Product Description

From the author of Big Fish comes this haunting, tender story that weaves a tragic secret, a mysterious meeting with the Devil, and a family of charming circus freaks recounting the extraordinary adventures of their friend Henry Walker, the Negro Magician. 

In the middle of a dusty Southern town, in the middle of the twentieth century, magician Henry Walker entertains crowds at Jeremiah Musgrove’s Chinese Circus. Though not the world-famous illusionist he once was, Henry, with his dark skin and green eyes, is still something of a novelty to the patrons who pay a dime to see his show. Most of the patrons, anyway.

As the novel begins, one May night in 1954, Henry is confronted by three menacing white teens, and soon thereafter disappears. With his fate uncertain, his friends from the circus—Jenny the Ossified Girl, Rudy the Strong Man, and JJ the Barker—piece together what they know of Henry's mysterious and extraordinary life. The result is a spellbinding adventure that begins when ten-year-old Henry meets the devil, who gives him the art of magic and then steals the one thing that means the most to him. As Henry’s friends recount the remarkable adventures and incredible heartache that result from this childhood encounter, only one thing seems certain about Henry's life: nothing is as it appears.

Brimming with surprising twists and turns, and peopled with a literal circus of memorable characters, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is Daniel Wallace at his finest. As in his beloved debut, Big Fish, Wallace once again conjures a wondrous tale with an emotional punch. This is a story of love and loss, identity and illusion, fate and choice; a story that will capture your heart and your imagination and not let go until the very last page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54393 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-03
• Released on: 2007-07-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An inept African-American illusionist is dogged by the deal he struck with the devil in Wallace's fourth novel, a circus picaresque that barnstorms its way through the 1950s American South. Henry Walker, once the "greatest magician in the world," has been reduced to a minstrel show–like novelty act in a traveling circus. Henry's story, told by a succession of narrators—including members of the circus and a private detective—begins during the Depression, when Henry's family fell on hard times. While down and out, Henry meets and apprentices with the devilish magician Mr. Sebastian. Henry learns the secrets of magic, but his ambition and ability are crimped when his beloved sister, Hannah, disappears. The truths of Henry's and Mr. Sebastian's identities and the fate of Hannah are gradually revealed, and what appears to be a Faustian tale of a pact with the devil turns out to be something more tragic. Wallace (Big Fish; The Watermelon King) skillfully unravels the tale, and though the conclusion is both startling and inevitable, and Henry is as beguiling and enigmatic a character as Wallace has created, the milieu of carnies, hucksters, tricksters and wanderers isn't as sharp as it could be. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Sheri Holman

The Devil in Daniel Wallace's engaging if sometimes elusive new novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, frequents upscale summer resort hotels, lives in Muncie, Ind., knows a fair number of card tricks and is very, very white.

The Depression is raging when Henry Walker, the story's hero, first meets the Devil, a.k.a. Mr. Sebastian, in room 702 of the Fremont Hotel. Henry is 10 -- his mother is dead, his handyman father is a hapless alcoholic, and he has just lost his younger sister Hannah's affections to a stray dog named Joan Crawford. Dejected, he enters the room to find a man "sheet white, cloud white," moving a coin between his fingers and mysteriously disappearing and reappearing. Mr. Sebastian offers to teach Henry the secret of magic, beginning with sleights such as the Montana Hideaway and the Carpathian Struggle, but soon moving to real magic, unexplained, dangerous magic of the sort that requires the swearing of a blood oath: "I swear never to reveal the source of my magic or . . . perform any illusion to a nonmagician without first practicing the effect until the illusion is perfect; otherwise I will lose all that I have gained. I swear not only to practice illusion, but to live within it, to seem but not to be, for only in this way can we fully partake in the magical world."

Henry promises, and a few weeks later during an impromptu magic show again in Room 702, makes Hannah disappear. The problem is, despite all he tries, he can't get her to come back.

Hannah's disappearance and Henry's life-long search for her become the subject of a peripatetic narrative told by members of Jeremiah Mosgrove's Chinese Circus, where Henry Walker washes up in the 1950s. We learn that after Hannah's disappearance Henry took up with the Barnum-esque Tom Hailey, who convinced him to take melanin pills and sit in front of a light box to make himself appear black. After all, Hailey says, "There's a glut of Caucasian prestidigitation right now." Now known as Bakari (Swahili for One Who Will Succeed), Henry becomes a celebrity as a Negro magician until Hailey dies, the pills run out, and he is white again. After a fantastic stint in World War II in which Henry's magic is improbably credited with a crucial mission, and one extraordinary performance during which, appearing under his own name, he brings his dead assistant and lover back to life only to lose her again, he re-applies black face and goes out into the world performing as two men: one skilled and white, one bumbling and black. In this schizophrenic state, Henry tracks down and does battle with Mr. Sebastian, but can anyone really beat the Devil?

