviews3