The Frequency of Magic

Book excerpt: Raphael is a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing...but somehow, miraculously, the novel seems to write itself. The Frequency of Magic traverses an array of lives connected to the village of Million Hills. There's the speculative imagination of Luke's travels through mythic landscapes pursued by his nemesis, the carnival figure of the Great Bandit. There's the psychological odysseys of the musician, a jazz saxophonist, and Ella, an actor, both long separated from Million Hills, working their ways across the USA and Europe. When the paths of these exiles cross, a love affair begins. Time in this richly ambitious novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. Above all, there is Raphael's belief that in the making of his fiction, however messy and disobedient its materials, art can both challenge the destructive passage of time and make us see reality afresh.