If it all seems dreamy and unbelievable, it's supposed to. Wallace's structure is its own parlor trick. Did Henry really make Hannah disappear? Was she abducted? Was she given up by her father, and is she now living a respectable life with Mr. Sebastian? The revolving narration makes each fragment of Henry's story true for the one who tells it, yet when truth itself remains a perpetual illusion, a book can teeter on the verge of sophistry. All becomes suggestion and misdirection, never allowing exploration of the larger themes of race and the evils of hypocritical respectability at which it hints. Instead of giving us so many characters freighted with mystery and seeming meaning, such as Jenny the Ossified Girl, Wallace might have let himself go deeper into the description that Jeremiah Mosgrove, the circus proprietor, gives of Henry as "an American of the highest order: a self-made freak."

The questions remain: Why are Negro magicians so rare? What is the cost of changing skins? Why does the Devil make pacts with the most mundane people? Without answers, we are left with a shadowy Henry whose personality and sense of purpose too easily vanish in a puff of smoke. But maybe that, too, is the point. Mr. Sebastian tells Henry that to make real magic "you have to find an audience who think they understand what's happening. . . . You will seek to present an effect so clever and skillful that the audience won't believe their eyes, and can't think of the explanation, but feel in their hearts there is one. But there won't be; even you won't be able to explain it. The sense of universal bafflement is part of the

entertainment." If Mr. Sebastian is to be believed, there is certainly magic here.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Daniel Wallace is best known for Big Fish, a clever tale about a son's search for the man behind his father. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician uses some of the same fictional ruses but tackles the far more troublesome issues of race and hypocrisy. A few reviewers found fault with an extremely convoluted plot and some extremely unreliable narrators. But most praised Wallace's unique characters and unpredictable plot twists. "In the end," concludes the Portland Oregonian, "we learn that nothing is as it appears to be, which is what this fine novel is really all about."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

captivating, well crafted, frustrating
I've given this book four stars because it is beautifully written and creatively told through a series of narrators who each bring his/her own perspective on the truths about the life of the main character, Henry Wallace, the "negro" magician. The reader is drawn in from the get go and follows a path of anticipation that the next page will lead to something even more astounding than the one before. The author delivers.

I did genuinely enjoy the experience of reading this book in part because
the reader is advised early on not to believe everything that the narrators relate. Until the end though one is not sure where the truth lies. In that sense this period piece about a man's mostly tragic journey through life becomes a mystery story within itself. The theme of reality vs. illusion plays out with the main character's magical skills of illusion paralleling the manner in which the story is told. Kind of clever, really.

I did have two frustrations upon completing the book. One is that since our protagonist is such a long suffering victim of one loss after another, I found myself wondering at the end what the point of it all was. He wasn't a bad person that somehow deserved to suffer these losses. So what's the lesson here? Sure, bad things happen to good people and there is usually no good explanation for that; but every opportunity for something meaningfully good or redemptive that could happen to our lead character is snatched away like an unassuming butterfly caught in a net.

My ultimate frustration, however, occurs when the truth is revealed late in the book but not to the two characters who could benefit most from it. They live and die with their memories both real and illusory as the truth never arrives at their doors in time to save or heal them. To me that was the tragedy of the story and the disappointment as to how it ends. I guess I like my endings a bit more tidily wrapped than this one is. Nonetheless, a compellingly strong read.

Imaginative modern fable
Daniel Wallace has struck gold again with "Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Musician." The story of Henry Walker, once one of the world's greatest musicians through a deal with the devil--or so we are told--is a magical tale that shifts in time, place and storyteller. Whose truth should we believe? Wallace draws vivid characters and places that linger in the mind's eye of the reader. It is no accident that Big Fish made a wonderful film and this one has the same cinematic scope of the imagination. This is not the book for those who need a direct, linear narrative, but for those with imagination willing to go with the flow, this is a magical story that questions the nature of family, of love, of friendship, of truth. Enjoy!

Let the Show Begin
Whoever stated that this should be a movie gets my vote. This is an entirely entertaining story with those twists that keep the reader guessing. The fantasy and magic and possibilities of fate meet in an intersection of the real and the surreal. Magic offers people possibilities - possibilities that are not available in the darkness and inhumanity of the lives of many. I found this to be a page turner with some passages that were absolutely riviting. Not only entertaining, but the underlying messages of love, devotion, and the treatment of people all swirl together in a dark mist that is more than meets the eye.