Army of illusions

THE MAGICIAN'S WIFE by Brian Moore, Bloomsbury pounds 15.99

Brian Moore's new novel is as unpredictable as ever, a strange tale strangely told and based on a bizarre historical incident which Moore came upon in a letter written by Flaubert to George Sand.

Napoleon III's armies had returned in 1856 from a victorious campaign in the Crimea. He planned to complete his conquest of Algeria by subduing the southern Berber tribes the following spring, but there was disquieting news from Algeria. A holy man, a marabout, was about to reveal himself as the long-awaited Mahdi who would lead Islam to triumph over the infidel. Reluctant to redeploy his weary armies, the emperor conceived an extraordinary project - he would send out Houdin, France's great magician, from whom Houdini later took his name in homage. By his miracles, Houdin would discredit the marabout, whose paranormal skills lay mainly in faith healing. What passed in Europe for legerdemain would be seen by the Arabs as god-given supernatural powers. And so it came to pass. The uprising did not take place and in 1857, as planned, the French gained the whole of Algeria, remaining sovereign until 1962.

Moore's fictional version of these events is seen through the eyes of Emmeline, wife of Lambert the magician. Bored and lonely, she sits sewing in her room while her husband, the genius and impresario, creates new wonders in the dungeon-like basement of their country house. Forty-two clocks chime the quarters of every dragging hour; out in the grounds a life-sized marionette opens and closes the gates, and lit by sudden torch flares in the grotto a scholarly automaton turns the pages of the Bible. Emmeline knows that her husband loves her, but it is a love without physical substance, "bound up in some way with his life of illusion". And she does not love him.

Suddenly everything is changed. Napoleon III invites the couple to one of his fabled series, a week-long houseparty studded with balls, banquets and hunts. In her new clothes Emmeline gains confidence and responds to compliments and begins a flirtation, tenuous but daring. She is shocked by the cynicism and artificiality she sees about her, the wanton cruelties of the hunt, a Mass that seems mere caricature, ritual empty of emotional engagement. But by the week's end she has acquired an appetite for adventure and is happy to accompany her husband on the Emperor's preposterous project.

In Algeria the plot rarifies against the background of the capital, part Parisian, part "Moorish, magical and strange". Emmeline continues her flirtation with the handsome and stereotypical officer from the Bureau Arabe but falls more seriously in love with Africa itself. "The Sahara will change you," she is warned. She finds herself profoundly moved by Moslem worship: "a force at once inspiring and terrible, a faith with no resemblance to the Christian belief in Mass and sacraments, hell fire and damnation, sin and redemption, penance and forgiveness." Most of all she is moved by the refrain "Everything comes from God". Almost overnight her spirit is refashioned. She who was timid and subservient becomes outspoken and independent. She challenges the course of events, she attempts to manipulate fate, and she is finally thwarted by her failure to understand the infinite gradations of that credo "Everything comes from God".

The story is dramatised by a series of carefully constructed set pieces. In between there are longueurs. Moore's considered sparseness of language, deployed to such effect in other books, notably The Colour of Blood, here lacks force. Much of the writing is oddly wooden, like an old-fashioned boy's adventure tale. There is little sense of place. Emmeline herself is vague, tiresome, and at times simply vacuous. Her transition from timorous mouse to fearless heroine is too swift, too arbitrary to be credible. Her husband's tragedy, barely delineated, is far more compelling, and the sudden momentum of the last 50 pages highlights the paucity of the rest. The ultimate illusionist must be the author; here the reader remains outside, uninvolved. We are told what happens but we do not feel it happening, and that is not enough.