The Magician in Love

C. Stephen Gray is Director of Information Services, Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario.

This is a bizarre little book — part fantasy, part allegory, and part short story. Its setting (“the village”) is unspecific and its characters surreal. The plot, so far as it exists at all, is a tangled concoction of incidents, dreams, hallucinations, and memories. But this is not a book against which it is possible or even desirable to apply Aristotelian, rational criteria. It is, rather, a performance, a show: Leon Rooke, linguistic magician, in love with his art and showing off.

The central characters are the Magician and his Mistress, Beobontha, whom he has stolen away from her pathetic husband. The book is a chronicle of their love affair, which is stormy, passionate, and more than just a bit erotic. It is also a tempestuous relationship, plagued by constant and reciprocal infidelity and impatience and weakness. But it is nevertheless a relationship that leaps off the page and grabs the reader’s imagination. That this is so is a credit to Rooke’s wordplay, and almost that alone. Page after page of verbal performance — awesome in power, and occasionally breathtaking in scope — is what keeps the reader driving through to the end of this book.

The Magician in Love is not, perhaps, a great book. But it is startlingly reminiscent of a Rooke performance — of the writer reading his work aloud. (Rooke is legendary as a reader of his own work, and this book really does come alive most when it is read aloud.)

The subtle delights of the book repay close reading and re-reading, but my guess is that most people who read a few pages will simply not bother going on. As the book’s back cover says, “A taste for Leon Rooke’s unique work may develop slowly, as for olives or octopus...”. The work is compelling and vital, but it is not familiar ground for most readers. So what is probably its chief merit is, ironically, probably also its greatest liability. It’s certainly the most interesting book I’ve read in some time.