A Criminal Magic Review

This week's novel is A Criminal Magic, prohibition era fantasy by Lee Kelly.

Set in the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition has outlawed magic, meaning most magic shows and "shine" (an addictive drug created by magic) are controlled by mobsters.  Joan tries to support her family by working as a performance sorcerer at the Red Den, a club owned by the Shaws.  Gunn, who runs the Red Den has grand, vague plans about magic and reinvents the club into a grand immersive show every night, pushing his troupe of sorcerers to greater and greater heights.  Alex is an undercover operative for the Feds who infiltrates the Shaws to figure out what Gunn is up to.  Joan and Alex fall in love and begin to question their loyalties and how far they would go to protect what was important to them.

I enjoy the magic in this.  Magic can do a great deal--create illusions, or produce objects, or create portals--but these things only last for a day.  It's ephemeral, which works for creating a magic garden to hold a party, but causes problems when they try to distribute shine because in 24 hours it turns to water.  It provides a good balance so the magic isn't too powerful.

Magic is often used to create scenery--beautiful and fantastical scenery, but still scenery.  The most impressive immersive magic show that the troupe puts on at the Red Den is a sunrise.  Now, I've seen some pretty great sunrises, but using magic to create something that doesn't have a finale or a surprise seems like a let down.  I call this The Night Circus Problem: the magic is atmospheric, but leans more towards eerie than shocking.  I also think about it in terms of lack of a Prestige (from The Prestige (and, yes, I know there's a book)).  A magic trick has three parts: the pledge where you say you'll make a rabbit disappear, the turn where the rabbit disappears, and the prestige where the rabbit reappears.  If you end the trick after the turn, the audience is left waiting, thinking, "But...where did the rabbit go?"  Here I wondered, "Okay, the sun rose like they said.  But...is the sun going to explode?"  It felt incomplete, or like a waste of talent, especially here where a handful of their tricks have that finale moment.  Joan makes feathers dance, then at the end turns them into a dove. 

This is probably just me and my adolescent need for fireworks and glitter cannons.

The story is told from alternating points of view: one from Joan and then one from Alex.  In the first few chapters, Alex digs my opinion of him into a hole by being a dipshit.  He never climbs out of this hole.  He continues to be a dipshit.  What was interesting, was that when Joan interacts with him in her chapters, he doesn't seem like a dipshit.  All his internal dialogue about his disdain for everyone and everything is stripped away, and besides that he's on his best behavior around Joan.  A similar thing happens to Joan to a lesser degree.  When she's shown through Alex's filter, all her self doubt is stripped away and the lengths she goes to to make herself the best she can be pay off since Alex doesn't pick up on any of it.  Since the reader gets these two views that don't quite align, they pick up on the fact that the characters don't know each other that well way before the characters start to understand it.

The characters also don't describe themselves, but are described by the other point of view character.  This delay in giving the description would usually bother me, but here it works because it made sense that neither character would feel the need to describe themselves.  I never felt uninformed.  What they looked like mattered more to the other character (because they're dreamy) than it did to them.

The plot is fun and exciting, with lying and scheming and evil plans and juggling who knows what.  But a lot of it feels like really bad planning.  Alex talks the mob boss into getting hooked on a drug that causes paranoia.  Joan agrees to figure out how to do impossible magic that centuries of sorcerers have attempted by Wednesday, because she won't let you down.  Even though the troupe is essential to his plans, Gunn works them so hard that they start talking of mutiny.  And then there's Gunn's theory that seven sorcerers working together are more powerful than any one sorcerer working alone, and they have to trust each other and work together, a theory proven by the success of the troupe.  But then he goes and forms rifts in the troupe by giving some members extra privileges.  It just doesn't make a lot of sense.  A lot of the characters shoot themselves in the foot in this.

But they don't shoot themselves with glitter cannons.

***

Next week: The Three-Body Problem, Sci-fi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Liu Cixin.