Dr Peter Lamont's "first book for a popular readership", as his publisher classifies it, is an entertaining feat of literary legerdemain, conjuring centuries of oriental mystery from performances that in actuality have never existed.
The Indian rope trick, he demonstrates, has always been a con-trick, concocted from materials as insubstantial as a cloud of incense.
Lamont is a research fellow at Edinburgh University who specialises in the history, theory and performance of magic. A former president of the Edinburgh Magic Circle , he has lectured on the history of magic and performed worldwide, even unto Hollywood's Magic Castle, whatever that is. Now he has proved well able to conduct readers on a Magical History Tour, in 70,000 or possibly more nicely chosen words.
I enjoyed reading them, though they eventually enlightened my understanding of the magic of the East little more than Tommy Cooper's fez. This is a work of Edinburgh's prestidigitational scholarship beyond the fringe. If you feel that your brain deserves a midwinter holiday, here is a good opportunity for one.
The book's elegant cover illustration, by Mike Wilks, depicts the Indian rope trick as traditionally imagined. An Indian magician with a dark, mesmeric gaze and a turban bearing a ruby like a third eye gestures with his right hand towards a turbaned, bare-legged boy climbing a vertical rope with no top in sight.
In the background, a small, naked, red devil sits on the lid of a basket from which an emergent arm looks like an attempt to escape. In the foreground, two monkeys suggest no immediate attempt to do anything, but they, too, should try to get away. The magician holds, partly concealed in his left hand, a wicked-looking knife. Evidently, magic can be dangerous.
Inside, the text begins, in the modern style, with five pages of acknowledgements - sycophancy under a thin disguise of facetiousness. Here's an example of his approach. When he told an agent about his rope-trick proposal "she sounded so excited I knew it could work. I later discovered she always sounds excited, but that's why she's a wee gem".
He was sustained further, when doing research in India , by his "pal, Geoff, who was living his own weird story at the time"; "by Sham, who does the worst Scottish accent since Mel Gibson," and by Arun, "who cheats at Karum, but is otherwise an all-round good guy." "And when I got back, Tim Whiting demonstrated admirable taste by becoming my editor . . ." These characteristic sallies are quoted to give some idea of the light-hearted way in which the author sets about his labours.
He proceeds with a seven-page "Author's Note (For the Discerning Reader Only)", which begins: "Few people will read this . . . so the fact that you are reading this makes you special."
I recommend turning at once to the prologue. Here, in only three pages composed on Kovalam Beach, South India, in 1997, Lamont gets down to business. "According to legend," he writes, "a magician throws one end of a rope into the air. It rises into the sky until the rope is completely vertical. A boy then climbs up the rope until he gets to the top. There, in broad daylight and surrounded by the audience, the boy disappears. The legend became known as the Indian rope trick, and many came to believe it was real."
It wasn't. It couldn't be, as Lamont shows in detail, tracing the history of Indian juggling and bogus mysticism, from the days of Marco Polo to the present. He discusses unsuccessful attempts to bamboozle Victorian sceptics, the falsity of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society and the disillusioning findings of the Society for Psychical Research.
He cites Harry Kellar, "America's most popular magician" at the end of the 19th century, who visited India and, in 1886, published a book about the place. Of the rope trick, he commented that writers who claimed to have seen "a ball of twine" thrown in the air "to form a sort of Jack-in-the- beanstalk up which the juggler climbed out of sight . . . must have had their brains steeped in hasheesh".
Lamont attributes the continuation of public credence to one John E. Wilkie, who wrote a piece in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1890 describing a performance of the Indian rope trick witnessed by two graduates of Yale. The article was reprinted internationally and believed even after the Tribune admitted it was a hoax.
Though Lamont is an eloquent debunker and his book provides many debunking illustrations, it seems he was disappointed in 1997 when "the largest magic convention in India" showed him that the rope trick was a fraud. In his epilogue, there is a wistful seriousness about his observation that a legendary illusion is "more interesting and invariably more attractive than reality . . . we have always needed legends, and they have always provided that escape route: cords have always risen into the air, providing access to the heavens; the dead have always been resurrected, symbolising the survival of the human spirit".