Magic is magic!
Having read and posted reviews of Mike Russell's previous strange books, Nothing is Strange, Strange Medicine, Strange Secrets, Strungballs, The Exploding Book, I wondered how Mike would infuse new energy, new life, a new special strange something into his most recent fiction.
Outstanding news, folks! As if written with a pen doubling as magic wand, Magic bursts forth with a newness and strange energy that will keep any reader gladly turning the pages.
The book's narrator, Charlie Watson, tells the tale of magicians and magic and the creation of the universe out of nothing, how he himself became a famous magician and how and why he wrote the very book we are reading.
But enough of generalizations. Allow me to perform my own style of reviewer magic (nothing up my sleeves!) by linking my comments to a trio of direct Magic quotes taken from the first two chapters:
"Before the universe existed there was a giant, black, upside-down top hat surrounded by empty, black nothingness." The opening sentence sets the tone: the narrator tells his story (or the story of the universe) with quirky humor and wit that immediately draws a reader in.
"In a way, though, there was someone watching. In a way, you were watching. You weren't there all those millions of years ago, of course, but you're watching it now. These words that I'm writing are showing it all to you in your mind." Ah, the magic of literature: a writer creates images (one of Mike's strengths is creating clear, vivid images) and, by a sheer act of imagination, a reader forms mental images, mental pictures.
"But my mother and father weren't my real parents because they didn't look after me. Manzini the Marvellous always looked after me. He never even hit me and he only shouted at me once, when I tried to peek inside his special room." One can surely detect these lines speak to how the tale is one of heart and emotion. Actually, as I was reading, I kept wondering how much of his own personal biography Mike incorporated into his tale.
Lastly, one abiding theme of Mike's writing, not only Magic but the other Strange Books he's written: death and rebirth, death and transformation. This above lines about one's true parentage also bring to mind the following mythic tale from India:
"There once was a lion cub raised by sheep. It began acting like a sheep, even began making baa baa baa sounds like a sheep. An adult lion came by and immediately understood what had happened. She grabbed the cub by the fur and carried it to a lake where it could peer into the water and see it wasn’t a sheep at all; it was a lion."
Magic invites us to take the readerly plunge. Is your sheep nature only an illusion? Is your true nature that of a being of magic?
British author Mike Russell, born 1973
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