4 Stars
This short novel is primarily set in three time periods. During World War II, eight-year-old Ronnie Deane is evacuated from his council house in Bethnal Green and sent to Evergrene, a manor house in Oxfordshire. In 1959, Ronnie has become Pablo, a magician and illusionist, who, with the help of his assistant and fiancée Evie White, has become the star of a variety show in the pier theatre in Brighton. His friend Jack Robbins is the master of ceremonies. In 2009, 75-year-old Evie, Jack’s widow of one year, looks back to the events of 1959.
Mystery pervades the book. Why did Evie end her engagement to Ronnie and marry Jack: “One day that September, after the show had finished and after the police had said she was free to leave Brighton, she . . . went to the end of the pier, took off the [engagement] ring and threw it in the sea”? What happened to Ronnie who, after the summer of 1959, “never appeared again at all”? Did Evie every really know Ronnie? Did Jack? And there’s also the question of whether Evie regrets her choice.
The title refers to a phrase often used when offering something or announcing someone on stage; it is inevitably stated in an upbeat tone suggesting happiness. Of course, the happiness is often an illusion. Evie, for instance, is taught by her mother: “’And you must keep smiling, never forget your smile.’” And she remembers that lesson, keeping an “indomitable and gleaming smile” so that it becomes a part of her: “The last thing she would put on was her smile, though did she really need to? Wasn’t it just a part of her, like her flashing blue eyes?” A cake celebrating a performer’s 50 years on stage has “the two famous masks, but not in this case of comedy and tragedy – both masks must be smiling.”
This book reminded me of lines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts (II,vii, 139-142). The book examines how people assume different identities throughout life. Of course, there are the stage names so Ronnie Deane becomes Pablo and then The Great Pablo; Evie White becomes Eve; and Jack Robbins becomes Jack Robinson and then Terry Treadwell. Different roles are assumed: Jack begins life as a “song-and-dance man” but then becomes a film star and a Shakespearean actor. Evie, the glamorous magician’s assistant, morphs into a serious businesswoman who “found the all-important key in the small of [Jack’s] back and learnt how, carefully, lovingly, to turn it, when all the [other women] were too busy just wrapping their legs around him.” Even as a child, Ronnie becomes two different people: he goes from being the son of a charwoman and a seaman to being the surrogate child of a couple living in a country manor, a transformation so complete that he is alienated from his mother. When he performs his first magic, “He himself had become a different person.”
The point seems to be that our lives are little more than “a flickering summer concoction at the end of a pier.” Who is the real person behind the roles we adopt? For example, Evie imagines her prospective mother-in-law asking, “And who’s she, anyway, when she’s at home, the one with all the sequins and feathers and precious little else, looking like she’ll never stop smiling?” We act, we give our audience what they want, a lesson Ronnie teaches Evie: “’You have to give the public what they want and expect” while diverting their attention from what you don’t want them to see. In her skimpy costume, Evie’s job as assistant is to divert the audience’s attention from Ronnie. On the anniversary of Jack’s death, Evie has a good cry and then gets ready to have dinner with a friend: “she’d got up again, not a sobbing child but a seventy-five-year-old woman, and prepared herself slowly . . . She’d put on her face. The cream blouse, the straight black skirt, the little black jacket, the pearls.” One persona disappears and another emerges. Evie thinks, “The batty old woman in the garden and the bawling infant had turned into a princess sitting in a Mayfair restaurant, and now she was going to have to play her part.” At the end, she wonders who would dare say “She couldn’t act,” because she feels “she had performed her best.”
This novel seems deceptively simple and straight-forward but it has complexity, leaving the reader thinking about the illusive nature of identities and life itself. Illusions are not found only on the stage. But I do not think that it’s an illusion that the author has created some magic in this finely crafted novel.
Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. The book will be released on September 22.
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