On the trail of Rosa
A novel of passion and prestidigitation and the obsessive search for a lost lover

Author: By Kurt Jensen

Date: SUNDAY, February 7, 1999

Page: H1

Section: Books

The Houdini girl
By Martyn Bedford. Pantheon. 310 pp. $24.

To fall in love is to engineer into existence the dream of being in love. An entire creation, with rooms and porches and ornamental balustrades -- the habitation of a new life -- is imaginatively carpentered together, and when love fails, the entire vast and impossible contraption must be pulled wholly to the ground. In a novel of failed love, the reader is invited, in the opening pages, to adore the untenable facade, and to witness its woeful demolition, often while beside the abandoned lover, who writhes and weeps and rages as he watches his dream tumble apart to its extinction. Because fiction is magical -- the performance of illusion -- its subject matter cannot perpetuate illusion indefinitely; the dismantling progress of the plot must conclude with the triumph of reality over illusion, the grinding down of the dream against the passionless grit of fact.

Such is ``The Houdini Girl,'' Martyn Bedford's well-executed second novel. It is a tale of the decay of illusion, and is thematically adorned by professional magic (the narrator, Fletcher ``Red'' Brandon, is a performing magician, and his observations on the art and mechanics of magic open most chapters) that keeps the proceedings fun to look at, if not quite artful.

``I am a magician,'' Red tells us. ``That is, I perform feats of conjuring and illusion for the purposes of entertainment. Performance is the key. In truth, tricks are incidental.'' Bedford is an agile performer, fluent in relating what happened and how. Unfortunately, with novels, the performance of style, or construction or voice, cannot be the key.

It is a fairly simple story. Red falls for Rosa, a caustic but appealing Irish woman whose sexual facility and general good humor more than compensate for her reticence about her past. After a relatively contented year together (but before we reach page 25), Rosa dies in a train accident. But there are inconsistencies and gaps in the official story of what happened on the tracks that day: Was Rosa pushed, or did she jump, from her car into the path of an oncoming train? Red starts asking questions, and the arduous, 300-page search for the facts of Rosa's life begins.

``What you are doing in magic is creating the semblance of a chain of cause and effect. I do this, then this happens; I do that, then that happens. Basic logic. And a logical mind . . . is more prone to surprise when an illusion reaches its `illogical' climax.'' This illogical climax, in magic, is usually the triumphant presentation of the incontrovertible: The pea is in fact beneath this cup, the trisected woman indeed remains whole, and somehow the bird remains caged. In a novel bereft of magic, no such fact is produced, no dream is ground away, and the triumph of fact is reduced to the advantage of efficient presentation.

Any murder investigation is really a search for a missing person, generally the killer. Here, Rosa is discovered to have been missing, and comes fully to life only after she has died. Raised in Ireland and orphaned as a young girl, she escaped her abusive relatives by fleeing to Amsterdam. There she became entangled in a prostitution ring whose managers smothered the resistance of their employees with heroin. After some years of this, a secretive group of former prostitutes liberated Rosa and sent her off to England. Having gained control of her addiction, Rosa became a partner in this covert group, and during this time moved in with Red.

None of this is narrated directly; it is a history that is the result of Red's relentless and occasionally illegal quest for Rosa. Early in his pursuit, it emerges that all clues implicate Amsterdam as their point of resolution, and Red follows the path faithfully. There, Red is aided by fellow magician Denis Huting, one of the few fully animated secondary characters in the novel. Together, they unearth most of Rosa's hidden biography.

(An observation: As a plot device in contemporary fiction, Amsterdam is emerging as the stage upon which the raw human truths play out. In at least three novels of the past year -- John Irving's ``A Widow for One Year,'' Irvine Welsh's ``Filth,'' and Ian McEwan's ``Amsterdam'' -- the main characters experience important catharses, usually by divining something profound and domestically unavailable to them. In Henry James and Thomas Mann's day, Italy was decadent enough to rinse away social illusions, and to reveal the pulpy center of the desiring heart. For our day, perhaps something more abrasive is required to scour truth into being.)

After Red fails in his attempt to complete Rosa's last, fatal mission for the group, and once the last pieces of Rosa's life are produced, one wonders what human passion has driven Red's search. His methodical recounting of it carries little hint of heart, broken or otherwise, and one might guess he is driven by unmentioned, personal reasons -- an unresolved incident from his past, for example, or a guilty conscience for a past transgression. But this is an empty hope; Red seems to pass through the turmoil of events with his costume largely undisturbed.

Yet at the heart of romantic obsession lies a spiritual chaos, a radical disordering of emotional perspective -- especially so if it is thwarted by death. This chaos is the pulsing, vicious heart of the matter, and because Bedford has chosen to narrate his tale in the first person, he has unique, and unexplored, access to this dauntingly interior maelstrom.

The brief tale of their love affair is told in shorthand, and furnishes too little emotional fuel to propel Red on his convoluted hunt: The motives for his devotion remain opaque. His relentless pursuit of Rosa's past -- an elaborated gesture of mourning, perhaps -- is hard to credit, hard to writhe through. If it is mourning, it is unsubstantiated by discernible grief. Instead, Red's search for the truth about Rosa is animated by the same mixture of enthusiasm, curiosity, and fear that one brings to an annual family reunion in the Midwest somewhere.

A bit of the corrosive frolic of grief would have served Bedford's story; instead, Red's definition of magic (``Someone or something is caused to pass mysteriously from one place or condition to another'') tells us everything we need to know about this plot, which serviceably fills in the details of the comings and goings, the plane flights and alleyway muggings and restaurant meals, that push the plot ahead. And while Bedford's performance as a writer shows diligence and craft, the biggest trick fiction can pull off -- the evocation of substantial characters with persuasive motives -- remains uncompleted.