The father of Adair Graham MacKenny (who has a fondness for utilizing the full complement of his name) hated illusionists. You can hardly blame him, after a childhood incident in which he unwittingly participated in the death of the Great Carrazimo, a traveling escape artist who miscalculated the water content of a particular plot of sand.
Now Adie (which is what most people call him, despite the formal introduction) isn’t quite sure what to make of “street magician” David Blaine, who is currently (dare we add “supposedly”?) starving himself for 44 days in a clear Plexiglas box hanging from a crane near London’s Tower Bridge. Adair — whose narration in Nicola Barker’s Clear: A Transparent Novel is littered with parentheticals, tangentials, self-referentials, gratuitous italicized emphases and compulsive asides — idolizes Jack Schaefer’s classic Western novel, Shane, adoring it for its direct and unadorned language. But is Blaine, like Shane, an enigmatic Western hero of quiet conviction and profound strength or just a “preposterous magician” engaging in an overhyped stunt? And if you’re trying to be a Shane-style rugged individualist, should you love Blaine? Loathe him? Pretend not to notice him? “So who’s conforming?” asks Adair. “And who are the deviants?”
Adair tries to make sense of the man in the clear-walled box, with the (often aggressive and contrary) assistance of: his Ghanaian “Über-man” of a flatmate, Solomon; Solomon’s American-expat retro-African girlfriend, Jalisa; an apparently legit fortuneteller; a human resources officer from Adair’s office; a bizarre woman named Aphra with a superhuman sense of smell and a fondness for old shoes; and a dying Australian wine baron.
Says Adair, “Seems like the need for real ‘truth’ (whatever that is, in the bleak-seeming aftermath of the Iraqi war) has — at some weird level — become almost a kind of modern mania.”
Is Adair’s final revelation the real transcendent deal or merely a philosophical sleight of hand? Such a cynic you are! It’s all there plain to see in the illusionist’s transparent box.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.
