The idea that literature is a cousin of sorcery or sleight of hand goes at least as far back as Ovid’s poem sequence Metamorphoses, though its ubiquity in modern times can probably be credited to Shakespeare’s (highly Ovidian) final play The Tempest, in which the concept of “rough magic” is used to encompass both spells and stagecraft. According to this strain of thought, language is in the business of creation and mutation, and the writer is a sort of master-mage, a conjuror of new life who reads minds and travels through time while performing lightning-quick transformations with the help of metaphor.
The latest novels by Graham Swift and Daniel Kehlmann, both virtuoso writers in their very different ways, take this conceit about as far as it will go – or further. Here We Are concerns a trio of illusionists in Brighton in 1959, the last summer of good old-fashioned entertainment, in Swift’s view. Kehlmann’s Tyll, which has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, follows a notorious, possibly demonic trickster around Bavaria and Westphalia during the Thirty Years War (1618-48).
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