On The Nature of Magic by Marian Womack
I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Titan
Published - Out Now
Price - £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook
This book while can be read standalone follows on from the great https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2020/2/22/the-golden-key-by-marian-womack
Spanning London’s occult seances to the Parisian catacombs, two women claim to have seen Marie Antoinette's ghost in the garden of Versailles in this Gothic supernatural mystery where magic and science collide.
1902.
Helena Walton-Cisneros, known for finding answers to the impossible, has started her own detective agency. She takes on two new uncanny cases, both located in Paris – which itself is too much of a coincidence to ignore. In the first case, two English women claim to have seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. The second case is the murder of a young woman working at the mysterious Méliès Star Films studio outside Paris.
As Helena and her colleague Eliza investigate, they hear whispers of vanishings at Méliès Star Films, strange lights, spies, actors flying without ropes and connections to the occult.
What is George Méliès practising at his secretive film studio? And is it connected to the haunting in Versailles? Helena and Eliza will only find the answers if they accept the natural world is darker, stranger than they could ever have imagined…
Sometimes fantasy when set in our work is now very much in our face. You know it’s all real. But when looking at the supernatural and thinking of it more as the uncanny then it’s about things just not feeling quite right. Our world but not quite as you know it. When reading Marian Womack’s engrossing fantasy tale On The Nature of Magic I was delighted that this is a story that plays with reality in lots of unusual ways.
It’s 1902 and Great Britain is still getting over the end of the Victorian age and worries what is to come. Spiritualism continues to be popular; still threaten as both science and scam. Elsewhere the world is seeing new technology spreading from telephones to now the moving picture. It’s a world in flux Helena Walton-Cisneros and her friend Eliza is setting up a unique detective agency that is designed to help women get solutions to problems that in current society many men will ignore or even make fun of. Their first case are two academics who believe they have travelled in time while visiting Versailles. To establish the truth Helena and Eliza investigate in both London and Paris and uncover new technology, magic and once again a strange magic sect known as The Golden Dawn who seek power.
A word used early on in the book really sums up the effect Womack creates in this tale - liminal. This is a tale less about very obvious black and white occult detective adventures and more an unsettling uncanny occult thriller where there may be a simple explanation but we constantly feel something else just on the periphery.
Everything in the story feels liminal. Helena and Eliza we first meet in the tale watch a spiritualist who is clearly using stage tricks and yet Helena can’t work it out completely. Unnerving the far more rational Eliza. Helen and Eliza are detectives and also not yet fully established while Helena is creating her own theory of detection and yet continuing to explore her potential psychic abilities like fortune telling. Even the first case is not the standard murder or theft but one of the most unusual timeslip tales of actual history the Moberley-Jourdain incident when two Oxford academics claim they walked Versailles grounds and witnessed the past including Marie-Antoinette - how do you go about exploring that? It’s a great hook.
What the story then does is play with the history of the period and make unusual links. We get the introduction of George’s Melies the famous film director playing with this new technology creating films that have unusual effects that audiences witness for the first time. Womack cleverly again makes the liminal link of reality with the strangeness of the cinema where we can believe in magic and demons. A really smart idea and further links to other inventions start to create explanations for why things are so strange. It’s a story gently but smartly creating its own secret history of the early twentieth century.
Into this and linking to The Golden Key’s plot is the mysterious cult of The Golden Dawn. That has factions in London and Paris all seeking power. Be it in showy shaman presentations acting as scientists or stylish clubs with furniture of bone and coffins. They are decadent using drugs and rituals and any other historical items they can find. They have a sense of menace throughout as women disappear and our detectives get trailed but at the same time Womack links these events to both the suppression of women (men only can have psychic powers in the eyes of the patriarchal societies these are) but also colonisation - it’s again the Empires and France and the UK seeking a new way to control and take centre stage and not ashamed to steal other cultural ideas and beliefs to be converted to their own ends. The story has a sense of menace and while we do get some resolutions for this current problem the overwhelming sense is that Helen and Eliza will be facing more danger soon.
I really found On The Nature of Magic to be a deliciously strange occult thriller. Offering mysteries to be solved, a sense of the strange just out of our sight and a delicious alternate history idea that feels strangely plausible too all told in Womack’s hallmark poetical style. Highly recommended!
