AS IF BY MAGIC

Wilson gestures from his earliest work onwards towards the interesting and unfashionable perception that, for the educated and half-educated alike, reading may feel more real than living. Indeed contemporary living itself may have a papery, ‘literary’, second-hand and allusive feel, since literature continues to provide – when not misused – the best means we have by which to try to understand ourselves. In Hemlock Mrs Rankine imitates a Virginia Woolf dialogue (p. 28), while Meg Eliot essays an Ionesco note at a party (p. 203). Meg and Sylvia alike are great readers, both sometimes using novels ‘to anaesthetise’ (MME 35) – in other words, as ‘magic’. Yet both also understood that ‘some books reflect reality’ (MME 253). Fascination with the déniaisé, and with the second-hand use of literature as a crutch, run throughout Wilson's work, including As If By Magic. Literature helps us understand life, but must not be confused with it. Fictional self-reflexivity may, in other words, be variously arrived at. If there are literary allusions by which the characters support the artifice of their lives, there are other allusions by which Wilson here supports the artifice of the novel.

Thus Hamo's relationship with cockney Erroll, which borrows from the innocent Pickwick's with the worldly Weller, gives rise to discussions of the picaresque. Alexandra also glosses Hamo's role as ‘holy fool’ (p. 372), alluding to Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Similarly Alexandra's incarnation in the Epilogue as millionairess and instrument of justice prompts her own final dismissive acknowledgement that she is a ‘fictive device’. Yet Wilson is not, unlike lesser writers and academics, simply foregrounding the feeble, banal little truth that ‘fictions are lies’, and Alexandra here expresses an angry distaste for the meta-novel (p. 420) which is almost certainly Wilson's own. Unlike B. S. Johnson or Fowles, he is not much interested in driving the reader into aporia …

Roddy, Ned and Alexandra have an experimental ménage á trois, so equitably managed that none much minds who fathers Alexandra's baby, Oliver.