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July 20, 2007
Review: Carter Beats the Devil
As one or five of you out there know, I've been spending some part of my time of late reading about magic and talking with magicians. And by magic I mean real magic, the kind that actually fools people and creates illusions. Not the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo or new agey stuff. We're talking sawing people in half on stage and "is this your card." You know, real magic.
So I finally picked up a copy of Glen David Gold's sprawling novel of early twentieth century magic, Carter Beats the Devil. Right off the bat I want to say this is quite a good book. Very well written, compelling characters that you really care about, and full of wonderful scenes and moments. I enjoyed it and I recommend it. But I'm also a little confused by it.
The story centers around a real life magician, Charles Carter. Indeed, the cover illustration shown above is a straightforward reproduction of one of the real Carter's posters. But at the same time, there's a lot that goes on in this book that I don't think, as far as I can tell from my researches, bears any resemblance to the life of the real Charles Carter. Now, I could well be wrong here. My main source is Milbourne Christopher's Illustrated History of Magic and I haven't read Mike Caveny's in-depth biography of Charles Carter, so maybe Christopher has his facts wrong. But that doesn't seem likely, so let's assume that for his novel, Gold just took a lot of license with history. I'm totally fine with that, no problem. He clearly says as much. But at the same time, so many key things seem changed, particularly in the area of upbringing and wives, which are both key elements to the novel, that it seems weird to me that he decided to use a historical person as his main character. It's one thing to take a real life person and then slip some wild fictional adventures into a short gap in their life (as in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril which I liked quite a bit and thought used real life people very well). But Gold seems to have made a mostly fictional life that works perfectly for his novel but bears little resemblance to the real Carter. On balance I find it all distracting.
I also found one of the main plot elements, involving the inventor of television Philo Farnsworth, to be likewise quite distracting, especially when weighed against and intertwined with the exciting secret plot that opens the book: the death (and murder?) of President Warren Harding hours after seeing Carter perform his magic. Even when wrapped up in the end, the television stuff never really makes a lot of sense and the way people behave towards it just doesn't quite seem credible.
But these complaints are all tangential to the central thrust of the story, which is the life of this man, Charles Carter. And as a character study of a magician and an artist and a human, the book is excellent. And at 600 or so pages, it'll keep you nice and entertained for a good long time.
Posted by rdakan at July 20, 2007 04:12 PM
Comments
"Carter" is one of my favorite books, and yeah it puzzles me why he used an actual historical figure and then ignored essentially everything about that figure. And the television plot really didn't interest me either. But as a love story (both a love of stage magic and between Charles and Phoebe) it was outstanding.
Posted by: Chris at July 20, 2007 08:10 PM
That's exactly it. The love story stuff is pitch perfect and so are all the parts about being a magician. And the idea of people killing and kidnapping people over television just wasn't credible - it could have been I suppose, but he never really made the case for it. I think if it had been set in modern times and had been some sort of made-up new innovation then it might have been more believable (although the corporations-kill-for-trade-secrets trope has never been one I liked much), but we all know that television didn't stop wars or any of the other stuff that people were afraid it would do in this book so it was all kind of silly. And I still don't know how I feel about the Mysteriouso stuff at the end.
Still a cool, cool book though.
Posted by: Rick Dakan at July 21, 2007 10:29 AM