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 protŽgŽ, 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 this phenomenal fourth novel from Alabama writer Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), 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. Like the best magic tricks, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is a very clever illusion, and that is the secret of this luminous new novel’s superior value as literature and entertainment. So, reader, prepare to have your heart broken and then as if through magic restored and enriched by Wallace’s mesmerizing tale of life’s relationships and possibilities.
Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida.
