Harry Houdini Was a Very Interesting Man

Harry Houdini was a fascinating character, spending his life travelling the world astounding the general public, going to greater and more dangerous extremes as each of his showpieces became old hat. He began with simple handcuff escapes behind a curtain, but graduated to challenging the general public to bring any container up on stage to try and hold him (he once even escaped from a giant fake sea monster made of sewn-together flesh), removing himself from prison cells around the world to drum up publicity, and jumping into rivers and escaping underwater from cuffs and chains. Sadly, as with all magic, when you find out how it's all done that wondrous sheen is removed from his tricks. Before you find out the mundane truth, it's always tempting to ignore logic and think there must have been some superhuman mastery taking place, but often the least interesting solution you can come up with is the right one. So, when Houdini was escaping from any container an unknown member of the public could build, these were usually confidants, or he'd met the challengers beforehand and bribed them to leave a few nails loose so he could escape; or when he escaped from jail cells, he had keys or lock picks hidden on his body. Of course, being a contemporary of Houdini and not knowing any of this made him seem like a voodoo master, and he was still an amazing contortionist and lock picker. He always performed his escapes behind a curtain, and it's unbelievable to think that he could hold an audience rapt for an hour with nothing but his writhing shadow and an orchestra to keep them entertained.

Later in his career, riddled by the injuries inflicted by years of contorting his frame to escape from seemingly impossible positions, Houdini slowed down his stage routine and became a full-time Spiritualist debunker, disguising himself as an old man and infiltrating seances to show up phony mediums. He had run-ins with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an advocate of Spiritualism and Houdini's one-time friend, who once released a mocked photo of a little girl with fairies from a story book superimposed on it, believing it to be evidence of spirits. It's a funny photo. Doyle thought that Houdini himself possessed Spiritualist powers without even knowing it, so bamboozled was he by the tricks the master performed.

All of this stuff is in the book The Secret Life of Houdini, a thrilling read. The only minor problem with it is that the authors were desperate for a USP to make their biography different to any other, so cobbled together a silly theory about Houdini's life as a spy, based solely on wild conjecture, including at one point a claim that Houdini escaped from a crate in half an hour, but his diary confirms that he didn't appear to the audience until an hour had passed, giving him the perfect alibi to engage in spy work. Um. Ignore the spy stuff, and focus on the life of the best magician the world has ever known. Neatly, the book leaves a few of Houdini's tricks as mysteries, so if you want you can (like me) still pretend that there was something supernatural in his abilities.

Worlds of Fiction, Worlds of Fact

At the moment I'm reading a biography about Harry Houdini, and although I'm really enjoying it (Houdini was a fascinating person), like all non-fiction it makes me yearn to read something made up. I often have trouble getting through a non-fiction book, no matter how interesting I find the subject material, because I love the way that fiction creates its own world, even if what is happening in the novel could be placed directly within our own lives. It's almost like a book delivers a slightly warped parallel universe, and even if the contents are very sober and realistic, there's always this magical possibility with fiction that anything could happen.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, about a Turkish city blocked off by heavy snow from the outside world and thus at the mercy of a military coup, is a book that opened an entirely new world to me: a place and political landscape that I knew nothing about. It's a world in which girls who choose to wear headscarves are banned from education and the state battles Islam for control, and it has been happening in Turkey for the last few decades, with headscarf girls only recently being tentatively accepted in the classroom. It's funny how living in England leaves you mostly ignorant of anything that isn't happening in either the UK or USA. Pamuk perfectly captures the mood of a nation divided, one in which a life can mean so little as to be expunged in the same way that a writer might decide a character is superfluous and just delete them from the story. Life seems like such a fragile thing in Snow: people die for their beliefs at the drop of a hat, little caring as long as they stand up for what they feel is right. It makes me feel small that I basically see myself as the centre of my world, and don't think I could ever see a cause as worth dying for, as big enough to give my life to. I love learning about new places and ideas, and with them presented in fiction I find them much easier to grasp than reading a factual book. I suppose it's the personal touch, the microscope that is placed over a story, that I identify with.

From the Desk of the Editor

After a nice December break, I'm back in the saddle and deep into editing the novel I wrote in November. I thought that the writing of it would be the most arduous part, but now I'm confronted with 50,000 words that need changing and shaping into the finished product, and I'm beginning to realise how long this is going to take. Usually I read through and edit a story about ten to fifteen times, and they're typically around 3000 words, so if I'm going to do the same with my novel it's going to be a mammoth task. I'm currently a third of the way through my initial read through and edit, and at the moment I'm enjoying the story as much as I can, because I know in a few months I'll be sick of it! After a couple of edits I'll post some extracts on here.

I'm still pinching myself that when I've finished I will have a book that theoretically could be published if it's good enough and I'm lucky enough. Just to have that possibility if Mr Vintage or Ms Random House were going door to door and offering to publish anyone with a finished book is a wonderful feeling. A good thing is that as I was writing I was worried that a lot of it wouldn't make sense or hang together, but that doesn't seem to be a problem; it seems I have written a coherent novel.  That's the first step out of the way, but there's a nice long marathon ahead....

Life in Nazi America

Books like this scare me, because they force me to think about the question of what I might have done if I was unfortunate enough to live in Germany as it was being overrun with Nazi ideology, and face up to the answer that in all likelihood I would have done nothing except for quietly be relieved that I'm not Jewish or a gypsy or gay or anything else they decided they didn't like. It's a horrible potential to face, and must have been a horrific truth for the millions of Germans who let the horrors of fascism wash over them and did nothing.

The Plot Against America is Philip Roth's nightmarish vision of Nazism supplanted to the United States, and although at times it seems a little far-fetched and fanciful, if you run with the initial premise everything that comes after as the USA slowly degenerates into a Jewish-ostracising, Hitler-loving hole seems possible. First, Fascist sympathiser and celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940 on an anti-war platform [the idea that the US could ever be anti-war was for me the hardest thing to imagine!], and then he gradually brings in measures to side with Hitler and persecute the Jews of the country, planning to separate Jewish communities and move individual families to far flung Southern towns under the guise of integrating them with the wider community. The disintegration of freedom is shown as a delicate change masked by the government and shined up to look positive, and you lose yourself in a world in which Jews become hated in America in the same way as in Nazi Germany. Non-Jewish citizens quickly latch onto the fact that they are in a position of safety as long as they target the Jews, and the country becomes perilous for the minority. Roth throws up so much to ponder that it took me ages to get through the book, as I could only read a couple of pages before becoming lost in thought. I cannot imagine the fear in Jewish souls as their home countries in Europe were engulfed in the wave of Hitler's domination, and they lived on the edge of being sent to concentration camps. The Plot Against America is an amazing book, and though it requires some suspension of disbelief, it's frightening how little you need to be caught up in it.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how easy it seems to be to slander dead people and get away with it. Although Lindbergh is historically reported to have vague Fascist and anti-Semitic leanings, Roth gets away with turning his character into a Nazi pawn who at times seems close to ordering genocide, and nobody seems to have a problem with it! If Lindbergh was alive Roth would have lawsuits coming out of his ears, but apparently turning frantically in his grave counts for nothing. I found it strange that an author could get away with such blasphemy. And Henry Ford seems like a monster, too, although if you look him up on Wikipedia that one seems justified.