Between the Pages

This book artfully blurs fact and fiction to create an interesting novel. It is narrated in part by Martin Strauss, a man who in the present day, has just learned that he has a medical condition which will cause him to eventually lose his mind; he will be unable to distinguish between memory and imagination, or to put it another way, he won’t know what is fact and what is fiction.

Martin introduces himself to the reader as the man who killed Harry Houdini, not once, but twice. In telling his story, the reader also learns the story of Houdini (although be warned…while some parts of this are absolutely truthful, other parts are fictionalised). The chapters alternate between Martin in the current day, Martin in 1926/27 and Houdini’s life.

What is true – and what forms a large part of Houdini’s story here – is that Houdini was intent on debunking so-called mediums and psychics. He was concerned that a lot of powerful people were reliant on the advice they received from psychics, and was determined to reveal spiritualism as being fake and the people that practiced it as fraudulent. Unsurprisingly, this made him a lot of enemies, and that thread is a strong feature throughout this book.

I enjoyed the parts about Houdini, which are told in the third person, but I think I actually preferred the parts about Martin Strauss. In this book, Strauss is the man who famously punched Houdini in the stomach, shortly after which Houdini died (although it is now known that he actually died as the result of appendicitis, which  may or may not have been aggravated by an unprepared for punch). Strauss is an entirely fictional character 0 in real life, the man who threw the punch was named J Gordon Whitehead.

For me, the real theme of the book is memory – what is real, what we construct for ourselves, and how we separate fact from fiction. We know from the beginning that Strauss is an unreliable narrator, but he also knows this and is desperate to impart the truth to Houdini’s daughter Alice (the result of an illicit liaison; it turns out the famous escapologist was also a rampant womaniser) before it is too late.

The ending does contain a twist which I certainly did not see coming, and I’m still not sure how I actually feel about it. Much the same as I feel when watching a magic trick, I know that I have had somehow had the wool pulled over my eyes, but I’m still trying to go back through events in my mind, working out where exactly the trick was pulled off.

Overall, this is an interesting story and well written. I think I would like to read more by Steven Galloway.