Multi-award winning author Steven Galloway looks exactly the same in person as he does in his book jacket photo: smart, intense, slightly nerdy and curious. As one of Canada’s rising literary talents — the author of Finnie Walsh, Ascension and national bestseller The Cellist of Sarajevo — I expected an edge of justifiable superiority. Not so. We met at the Wired Monk in Kitsalano, and he immediately was open and enthusiastic. We talked about his most recent book, published last year, The Confabulist, and his upcoming reading at the Chan Center.
My copy of The Confabulist arrived a day before our meeting, and though a thoroughly enjoyable read, I was tired that day. As I neared the end of the 300 pages, I was falling in and out of sleep, interrupting the words of Galloway’s narrator, Martin Strauss, with my dreams. When I told Galloway, he laughed and said, “Cool. That’s how it should be. The value isn’t that it is true. The value is in the telling of the story and what the story actually means. How you get to the truth is kind of immaterial.” In other words, making up truths and confusing what is “real” follows his plan.
This is a complex, multilayered book that conveys a plethora of profundities, sometimes wrapped in contradiction, and is told by a narrator who is not intended to be trustworthy. Among the book’s messages is that our minds are prone to trickery, capable of confabulating, or of fabricating imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory. And just like in a magic trick, they are sometimes incapable of deciphering truth from falsehood.
At first glance, these ideas appear as a strange basis for a story. But maybe not. Storytelling is, afterall, a world of make believe. Galloway quotes Aldous Huxley before opening his book, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” As in life, Galloway shows in The Confabulist that magic interwoven with memory, fiction or fact, creates an engaging story.
Galloway, an Associate Professor in the University of British Columbia’s Creative Writing Program, begins developing his novels with an idea. For The Confabulist, the idea sprang from a pivotal childhood memory.
“I had this general idea as a little kid that adults were terrifying. I didn’t like being around them. I remember my parents would have parties and I would hide in the basement.” Then one day young Galloway had an interaction with his great uncle Johnny, the sharp dresser and excellent checkers player. “I remember him coming into the backyard. It was a hot day and he took off his coat and his fedora, and played checkers with me and let me win.” Galloway decided that all adults weren’t so bad. Many years later when he was in his mid-30s, he was looking through photographs and learned that his Uncle Johnny had died before he was born.
Galloway was fascinated by the creation of false memory. His research began. It didn’t take him long to realize that the most interesting people writing about memory were magicians or psychologist writing about magic tricks.
False recollection, Galloway believes, is like a magic trick. “If I were able to do a really great magic trick right now, you wouldn’t actually think, ‘Oh, wow, Galloway’s a wizard. Right?’ No one thinks that…but you also sort of do. There’s a duality to it. You know that the person doesn’t have supernatural powers. You know it was a trick but if you don’t know how it was done. There’s that tiny, tiny possibility that something legitimately magical happened. It’s not an either/or. It’s both.”
The historical character who epitomized the duality and interplay that fascinated Galloway was magician and illusionist Harry Houdini. Houdini was a sort of self-created illusion. Born Ehrick Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, he re-invented himself as the most famous man alive, Harry Houdini.
“As a writer what I could do with Houdini was totally different because he was a made-up character, but he’s also someone everyone has heard of. You could actually have suspension of disbelief and also not. I couldn’t have written this book with a made-up magician because one of the exercises of reading it is wondering, did Houdini actually do this or is this a made-up part of the book— which, by the time you get to the end of the book, you realize is pretty woven into what the book is.”
Galloway marvels at Houdini’s fame. Houdini, who died 80 years ago, gets more Google hits than Stephen Harper.
After settling on Houdini to guide his story, Galloway created his narrator, Martin Strauss. He is an unreliable narrator, an older man who has just been diagnosed with tinnitus, “a degenerative psychological condition” that replaces real with false memories, or so says Strauss at the beginning of the book. In fact, tinnitus is defined as a condition that causes ringing in the ear. From the outset the reader is presented with a narrator who can’t be trusted to judge truth from fiction. But then this is fiction, and as Galloway says, it is the meaning of the story, not the facts confabulated, that matter. Though Strauss’ memory is jumbled, he nonetheless understands some deep truths…and he knows a thing or two about magicians and magic tricks.
“The magician,” writes Strauss, “trades in this human struggle. Magic that is not real magic affects us because it mirrors our existence. We know that what we see isn’t as it seems, but we want it to be and want to understand. We strive for immortality in the face of its impossibility.”
Galloway grounds the book in intricately detailed descriptions of magic tricks, in which he clearly delights. The Confabulist begins with Houdini’s performance in Kansas at an opera house. The tale then follows two narratives — Strauss in first person, and a third person description of Houdini — and bounces from one year to another between 1847 and 1927. Strauss tells his story from the present day, which isn’t today but is nonetheless located in a time when the past is reminiscence.
Galloway provides provocative details of key events and performances in Houdini’s life, whether fabricated or not, and draws the profile of a man who is ambitious, brilliant and self-involved. We follow his rise to fame in the United States and Europe, his debates with Arthur Conan Doyle about spiritualism, and his (possible) involvement in an international political conspiracy as a spy. Houdini’s story becomes increasingly complex and obscure as the book continues. Strauss, who relates parts of the story, believes he murdered Houdini, not once but twice, and recounts how his encounters with Houdini determined the course of his life.
There is ongoing irony throughout the book. Galloway strips magic tricks of their magic by revealing the mechanisms of the tricks, creating reality where there was doubt. He presents a narrator who questions, like Houdini, all that is in the realm of the "spiritualists"— and yet is in constant contact with his dead mother.
It is these contradictions or juxtapositions of ideas that most deeply engage the reader. As the storyline skips along at a fast clip, the ideas demand considered thought.
The final element of Galloway’s novel-making process is creating structure. “The structure of a novel, the overall shape and how it’s built in terms of what parts go where, is for me a more important storytelling decision than characters or plot.” Each of his novels has an internal logic, unique and specific to its story. The Cellist of Sarajevo is structured as a trio sonata; Ascension as a gypsy folktale; and The Confabulist as a magic trick. A magic trick, in order to be successful, explains Strauss, has four parts— effect, method, misdirection and reconstruction.
Whether the reader is consciously aware of Galloway’s structure is irrelevant. The effects are felt. Galloway uses sleight of hand, like any good magician.
“The magician,” writes Strauss, “knows that what happened and what we will remember having happened can be two entirely different things… When we close our eyes, we will see things as we believe they happened, not as they actually did. This is essential for the effect. It is what carries it forward, what propels us to seek the next effect, to keep our mortality in abeyance.”
It also propels us to read on, and to anxiously await Galloway’s next book.
Galloway will join with magician David Gifford to present an evening exploring reality and illusion as part of the “Beyond Words” series at the Chan Center on February 26th. It promises magic!