The Last Magician

A story of childhood friendship, love, secrets, and betrayal, set (mostly) in Australia and spanning two generations. There's a criminal underground (literally underground in this case), lush verbal depictions of photographic art, and all sorts of other goodies that play into the plot here as well.

A surprise hit! Well, not really a surprise. I really like Virago as a publishing house (one of the categories in my 2014 category challenge is completely devoted to Virago books) and the critical reviews on this book were glowing, so I figured Hospital would be a good bet for a new author to try.

It was sort of slow going at first. Hospital's prose is dense and dreamy and reflects the confusion of the narrator over the events happening in her show more life and the lives of her friends. It was such a stark contrast to the blunt prose of The Daylight Gate that I had trouble getting into it initially - plus, I'd sort of thought it was a fantasy novel and it quickly became clear that there are no magicians in this book, not in the traditional sense anyway! Somewhere in the first third of the novel, though, my impatience turned abruptly into excitement and I could not put the book down until it was finished. There are so many little twists and turns in it, so many secrets slowly revealed, that it's as gripping as a good mystery.

The title is not a misnomer - there are definitely fantastic elements in here. The characters and their obsessions are all bigger than life; at the same time particular small details (like a pair of earrings with blue glass beads) reappear in surprising contexts and become potent symbols in the world of the story. There's a wonderful sense of setting in The Last Magician as well - I can remember the places in the novel almost as if I've been there. It really is a world unto itself.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship. show less

Twenty-somethings Lucy and Gabriel are obsessed by the mysterious events that traumatised the much older foursome of Charlie, Cat, Catherine and Robinson Gray as children, and which they still haven't got over. Lucy tells the story obliquely and it is wonderfully written, full of surprises and subtle clues to what really happened, often in the form of photographs that Charlie has taken or collected (as in the film "The Draughtsman's Contract", where the draughtsman's pictures hold clues to the murder of the landowner).

This was a challenging book to read. I didn't understand the characters enough to care about them until almost half-way through the book. It was only because I'd read two previous books by this author -- and loved them -- that I persevered.

Charlie, Catherine, Robinson and Cat are linked by a traumatic event in their past. In modern day, Lucy who worked for Charlie; then with Catherine and is dating Robinson's estranged son, Gabriel, becomes engrossed in their story -- wanting to understand what happened and why both Charlie and Gabriel are obsessed with finding Cat.

This is a complex, deeply layered story of obsession and the effects of trauma. However, the writing, while beautiful, left me as the reader largely outside the story show more rather than finding myself emmeshed in it and caring about the characters as if they were real. And yet, somehow, it haunts me weeks later.l show less

What a terrible new jacket for an eerie, gorgeous book, truly full of wonders.

bargain = 1 of 29 books for $5.