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The Author on Her Work
For me, all novels begin with the collision of an IMAGE and an IDEA. The image for The Last Magician was a stunning set of photographs by the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. The New York Times Magazine ran a multi-page spread of his extraordinary photographs of a gold mine in Brazil (this must have been somewhere around ’87). The magazine devoted its central two-page spread to a photograph of the great cauldron of the gold mine, hundreds of feet deep, dug by impoverished and frenzied peasants with picks and hand-shovels. Precarious ladders made of bamboo lashed together with rope descended into this hell. Peasants, hoping for gold, labored up and down the ladders with loads on their shoulders and heads.
The photograph looked like a scene from hell. I immediately thought of Botticelli’s drawings for Dante’s Inferno (a literary work with which I am extremely familiar, since my graduate work is in medieval literature).
In 1988, not long after Salgado’s images were burned into my brain, I was teaching at the University of Sydney, Australia, and living in inner-city Sydney. Each day, I passed boarded-up buildings in which “squatters” lived, as well as similar buildings that were being bought by young professionals and being fixed up into elegant townhouses. The boarded-up buildings had signs spray-painted on the plywood nailed over the windows: FUCK OFF, YUPPIES! Each day, walking to the University of Sydney, I passed scores of homeless people sleeping in doorways. I talked to street kids, living on the streets, sometimes as young as thirteen. They were hooked on drugs and lived by prostitution. I also passed the old railway ravine of inner Sydney and was electrified by the similarity to Salgado’s goldmine. By sequential images, Dante’s Inferno became the image for the underground life of the inner city. (I set this in Sydney, but I mean this to stand for inner-city decay in any of the great cities of the world.)
So that was the image, or series of linked images. And the IDEA came from one of the street kids I talked to. She was fifteen, hooked on drugs, living by prostitution. She had run away from home because her stepfather was molesting her. She had to turn six tricks a day, seven days a week, to support her drug habit. She pointed out to me, quite tartly, that she didn’t have time to talk for free (“I gotta work. You gotta pay me the going rate to talk for half an hour”). I did pay for half an hour of her time, and she talked over her coffee. Of the many amazing things this bright, intelligent, doomed child told me, the most startling—at least to me—was that her most frequent clients (especially the repeat ones) were cops, lawyers, and judges.
That was the IDEA that I wanted to explore in this novel: the seeming anomaly that the guardians of law and order consorted constantly, sexually, with the subverters of law and order.
Thus the novel was born, and I did far more intimate research than I ever expected to do with the denizens of the Red Light district of Sydney.
Discussion
Questions
1. The leitmotifs of photography and moviemaking contribute a cinematic quality to The Last Magician. How do these as well as other narrative elements and stylistic devices make it a remarkably visual novel?
2. What rules of conventional narrative structure does Hospital break in her telling of this story? How does the structure push us to examine how we know what we think we know?
3. Why is Lucy the narrator?
4. Describe how sexual repression informs the choices some of the characters make in their lives.
5. What draws Gabriel and Lucy to each other?
6. Hospital’s novel is rich in literary allusions. Name a few and explain their relevance.
7. As depicted in Lucy’s narrative, does the process of remembering serve to illuminate or obfuscate moral meaning?
8. What do the characters’ childhood memories reveal about the novel’s themes of innocence and corruption?
9. In her author’s statement, Hospital notes that the urban environment she depicts is meant to have universal qualities. Are there any uniquely Australian qualities to The Last Magician?
10. Robinson Gray is the consummate insider while Charlie Chan is the ultimate outsider. Do they have anything in common?
11. Hospital’s novel is richly inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Discuss the thematic and structural parallels between the two. How does Hospital depart from Dante’s model?
12. The similarity of the names Cat and Catherine offers initial indication that these characters are uniquely linked—are they?
13. What makes Charlie Chan the last magician?
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