Books - Houdini Girl

The Houdini Girl is Rosa Kelly, an earthy, cynical, smart, funny and carnal Irishwoman who enters Fletcher ('Red') Brandon's life for a year and abruptly disappears, under dark and devastating circumstances. The circumstances of her 'disappearance', the 'how did she do that,' 'how did it really work,' and 'who is she really' questions that normally surround events like this are especially germane to Red. He's a professional magician, and an avid student of contrived scenarios, misdirection, creating false expectations, playing human nature and making his audiences very happy that That Just Happened To Them.

The standard set-up of knocking off the victim early, then having the protagonist reconstruct the path to her demise, has been done and done and done. But it's a reliably rich structure for writer Martyn Bedford to work within, and most successful when our reconstructor is as compelling as his or her subject. And Bedford's Red is a unique, yet identifiably comfortable character to spend the novel's length with. His narrative voice is chummy and conversational - he takes justifiable pride in his own intelligence and guards his professional secrets well. But he's also very self-deprecating, and has a real respect and affection for the fallibility of his fellow man. It's why he's a good magician - he has a terrific work ethic, and understands that gracious presentation is far more important than the mechanics of the trick. Nonetheless, he constantly reminds us Not To Ask - he won't tell.

Bedford is especially smart in the first third of the book. Having set up the obvious mystery to be pursued, he nonetheless spends an enormous amount of care and time on the nature of Red's initial grief. We witness how his life is changed by it day-to-day, how he now relates to Rosa's friends and acquaintances, how his family reacts to him, what he contributes to and what he omits from the police investigation. All of these objective circumstances acquaint us with Red's values - what he chooses to share, his boundaries and his shortcomings. It's easy for us to construct a complete picture of who he is and why we care about him. Our learning so much about Red lays the perfect foundation for our following Red's own personal investigation of Rosa.

Red enters an unfamiliar world that has it's own ideas about manipulating human nature and creating misdirection, both for evil purposes and good. And he must employ his own resources of charm and fearlessness, and learn the limitations of each. But Bedford never goes for the easy thrill or the big twist. No one is cartoonish, no one becomes bigger than life. Red encounters real, believable people in real, believable circumstances. There's an especially interesting point in the story when Red feels close to the truth of who Rosa was, and describes a particularly conflicted episode from his life and their relationship that involves his explaining how a particular trick is done - information he's insisted all along he'll never volunteer to us. And I suspect individual readers will react to it in a variety of ways - What's The Big Deal?, or I Knew He Was A Shit!, or Who Can Blame Him? It's all part of Bedford's own investigation into who we all are, what we present to the people we love, and what responsibility each of us takes for the choices, calculated or otherwise, that we make that affect other people.

Recommended.