Monday, December 01, 2008

AN EVIL GUEST, Magic Right Before Your Very Eyes

We met to discuss Gene Wolfe's AN EVIL GUEST. Both Rick and I loved this book in the same way. I will make an analogy to try to convey the feeling I got while reading AEG. In the world of stage magic there are the illusionists like David Copperfield and Harry Blackstone. These guys saw women in half, and make elephants disappear. Then there are the street magicians like Chris Angel and David Blane who, on TV, seem to do the impossible. But in both these cases the effects are often so large and incomprehensible that the fan can't even begin to speculate how the trick was done, and we chalk it up to a mere gimmick. Finally, in this analogy, there are the close-up magicians, who do no more than guess your card or make a lit cigarette appear from their mouth. They do simple things, but they do them right before your eyes. The best of them, like Teller, do not even make sharp distracting gestures to befuddle their audience. This is Gene Wolfe in AEG. He tells a simple story, populates it with real people, and, right before your very eyes, makes it fascinating. No tricks, no smoke, no mirrors. He even deliberately tosses away some cool SF gadgets that would be the main attraction in some Hard Science Fiction Sense-of-Wonder novels, but here they are plainly window dressing. Wolfe's skill is doing the impossibly difficult task of holding my interest without any flash. Clearly he has superior insights on how to string words together that make me feel like english is a second language. And most maddening of all? You can read the words over again and still can't see how its done. Magic.

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