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Empty hat
Last night, upon returning from my stroll, I finished up The magician's wife. I found the ending effective and even moving, but not so much as to justify having read the the two hundred pages leading up to it. Till the end, the main characters remained unconvincing cyphers to me. I suppose that was intentional in the case of the magician of the title, but it was also true of the protagonist, who never persuaded me she had an interior life worth caring about. This is a real problem when (apart from a few apparent slips) the story is narrated solely from her point of view.
The author's failings are all exacerbated by the fact that I was reading another novel about a fictional mid-19th century Norman woman at the same time, and this one was written by a man many consider the greatest novelist of his generation, so Moore's novel can only suffer by comparison. Satan knows Emma Bovary annoyed the hell out of me at points, but I never doubted the verisimilitude of her portrayal. Emmeline Lambert, on the other hand, didn't seem realistic as either a female or a Frenchwoman.
The book comes perilously close to failing the Bechdel test (though to be fair, so does Bovary on a pound-for-pound basis). Not only does our heroine never really have a conversation with another female--even during a week of festivities at Compiègne--but you are seldom even told what she thinks of them. And there are enough holes in the depiction of her and her milieu as being "French" that by the end of it I found myself mentally sounding out the characters names with their English pronunciations (even turning "Henri" into "Henry").
The period detail also seems off, particularly in the amount of freedom Emmeline has to come and go. More than once, as if it were completely natural, she plunges unchaperoned into the bazaar of Algiers--a place where I'm sure many modern Frenchmen wouldn't allow their wives to go unaccompanied. There's as good as no mention of the particular unsuitedness of Second Empire fashion for the extremes of the Algerian climate.
It was only at the very end that I discovered the real-life basis for the novel: a mission to Algeria by the legendary conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (that's right, the one Houdini named himself for) to awe the natives into pacification. I suspect reading his own account would've been a good deal more entertaining than reading Moore's attempt to turn it into a commentary on colonisation by shoehorning in a half-baked fictional spouse.
The author's failings are all exacerbated by the fact that I was reading another novel about a fictional mid-19th century Norman woman at the same time, and this one was written by a man many consider the greatest novelist of his generation, so Moore's novel can only suffer by comparison. Satan knows Emma Bovary annoyed the hell out of me at points, but I never doubted the verisimilitude of her portrayal. Emmeline Lambert, on the other hand, didn't seem realistic as either a female or a Frenchwoman.
The book comes perilously close to failing the Bechdel test (though to be fair, so does Bovary on a pound-for-pound basis). Not only does our heroine never really have a conversation with another female--even during a week of festivities at Compiègne--but you are seldom even told what she thinks of them. And there are enough holes in the depiction of her and her milieu as being "French" that by the end of it I found myself mentally sounding out the characters names with their English pronunciations (even turning "Henri" into "Henry").
The period detail also seems off, particularly in the amount of freedom Emmeline has to come and go. More than once, as if it were completely natural, she plunges unchaperoned into the bazaar of Algiers--a place where I'm sure many modern Frenchmen wouldn't allow their wives to go unaccompanied. There's as good as no mention of the particular unsuitedness of Second Empire fashion for the extremes of the Algerian climate.
It was only at the very end that I discovered the real-life basis for the novel: a mission to Algeria by the legendary conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (that's right, the one Houdini named himself for) to awe the natives into pacification. I suspect reading his own account would've been a good deal more entertaining than reading Moore's attempt to turn it into a commentary on colonisation by shoehorning in a half-baked fictional spouse.