‘The Confabulist’ by Steven Galloway

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn 

Perhaps the key line from this seductive entertainment of a novel: ‘A magician is an actor playing a magician.’ That in turn is a quote from Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the great nineteenth-century French magician, who had his name borrowed by one Erik Weisz, better known as Harry Houdini. It says a lot for the latter escape artist and illusionist that we still know his name eighty-eight years after his death when we are hard-pressed to remember what the top selling single was from just twenty years ago (Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia,” in case you wondered).

Getting back to that line from Robert-Houdin, it is one that inspires speculation. It is not dissimilar to a stern admonition delivered from the stage at the Royal Albert Hall by the late Frank Zappa, where he told a late-1960s hippie audience that “Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, and don’t kid yourself.” We invent and costume ourselves in order to play … ourselves.

To choose the most clichéd of examples, one is hired for the first time as a used car salesman. Is not the instinct to arrive for the first day on the job dressed a little louder than before, speaking a little louder than before, being a bit quicker and firmer in the handshake than before? It may be either a highly cynical point of view, or indeed one affirming our glorious abilities as humans to constantly recreate ourselves, but we do tailor our manner, appearance and behaviour to suit the role we are cast in.

That either/or construct begs a question, which is at the heart of The Confabulist. Which is it then, for surely it cannot be both; is the re-casting of Hungarian immigrant child Eric Weisz into Harry Houdini a defeat of the truth, or a glorious mastery of invention? The answer of course is, yes to both. From the novel:

But does the past change who we are? It may change how Alice feels about her life, but not necessarily for the better. I could tell everyone who saw the elephant disappear in front of them at the Hippodrome that it was just a mirror and some clever physics, but would that make their lives better? Would the reconstruction of their reconstruction be more truthful or of more value to them? Because at the end of the past and the present is the future. It never really comes but it’s there all the same, this supposed place we will someday get to. But the future is either our own death or the existence of magic.

Steven Galloway’s fourth novel is one I describe as an entertainment, following the definition by the late Graham Greene, who divided his own work between serious novels devoted to serious themes, and those like Our Man in Havana which were intended to give the reader a cracking great time. The Confabulist is a cracking good time. As a, shall we say conjectured biography of the conjurer Houdini, the story reads as real and is particularly delightful in how it explains Houdini’s greatest tricks and how he exposed the false seance mediums of his day.

Galloway gets away with his speculation about Houdini’s long-rumored side career as a spy for the US Secret Service by having the novel narrated by one Martin Strauss. Strauss, a fictional character, is both a patient in the middle stages of dementia and believes he was the McGill University student who punched Houdini in the stomach causing his death. The observant — indeed any sentient reader — will figure out pretty early on in the novel what is going on, so it is giving nothing away to tell you that Strauss is making up a lot of this on the fly. Still, Galloway’s subversive theme is that what we believe to be real, what we want to be real, is in fact reality.

This returns us to the earlier quote about disappearing elephants. Is this desire or need to believe in the subjective and invented over the objective and truthful a weakness or a strength in people? Houdini certainly saw it cutting both ways. No matter how much he proclaimed from the stage or in private conversations that he was a craftsman and not anyone born with supernatural powers, people chose to believe otherwise. He was not just Pandora opening the box of shysters and con artists who had opened the box of fake spiritualism, he was himself the box.

In a delightful cameo, one based on actual history, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle effectively tells Houdini that the latter is deluded. To paraphrase, ‘You can tell me all you want that you aren’t spiritually gifted, but I’m here to tell you that you are.’ It is all rather like one of my favourite quotes of all time. When the pianist Oscar Levant was told of the death of his best friend, Levant said to a concert audience, ‘they tell me that George Gershwin is dead, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.’

It is a dangerous business telling people that the illusions they choose to believe in as reality are in fact magic tricks. Houdini’s quest to expose spiritualists and their believers (who included the US President Calvin Coolidge, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King) as hucksters and marks, led to his demise, according to Galloway’s plot. Now if that makes the reader of this review giggle up his sleeve at the silly gullibility of people a century or so ago, might I remind you that sixteen percent of Americans, or one in six, believe in the actual historical truth of the Noah’s Ark story. Given what we know of Christian fundamentalism, who among us would dare to tell them otherwise, unless we were enclosed in a triple-hulled steel battle tank and supportive air cover, just to be on the safe side? If you want to piss off a baby, steal its ice cream. If you want to turn an adult into a killer, question his beliefs.

The Confabulist starts to come a bit undone by the end when Houdini and Strauss expound on these themes. None of the introspection or extrapolation I have mentioned above is anything that a thoughtful reader might not come up with on their own. We really don’t need the characters to break from themselves and start talking in footnotes. Sometimes novelists should just let readers figure life out on their own, rather than cock their doodles like strutting barnyard roosters showing off their cleverness. However, four or five pages of characters over-pronouncing on their own existence is a small penance for the remaining three hundred pages of fun and suspense. Metaphorically, Galloway saws through a lady and only loses her a toe in the process. The trick, and the novel, are a qualified success.

Knopf Canada | 320 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0307400857