[In the following review, Craig commends Johnston's skill at portraying complicated and intricate relationships in The Illusionist.]

The Illusionist is a kind of fable. Jennifer Johnston has been narrowing her focus lately, and this short novel is both highly concentrated and decorative. It doesn't have much in the way of plot, but plot is not the point as it moves between the present and the past.

It opens in Dublin, where a middle-aged novelist, Stella Macnamara, awaits the arrival from the airport of her daughter Robin. Robin is coming from the funeral of her father, Stella's estranged husband and the illusionist of the title. Martyn Glover has died in the company of 250 doves, caught by a terrorist explosion in a London street. Terrorism plays no further part in the story. Its function is to furnish the illusionist with a suitable end; gone, as he came, in a puff of smoke.

Train smoke must have heralded his first appearance on the Liverpool-London express, c1961. After materialising in the compartment in which Stella is travelling, he first interrupts her reading and then takes over her life. Reader, she marries him—and from this point on, it's a matter of the narrative allying itself with all those wives who are kept in the dark about their husbands' pursuits—occupational, amorous. Bluebeard springs to mind quite early on—“He had this room at the back of the flat … He kept the door of that room locked … ‘I have to have my own privacy you know.’” Martyn supplies no information about his background or source of income; Stella, we know, works in publishing—until Martyn puts a stop to that—and has a mother and father at home in Ireland. But Martyn is self-created, for all anyone can tell, and creator in his spare time of dazzling effects: roses sprouting from wrists, doves out of flames. One of his defects is to display scant sympathy over irrational fears; in Stella's case—unfortunately—a fear of birds. Birds are crucial to his illusionism. (He repudiates the term “conjuror.”)

It's the business of the novelist, no less than the magician, to kit herself out with a bag of tricks—to improve on reality, to create illusions. This analogy is stressed throughout. When Stella becomes a writer, against the odds, this triumph is referred to as “pulling something out of her hat.” (Martyn is adept at keeping things under his.) Running alongside this idea is a feminist point about women's resilience, which manifests itself here as a kind of muted mockery, as one illusion after another goes to the wall.

Minor issues get a showing—betrayal of one kind or another, friction between mothers and daughters—but the novel's central theme concerns illusions produced by men in the interests of power. Johnston, though, is far too skilful a novelist (or illusionist) to overstate the point, and her narrative is by turns inspiriting, illuminating and attractively strange.