Review – Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

Posted on February 5th, 2010

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

By Daniel Wallace

Doubleday, 257 pages

ISBN 0-385-52109-X

Henry Walker, the magician in Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus, has been having problems: he “can’t do a trick to save his life.” Yet before joining the circus, as the shadowy Mr. Sebastian’s protégé, Henry had been doing not merely tricks but real magic.

Now, though, Henry has suddenly vanished in the volatile springtime of 1959 in northern Alabama, and his few friends in the circus—a “patchwork conglomeration of freaks and castoffs”—ponder his baffling disappearance. Had he found love, religion, money, or had some new trick gone diabolically wrong?

Comparing what they think they know about Henry’s past, his friends put together a kaleidoscopic portrait of their missing magician. Henry, as everyone slowly begins to understand, had spent most of his illusory life “floating in the no-man’s land of the imagination, somewhere between this life and whatever is on the other side.” And the truth of the matter, as his friends realize, lies hidden in plain sight within the reality that “none of us are what we appear to be.” And, as readers discover in Daniel Wallace’s phenomenal novel, all of the life-enhancing illusions for Henry may have finally fallen apart.

Wallace—in the tradition of magical realism—has created a paradoxical though seamless fusion of wistful fantasies, terrifying nightmares, and the extraordinary twists-and-turns of our not-so-ordinary everyday lives. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, like the best magic, is a very clever illusion, and that is the secret of this luminous new lyrical novel’s superior value as literature and entertainment.

So, reader, prepare to have your heart broken and then—through magic—restored and enriched by Wallace’s mesmerizing tale of life’s relationships and possibilities. Frankly, not since Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) has there been a more powerful and more important novel. Don’t miss it!

Tags: Chinese Circus, Conglomeration, Daniel Wallace, Doubleday, Everyday Lives, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Henry Walker, Hidden In Plain Sight, Joining The Circus, Magical Realism, Magician, Mesmerizing, Northern Alabama, One Hundred Years, Real Magic, Seamless Fusion, Springtime, Truth Of The Matter, Twists And Turns, Years Of Solitude
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