Carter Beats The Devil - Glen David Gold

A brief story about Glen David Gold before we begin. Before he wrote Carter Beats The Devil, Gold met his future wife, Alice Sebold (the bestselling novelist of The Lovely Bones) when they were both MFA candidates at California University. Gold arrived on a motorbike for the orientation and upon meeting Sebold, tried and failed to get his helmet off without success. He sat through the entire orientation with it on, and Sebold was smitten.

It's an odd little story but after finishing Gold's Carter Beats The Devil today, it sounds like a moment lifted from the novel itself.

Like Michael Chabon's incredible The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay, Carter Beats The Devil is a rich, surprising concoction of history, magic, science comedy and romance. A book that, despite it's size (560 pages), makes you wish it were longer. Those old adages about skipping meals and losing sleep due to a novel all apply to Carter Beats The Devil. It's an unalloyed joy from start to finish. I simply couldn't put it down.

The novel begins in 1923 with Carter performing his act, the climax of which is a duel with the Devil, with president Warren Harding taking part. But two hours later, Harding is dead and a dogged secret service agent is convinced Carter is responsible and in possession of a final Presidential secret.

After the audacious beginning, Gold takes us back to Carter's childhood in an upper class turn of the century San Francisco, following the budding magician through the vaudeville circuit, a titanic clash with a rival magician, a meeting with the legendary Harry Houdini, and Carter's ascent to his status as the greatest magician in the world. There's a dazzling array of larger-than-life characters along the way: fortune tellers, the world's tallest man, the inventor of television, pirates on the Molucca Sea, a blind woman with a dark past and pet lion called Baby.

To say more would be to spoil one of the biggest treats that books have to offer you. Gold's novel is an epic sleight of hand as well as a rip-roaring page turner. Using the old magician's adage of hiding a secret in plain sight, the book twists one way and then another, constantly suprising you. There are amazing escapes, huge magical set-pieces, and Gold effortlessly evokes the atmosphere of the early twenties and the spirit of theatre and vaudeville, weaving (and then tying up) an array of subplots and a wonderfully OTT villain into the finale. It's also a beautifully written love story between Carter and the two women who come into his life. Only in this book can a magician and a blind woman flirting in an overgrown park while a lion eats roast beef off of wax paper move you so completely. It's a charming, clever and unique piece of fiction, and destined to join Kavalier and Clay as one of my all time favourite novels.

Now seven years after the publication of Carter Beats The Devil, Glen David Gold has a new novel imminent, which sounds equally fascinating. Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion. From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world's last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America's doomed engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications - studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother - to finally make a movie 'as good as he was.'

And just as promising is the news that Carter Beats The Devil has been picked up by AMC, the company behind Mad Men to be adapted into a mini-series. Although Tom Cruise owned the rights for several years, and intended to produce and star in movie version of the book, this AMC produced version sounds like a much more appealing proposition. Let's hope it pans out.