[In the following review, Schaumburger praises the intellectual rewards of The Last Magician but finds shortcomings in the novel's expansive range and underdeveloped characters.]

The heroine of Janette Turner Hospital's novel Charades (1989) is told that she has a first-class “grab-bag mind,” full of arcane, unrelated, brain-teasing oddments of information. If you, too, delight in such intellectual quirkiness, you will applaud this Australian-born writer's latest effort, The Last Magician. Highly innovative and daring, this sensuous novel is bursting with images and ideas both rich and strange.

Most of its characters—or at least the seekers among them—seem to be walking almanacs of curious lore. They are obsessed with the case of a most significant person missing from their lives, who has probably been murdered. The detective elements in the plot do not appear by accident; Hospital is also the author of a successful crime thriller, A Very Proper Death, under the charming pseudonym of Alex Juniper.

Charlie Chang, as the Australian-Chinese hero of this title calls himself, is a photographer and filmmaker of tricky, disturbing symbolic effects. He is also the manager of a posh Sydney restaurant/whorehouse aptly named the Inferno, which employs Lucy/Lucia, the narrator, a Milton-quoting prostitute who has made a different “choice in cages,” a temporary detour from the normal world, to acquire the forbidden knowledge of the “secret cupboard under the stairs.” Catharine, a TV documentary interviewer, and Robbie, a high-ranking judge, often dine there; Catharine eventually interviews Lucy and hires her as an assistant, while Robbie periodically slips off from his current wife to the perverted world upstairs.

Charlie, Catharine, and Robbie share a dark childhood secret: their wild Queensland friend, Cat, who lured them all into dangerous games on the railroad tracks, finally became a victim herself. Robbie first prevented Cat from saving her retarded brother from an oncoming train, then told the sheriff (while Charlie and Catharine remained silent) that Cat had caused the boy's death. As a result, Cat entered a downward path from reform school to prostitution, prison, and occasional demonic reappearances in her old chums’ lives.

Charlie joins forces with Gabriel, Robbie's estranged drifter son, who works at the Inferno, to track down the long-missing Cat; they are convinced that she holds the key to several unresolved dilemmas of identity and culpability. In their quest for clues, they descend nightly into the Quarry, the criminal underbelly of Sydney.

The Quarry becomes the leading symbol of the novel: teeming subterranean dope dens and other Bosch-like scenes of horror that sometimes extend as far as the earth below suburban gardens. Visitors include not only the desperate and the damned, but also the haunted, like Charlie and Gabriel, and even such ultrarespectable figures on the evening news as Judge Robinson “Robbie” Gray. Charlie and Gabriel appear to die in a knife fight. And it remains for Lucy to assemble the crucial bits of information necessary to solve the murder(s). Lucy and Catharine remain the sole survivors of the far-reaching consequences of Cat's fateful childhood.

This ambitious novel weighs the consequences of crime and punishment, memory and remorse, collective guilt, and other societal issues. The novel's scope is immense, perhaps one reason why it falters. Ultimately, a novelist must convince the reader that her characters are real. We must learn to care about them. In this feat Hospital falls short. Despite this, there are many intellectual pleasures in The Last Magician, so indulge yourself and look forward to this prolific author's next offering.

One quibble: The Last Magician is ill-served by the murky, almost pornographic cover art, which I hope Hospital's publishers will replace.