Kirkus
"Surrendering to the spell of Moore at the top of his game is like watching a master illusionist at work. Few of his more celebrated contemporaries come even near him as a pure storyteller. 'The Magician's Wife' is another triumph." 11/15/1997New York Review of Books
"It is part exotic travel yarn, part thriller, part anticolonial tract, and part reflection on religious belief....The principals have just enough characteristics each to make the plot work, which it does extremely well." - Gabriele Annan 01/15/1998 Salon
"Moore...paints a political backdrop in watercolor and then sets to work enriching it with detail, using it as a context for exploring and breaking down larger themes. Moore thinks like a historian, but he's able to feel like a novelist, and that's what makes his work so engaging....As a prose stylist, Moore stacks his details beautifully." - Stephanie Zacharek 02/03/1998 Washington Post Book World
"While Napoleon's courtiers...live absolutely, and while Lambert's tricks...delight and satisfy, the heart of Emmeline remains elusive....Characters, in speaking to each other, reveal information; but they do not reveal themselves." - Claire Messud 01/11/1998 New York Times Book Review
"The secret of the book's success...lies in Moore's own unobtrusive technical skills....[His] books...are marvels of continuity, distinguished by a subtle sense of inevitability....'The Magician's Wife,' combining so many of Moore's longtime preoccupations and themes, proves to be one of his neatest tricks yet." - Thomas Mallon 02/01/1998 Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The novels of Brian Moore are unexpected, idiosyncratic, each filled with its own energy, colors, scents....Each of Moore's novels launches itself afresh upon an exercise in fable-making, confident in the powers of fable to sustain the writer on his tightrope and to entertain, perhaps to dazzle, the reader....Moore is a magician." - Thomas Flanagan 01/25/1998 Publishers Weekly
Few contemporary writers are both as versatile and as unfailingly provocative as Moore, whose forte is exposing the wellsprings of character and the motivations of behavior in particular moral and political environments. Here, he moves from his preoccupation with recent European history (The Statement, etc.) to a historical novel set in 1850s France and Algeria. Emmeline Lambert is the wife of Henri Lambert, the most celebrated magician in France. Emperor Napoleon III, concerned about a possible uprising in Algiers, asks Lambert to put on a performance there that will convince the Arab sheikhs of the superiority of European magic to the powers of a charismatic marabout, Bou-Aziz, who is urging his followers to oust the French in a holy war. Beautiful but unsophisticated Emmeline, neglected by her ambitious husband, is manipulated by handsome, mysterious Colonel Deniau, chief of the Bureau Arabe, whose seductive behavior may be a ploy to ensure her cooperation with his schemes. When a crisis ensues, Emmeline experiences an epiphany that opens her eyes to her husband's failings and her nation's perfidy. Her actions at this point are more dramatic than credible, however, momentarily betraying Moore's usual finesse. But Moore is masterful in depicting how the decadent pomp and ceremony of Napoleon's court is echoed even in French provincial outposts, and how the simplicity of remote Arab villages and the vast Sahara desert reinforce Emmeline's cultural dislocation. The heart of the novel, however, lies in Emmeline's recognition of the Arabs' faith in God, a stark contrast to the formal piety, trickery and duplicity of the French. It is for this moral vision that one reads Moore, with admiration. Literary Guild selection. (Jan.) 10/20/1997 |
