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Book 21 - "Carter Beats the Devil" by Glen David Gold
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 18:31Each piece of the set was on a winch and pulley, bag-dropped, counterbalanced by nests of fifty-pound bags of sand. The setup was called a 'Fairbanks,' for the reason that when a stagehand so wanted, he could stand upon a knot on the rope, untie as few or as many bags of sand as he wanted, and ride nearly to the rafters like Zorro as the scenery lowered.
There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter's team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalks and down to the stage again, simply because they could.
My initial problem with this book was that I was comparing it unfavourably with Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy which I read last year and which also involves a stage magician suspected of complicity in the death of a politician. It seemed rather slow-moving and I found it annoying how the author skipped over things that would have been very important in Carter's life. I know Carter was away at school at the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but surely it would have had more of an effect on a native of the city than that!
Things began to perk up half way through, at about the time Carter took Baby for a walk in the park and it started to become clear that there was more to the secret service's interest in Carter than at first met the eye. The second half of the book was definitely more exciting and involving than the first, and the plot consists of misdirection after misdirection, just like a magician's act.
I had heard of some of the other magicians mentioned in the book, such as Houdini (obviously) and the Maskelynes but not Carter, so it was only when I read the author's comment at the end of the book that I realised that Charles Carter was not a fictional character. If you Google "Carter the Great", you can find pictures of his posters and descriptions of his tricks, including Carter Beats the Devil, the Lion's Bride and other illusions described in this book, so of course that left me wondering if any of the events described in the story were true.
As Harding was a fictional President, I assume that the sub-plot about his death was all fictional, and also the invention of electronic television so far ahead of its time, but he could have had a wife who died on stage while he was trying out a trick and a second wife who was blind, and it's even possible that he could have had an encounter with pirates and been given an island by the King of Thailand! Perhaps I'll try to track down a copy of his biography so I can find out what was true and what wasn't.
There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter's team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalks and down to the stage again, simply because they could.
My initial problem with this book was that I was comparing it unfavourably with Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy which I read last year and which also involves a stage magician suspected of complicity in the death of a politician. It seemed rather slow-moving and I found it annoying how the author skipped over things that would have been very important in Carter's life. I know Carter was away at school at the time of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but surely it would have had more of an effect on a native of the city than that!
Things began to perk up half way through, at about the time Carter took Baby for a walk in the park and it started to become clear that there was more to the secret service's interest in Carter than at first met the eye. The second half of the book was definitely more exciting and involving than the first, and the plot consists of misdirection after misdirection, just like a magician's act.
I had heard of some of the other magicians mentioned in the book, such as Houdini (obviously) and the Maskelynes but not Carter, so it was only when I read the author's comment at the end of the book that I realised that Charles Carter was not a fictional character. If you Google "Carter the Great", you can find pictures of his posters and descriptions of his tricks, including Carter Beats the Devil, the Lion's Bride and other illusions described in this book, so of course that left me wondering if any of the events described in the story were true.
As Harding was a fictional President, I assume that the sub-plot about his death was all fictional, and also the invention of electronic television so far ahead of its time, but he could have had a wife who died on stage while he was trying out a trick and a second wife who was blind, and it's even possible that he could have had an encounter with pirates and been given an island by the King of Thailand! Perhaps I'll try to track down a copy of his biography so I can find out what was true and what wasn't.
