Surely, I thought, not even Napoleon III would be so goofy as to send a magician to North Africa to overawe the Arabs? But after my first reading, I learned that the Henri Lambert of this novel is based on Robert Houdin, a once famous nineteenth-century conjurer who did contribute to the subjugation of Algeria. (Harry Houdini named himself after Houdin.)
The title, though, tells us that the book is about Lambert's wife, Emmeline, and two journeys she takes with her husband in 1856, the first to the Emperor Louis Napoleon's hunting lodge at Compiègne, the second to Algeria. The two narratives are somehow both bleak and colourful.
The Magician's Wife is a homage paid to Islam from a distance, by a writer whose religious views are unknown to me, but who shows by his books that he illustrates the saying, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic."
Emmeline, his heroine (at the novel's crisis, she does act heroically), had been a fervent believer as a girl, with ambitions to be a nun. Under the influence of her enlightened doctor father, she became a nurse in his clinic-until she was picked up and married by one of the world's most eminent charlatans. She has drifted from the Church, but has not actually left it.
Brian Moore, I suspect, is telling us that the magician is a more accurate exemplar of the modern West than the free-thinking doctor. The main contrast in the book is between Lambert and Bou-Aziz, a Muslim holy man and wonder-worker, who some hope is the Mahdi who will drive the French out of North Africa. Napoleon III sends Lambert to Algeria in order to show that he has a more powerful wonder-worker than the Arabs, as part of his preparation for a completed conquest.
We're apt to think of Louis Napoleon as a bungler who was defeated by Bismarck, a poor imitation of his great-uncle, forgetting his almost twenty years of success as a moderate dictator. Still, he was preposterous even in his prosperity; Marx begins his admirable account of the great-nephew's taking of power, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with the now famous phrase that history repeats itself, first as tragedy (as with Napoleon I), then as farce. But "farce" does not mean failure.
Tocqueville's memoirs of the same few years give a remarkably similar portrait to Marx's, even in the choice of metaphors, though I can't believe either read the other. He presents President Bonaparte (as he then was) as the hero of a bad work of art, victorious by virtue of his folie rather than his intelligence, "for the world is a strange theatre; there are moments when the worst plays succeed best." Marx says that after his triumph Louis Napoleon stopped taking world history as a comedy, and became an ernsthafte Hanswurst, an earnest buffoon who henceforth took his own comedy to be world history. Both call him an adventurer, and remark on his taste for the company of ne'er-do-wells and people of borderline social status. The communist speaks as a disgusted snob; the nobleman does not. Emmeline Lambert, though no expert at placing people socially, is struck that the emperor wears rouge.
The magician and his wife are respectable, but in a twilight zone as far as class is concerned, most conspicuously in their visit to the emperor's country house: they belong to a demi-monde without crime, almost without sex.
Marx calls Louis Napoleon a Taschenspieler, a conjurer, in the last lines of The Eighteenth Brumaire. In Brian Moore's novel, the magician and the emperor are in a sense the same person: a superb charlatan with a mastery of technology, working with the most thorough-going "time management" (as we might say these days). The vast country-house party at the emperor's château is rigorously calculated, programmed, and scheduled, like a military operation. The magician's own house (outside a provincial city) reveals his obsession with exact timing. There are forty-two clocks, there are even robots. This is a little world of surveillance: a carillon warns the magician of every movement in the house. On the second page, one is startled in this nineteenth-century setting by this sentence: "As Jules [the manservant] withdrew, the electric beam automatically closed the door behind him."
Lambert is a masterful performer in an unartistic genre where timing, self-control, and mechanical ingenuity are almost all. Magic is technology and technology is magic. Now as then, we are astonished by conjuring, and flirt with fear of the supernatural. But we are entertained not awed, knowing that there is an explanation though not knowing what it is: this is the general modern condition of knowing less and less of how the things around us work, while more and more trusting in the intelligibility of everything. In showing us this, Brian Moore seems like a disciple of Max Weber.
Emmeline feels estranged from the countryside she lives in, from la France profonde, where peasants still meet fées by springs and in groves, where a mechanical virtuoso like her husband can be mistaken for a true and dangerous wizard. Likewise, in passing through Paris, she glances down the city's dark alleys, into a "a warm, dark, dirty world" now in retreat before the wide and straight boulevards opened up by the urban planning of the modern emperor.
She sees with regret that Algeria is on the brink of some similar change. In the capital, one mosque has already been changed into a theatre, where Lambert performs. But religion is intact, so far. Islam is not more spiritual than Christianity-she and Moore think-but now is stronger. At Compiègne, people go to mass as a merely social activity, presided over by the Empress Eugénie; in Algiers, a mass is treated as an adjunct to a French military triumph. Emmeline's observations deepen as she and her husband go inland.
Time in Islam is not clockwork, mechanical time. Five times a day all Muslims pray, wherever they may happen to be; if in a town they do so in answer to a call from a tower, but not just in a particular building set aside for the purpose. They speak in unison, yet each is directly speaking to God. Emmeline also admires what they say: unlike Christians, they are not asking for favours; they hope for guidance in the right path. This is a religion "not of petition but of acceptance". At a hurried funeral for their manservant, she reflects that Europeans "cannot accept death,. fear hell and only half believe in heaven." But she can learn little of Islam except by contrast, as "a faith with no resemblance to the Christian belief in Mass and sacraments, hellfire and damnation, sin and redemption, penance and forgiveness."
The crucial opposition in the novel is not between these two monotheisms, it is between Islam and modern Europe, in the persons of Bou-Aziz, a leader and faith-healer in the semi-desert hinterland, and an electricity-wielding entertainer. Lambert does have a certain spiritual power, "a summoning of his will so strong that he can make people do things they would never dream of doing". In a tour de force of self-control, he fulfills his imperialistic mission. But to Emmeline (and us), the Muslim holy man is the victor, the superior in dignity, wisdom, and eloquence.
There is a third man, Colonel Deniau, who is so to speak the author of the book's plot, an Arabist who has partly "gone native", largely living in a culture that he is working to overthrow. Emmeline is certain that she cannot really enter into the North African world. She does not try to become a Muslim; she does think of adultery with this French officer who has stopped short of becoming an Arab. She decides against him when she sees that his priority is for his manipulative political schemes, not for sex with her, or for the Arab way of life.
Emmeline wins some sort of moral victory, but this is also a story of thwartedness. The presentation of sex is chilling, not to say off-putting-a characteristically clinical view that I've heard attributed to Moore's education in Belfast. The prose is marked by starkly linked strings of participial phrases. In spite of this quality of distance, The Magician's Wife is a romantic book. Or rather, it is romantic out of this sense of loss.