Writing is magic, but plot mysteries linger

DANIEL WALLACE does not make it easy for any reviewer who wants to avoid ruining the experience of reading his new novel, “Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician.” Not until the very end of the book do the characters and plots snap into sharp focus. And, even then, some of the most tantalizing mysteries remain unrevealed.

Wallace is the author of “Big Fish,” which provided the raw material for a 2003 movie by Tim Burton, as well as “The Watermelon King” and “Ray in Reverse.” Burton visually captured the stranger elements of Wallace’s imagination, but, as we discover in “Mr. Sebastian,” it is in Wallace’s lush verbal invention that his real genius is found. Rather like Ray Bradbury, Wallace savors the sound and feeling of language itself, and the real magic in this novel is done with words rather than mirrors.

“Mr. Sebastian” opens under the tattered canvas tent of Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus in a backwater of the South in the mid-’50s. The circus is well supplied with geeks and freaks in the literal sense -- a geek as in a performer who bites the heads off live chickens, and freaks such as the Human Bear, Agnes the Alligator Lady, the Human Pincushion and the Ossified Girl. Ironically, and tellingly, “there had never been a Chinese person associated with the circus.” But one of the circus performers, Henry Walker, is billed as Henry the Negro Magician, and it is Henry’s strange life story that is Wallace’s greatest act of conjuration.

Race -- or, more precisely, color -- turns out to be one of the devices that Wallace uses to signify good and evil, although not in a way that Western iconography leads us to expect. The man called Mr. Sebastian, whom we are invited to regard as Satan himself, is unnaturally white, “a face so milky and pale that years later Henry would say that he was the first truly white person he ever saw.” Henry, the pure-hearted man who sets himself against Mr. Sebastian, is black. Or is he?

Of course, we quickly realize that we are in the realm of the surreal. No top-hatted ringmaster ever addressed a crowd in the vocabulary that Wallace put into the mouth of the character called JJ the Barker: “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! The balding and the blue-haired! All of you strange dispossessed and clueless backwoods know-nothings, mouths gaping, desperate and lost in the new world that is just being born.... “ Yet we are also given occasional glimpses into the world outside the circus tent, a poignant place in which more than one father is shown to break the heart of his son and more than one woman is depicted as unattainable, including not only Henry’s mother and sister (who may or may not be dead) but also the only woman with whom Henry ever falls in love. “[T]ruth was being presented as fiction, and easier to tell because of that,” Wallace writes of the not-so-tall tales that the characters tell each other, and the same now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t approach to reality certainly applies to Wallace himself here. “For it so happened that every word he had told ... was true -- not factual, but true.”

The tale of Henry’s troubled life is marked by both physical violence and moral squalor. At the beginning of the book, and again at the end, we witness his torture by three rednecks bent on murder. The rest of the story is told in flashback by a series of narrators who recount the events leading up to this act of brutality. But Wallace turns out to be a sentimentalist at heart. Love, suggests the Negro Magician, is the greatest mystery of all. “If we only understood how it worked,” Henry muses. “For surely it’s a trick, an illusion. Can anything so wonderfully powerful, so mysterious, so beguiling, be real at all?” A moment later, Henry answers his own question: “Love must be real,” he concludes. “It hurts too much not to be.”

The book is littered with symbols -- names, colors, numbers and much else -- whose meanings are never revealed. Riddles are never fully solved. By the halfway point, however, we are fully engaged in the potboiler that Wallace has conjured up. Will Henry survive the trio of rednecks? Will he succeed in his lifelong quest to find and kill Mr. Sebastian, the man who initiated him into the brotherhood of magicians but also may have committed an unforgivable crime against his family? Will he succeed in rescuing any of the beloved women who have been taken away from him?

Late in the story, we meet the narrator called Carson Mulvaney, a Memphis private detective who has been hired by a long-lost relative who seeks to reunite with Henry and to sort out fiction from truth. Mulvaney is reassuringly down-to-earth, a finder of facts, and he plainly exists in the here and now. “Henry was one of the necessary people in the world,” says Mulvaney, “the guy the rest of us could look at and say, As bad as things are, as low as I’ve fallen, as hard as this life is and will always be, at least I am not Henry Walker.” Yet Mulvaney too seems to subscribe to Henry’s credo: “It’s an unfortunate fact of my work and, I would have to say of life itself,” observes the detective, “that only love can take us to the darkest places.”

“Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician” ends on a poignant and provocative note. “We never expected to live the lives we have,” observes one of the several narrators, “and I’m sure Henry didn’t expect or desire the life he was given.”

As it turns out, Henry is given many different lives to lead, not one of which is entirely consistent with any of the others. The author -- like any good magician -- refuses to give away all of his secrets.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of, most recently, “A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization.”