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Background
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Somewhere around the age of 8 or 9, I had a brief career as a magician. I’d received a beginner’s magic kit as a gift and had spent some time learning the tricks that didn’t require large hands (no card-palming) or excessive dexterity. One evening I put on a show for some of the neighbors, cranking through one trick after another. The show must have gone off without major embarrassment—I have a long and merciless memory for any incident that could remotely qualify as social humiliation. On the other hand, my performance probably didn’t wow anyone (I do remember polite and good-natured oohs and aahs), because shortly afterward the magic kit went in the closet and never came out again. Part of my problem was I’d never taken the time to develop a proper act; I was so focused on doing the tricks correctly that I completely neglected the magician’s patter that charms and misdirects the audience and gives the proceedings an air of mystery. It’s hard to make people think you’re doing something marvelous when you forget to say abracadabra. I doubt any young reader of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels would make the same mistake today. For Harry and his friends, practicing magic is largely a matter of remembering the right words in the right order and pronouncing them correctly—the patter is everything. In Harry’s world as in most other fantasy worlds from Dunwich to Middle Earth, language and books are the keys to magic; words have the power to directly alter reality, often with disastrous consequences. In the latest British young adult magic-related publishing phenomenon, Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Trilogy, a young magician’s apprentice gains powers beyond his years by stealing books from his master’s library, and temporarily gains control over a powerful demon by speaking its true name. Susanna Clarke’s celebrated first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, set in early 19th century England, has as one of its title characters an antiquarian bibliophile who becomes a magician. It’s easy to imagine the appeal of magic as a subject for writers, most of whom must pine for a long lost time when words really meant something. But less obvious is why stories about magic should have such broad and fervid appeal for readers, who continue to buy these books by the truckload. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, another book about the power of arcane knowledge, plausibly falls into the same category of intellectual fantasy, with similarly eye-popping sales figures to show for it. The most optimistic explanation is that authors like Rowling, Stroud, Clarke and Brown have all figured out how to tap into that latent “anything’s possible” sense of wonder we’ve all tossed into the closet on top of the magic kit. Reading these books is a little like going trick-or-treating when you were a child; everything looks familiar, but everything’s different too, in a way that makes you tingle. On the other hand, this fantasy boomlet may not be so innocuous. With the (notable) exception of Brown’s book, all these stories, wittingly or not, betray nostalgia for a time when priests spoke in an antique tongue and the written word was a code that conferred unimaginable power on the few who could understand it. Fantasy is, at heart, a reactionary genre, and these are reactionary times. Totalitarianism may never happen in freedom-lovin’, gun-packin’ America, and I would never suggest that we’re anywhere close to it today. But we do have the unsettling example right before our eyes of a President who, like one of our beloved fictional wizards, seems to believe that words can change or even create reality. Iraq, he says, is on the road to democracy. Presto! The economy, he says, is healthy. Change-o! America is stronger and safer than ever before. Abracadabra! It
may be significant that we’ve had to import all our magic:
Rowling, Stroud and Clarke are all Britons writing about England.
Magic just doesn’t fit into the American landscape, which
may be why it only seems to find its way into horror novels. We’ve
always maintained a healthy distrust for the patter of magicians
and politicians, which is hard to distinguish from the blather of
con artists even in the best of times; we know that if a man claims
to have pulled a coin out of your ear, it probably means he took
two out of your pocket. That skepticism has kept this country lurching
along the right path for most of its history, and there’s
no reason to think things will be different this time around. Even
if the current President wins re-election, one thing’s for
certain: he’s no magician. A2P Email
deepbackground@annarborpaper.com
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