Word: magics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...common to all fairy tales is the happy ending. In The Story of One Who Set Out to Study Fear, ignorance is bliss if it enables the hero to overcome terrors from which wiser men would flee. In Hans My Hedgehog, ugliness is a curse to be broken by magic. In Pitcher's Feathered Bird and Brother Gaily, cleverness and sharp practice can outwit the Devil, even the keeper of heaven's gate. Above all, the tales are sweaty with human nature. Time and again, the message seems to be: "Don't tinker with the order...
...MAGIC by ANGUS WILSON 415 pages. Viking...
...even attempted essays in mysticism (The Old Men at the Zoo). As If By Magic is a little of all of these, but curiously - Wilson, after all, is now 60 - it reads more like the early Waugh-Huxley novel the author never got to write. In spirit it may well be his most youthful book. As with Huxley, there is an "idea" at bottom. Hamo Langmuir, a famous British plant breeder, is off on a VIP tour to see how his hybrid rice, nicknamed "Magic," is faring as England's gift to the Green Revolution. Hamo's goddaughter...
Like Huxley, Wilson can become an abstract moralist. The reader meets hun gry masses rather than hungry people. But in his gadfly or Waughspian capacity Wilson achieves top form. As If By Magic is rich in stock (but not too stock) characters: Japanese businessmen, German tourists, English eccentrics, American divorcees who look like failed Myrna Loys...
Dobecker plunges into Anita's sumptuous web of sexual intrigue and petty corruptions. He plays at black magic, proves adept at dirty political infighting, and manages to enjoy an exhilarating lowlife, but in the end still convincingly comes through for the old-fashioned virtues of a straight marriage...