Power, Vanishing Acts and Silent Watchers in Janette Turner Hospital's The Last Magician

Abstract

In Janette Turner Hospital’s fifth novel The Last Magician this world-wandering daughter of Australian literature returns to the place she still calls “home”. The novel is set mainly in central Sydney, however, the narrative could well take place in any city of the developed new world, whether real or illusionary, and still anxious for self-definition. The narrative is grounded in the notion that a sense of the surreal will always remain in the mental landscape of any social and geographical space that refuses to admit the interaction of the marginalised, or alienates and denies the value of difference. Among other things, this paper argues that the novel declares an unwillingness to accept woman’s value as determined and measured by the already spoken rules and expectations of patriarchal discourse. Woman’s silence is wielded here as a weapon of resistance--an unconventional, anti-establishment form of power that recognises how language deceives and wishes to give the silences their say (120).