Vaulting ambition, witty prose, and - hey presto! - James Flint's 52 Ways to Magic America comes alive

Peter Preston
Saturday July 27, 2002
The Guardian

What's left for fiction when magical realism fades? One plain answer would seem to be: magic itself. The last couple of years have suddenly produced some fine novels about stage magicians - not only last year's Guardian first book prize contender, Carter Beats the Devil, but also Martyn Bedford's haunting The Houdini Girl. Now James Flint casts a matching spell. His 52 Ways is a picaresque tale of times just past which blends social history and free-wheeling imagination with beady-eyed description. It has a unique tang to it.

Our hero, a skinny youth called Marty Quick, dreams of doing a David Copperfield or Blaine: playing Las Vegas. But Nevada is a long, long way from Beckenham. Marty, leaving his teens behind, works the talent competitions and cabaret clubs of provincial England. He summers at Pontin's and winters on cruise ships. He's good, but maybe not that good. You have to be really exceptional to be the joker who breaks free from this pack.

Quick and his beautiful lady assistant, Terri, a dead ringer for Princess Diana, need something extra if they're ever to top the bill. Enter Jill from Morecambe, a lady of the twilight, if not the night, who's also a Di lookalike. Double the potential mystery (as well as double the nooky). At last Marty can build his illusions as big as his ambitions.

But Jill has a drug habit, and Terri is prone to yellow mists as Di Two supplants Di One in the maestro's bed. When the original Di dies in a twisted heap of metal in a Paris underpass, the act - like the friendships that hold it together - falls apart. Marty has nothing left up his sleeve except plodding failure. And then comes New Labour and the new magic of the internet.
Flint - as he showed a couple of years ago in his first novel, Habitus - writes witty, surging prose. His sense of place is precise and almost tactile; you won't find the peeling glamour of old Blackpool better evoked, nor the sight of the Irish Sea washing its seedy shoreline. (Not "blue or green or even grey but sandy and oily, the foam scurfing its surface identical to that drooled on to his coffee by the Palm Court drinks machine"). Quick's tatty club circuit is an England fit for Bernard Manning and Archie Rice. Better yet, the conjurors who people these pages are drawn from life. "Ladies and gentlemen, I have nothing up my sleeve but my charisma. Yet deep down I'm deeply ordinary."

There are metaphors here, of course. The death of Di is pivotal, seen and interpreted through the eyes of her copycat generation. When she goes, so do all the illusions built in her name. The magic, too, in its diligent, meticulously researched realism, is always straining after shades of meaning laid one upon another. How did he do that? Flint knows and will duly explain. But at the close, at the moment where Quick recovers fame and confidence at a computer-software conference, the trick is more than a trick, perhaps even magic itself.

In short, James Flint has tried something small (much akin to the riffling dexterities of the close-up card shark in its little deceptions and distractions) and something much bigger: the catching of a time and an England in a locked box which - hey presto! - becomes another era and another England before our very eyes.

Vaulting ambition, mostly achieved. Not everything, perhaps, slides seamlessly into place. Jill is more of a device than a fleshed character. Nevertheless, this is a heady achievement, a British take on Carter Beats the Devil with acne and hangovers.

Once upon a distant time, I remember the local Leicestershire illusionist and millionaire, Sir Julian Cahn, do his own vanishing lady on stage. Into the giant cabinet on stage, wound in ribbons and ropes she went, until the catch of the door of the box refused to close. Then there was a cry from the back stalls. "Here I am, here I am." And down the aisle came her (possibly astigmatic) twin sister as the Sorcerer Cahn wrestled with a recalcitrant hinge. See? There's nothing quite new under the sun. But if you want a novel that mixes originality with ambition and some hilarity, then there are at least 52 ways to find one now.

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