The Illusions

Liz Hyder

DID you know that Harry Houdini, the famous escape artist, illusionist and stunt performer, once picked the locks of a rival’s establishment to steal an idea?

His desperate antic was just one of the many real-life stories that have flowed out down the years from the golden age of magic... a fascinating period of cultural history which saw the rise of pioneers like Houdini, inventive magician David Devant, and film-maker and special effects trailblazer Walter Booth.

And it’s the breathtaking tricks and triumphs of these late 19^th century magic-makers that provided the rich inspiration for The Illusions, a spellbinding new page-turner from Liz Hyder, author of extraordinary debut novel The Gifts which featured a group of winged women seeking liberation in early Victorian England.

Hyder (pictured below) has developed her own special brand of magical realism and employs it to dazzling effect for this immersive and powerful feminist-fuelled story which blends drama, intrigue, stunning atmospherics, romance, and a thread of magic and kindness that cannot help but weave its way into your heart.

So travel back to Bristol in 1896 and meet 16-year-old orphan Cecily (Cec) Marsden who has spent the last five years scraping a living (and learning the tricks of the trade) as the young assistant to ageing but kindly con artist, Arter Evans.

All changes for Cec – a small girl with ‘a loud voice and a knack for learning’ – when Arter dies after a bank of scaffolding falls on him one dark evening. It happened just as Cec was particularly angry with him and, convinced that she was to blame, Cec starts to believe that she has powers she little understands.

Meanwhile, pioneering early film-maker Eadie Carleton, who runs her late father’s photographic business in the city, is working on a living pictures projector but struggles for her abilities to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world and is under pressure from her half-cousin, who has a share in the shop, to sell the business. In another corner of the city is brilliant young magician, George Perris, who has been named as the first choice successor to a renowned, but now fatally ill, magician known as The Professor. Charming and confident, George cares deeply about the ethics of his ‘work’ and lives by the motto ‘All done by kindness.’

George, who is under pressure to produce a spectacular act for The Professor’s retirement show, is beginning to see the potential in moving pictures and believes that if he can harness this new

technology, it will revolutionise the world of magic forever. But in order to achieve his dreams, George must first win over Eadie and harness her moving picture talents. As a group of illusionists prepare for the grand retirement spectacle and the announcement of The Professor’s successor, the worlds of Eadie, George and Cec collide.

And Cec – who is now working for Arter’s only surviving relative, the sinister magician Roderick Skarratt, and has fallen in love with the bustling realms of theatre and magic – finds herself facing the fight of her life to save the performance from sabotage... and harness the element of real magic that she holds deep within her.

It’s lights, camera, action all the way as Hyder bewitches and bedazzles us with her enthralling late Victorian ‘magic’ show which celebrates the world of theatre, innovation and entertainment, and is steeped in the elegant prose that makes her books such a reading delight. With a plot full of trickery, sleight of hand, soaring ambitions, dangerous rivalries and heartfelt passions, the action bowls along at a fine pace, taking us on a memorable journey through a richly imagined world and a spectacular cast of characters.

As one of the many wise old magicians tells young Cec as she embarks on her theatrical odyssey, ‘magic only works if you believe in it too.’ And you don’t have to look far for the magic in this thoroughly seductive adventure!
(Manilla Press, paperback, £9.99)