What is a magician without an audience? The title character of Charles G. Finney's 1968 novella The Magician Out of Manchuria does not want to find out. The world has come under the sway of a new order, hungry politics that are at odds with the magician's "dramatic glamourie and adroit chicanery," and the people have become enslaved by the incomprehensible quasi-religion of progress. "Wartorn towns are inimical to make-believe, boiling, as it were, with slogans and ideologies," he laments.

Finney is known primarily for his classic novella The Circus of Dr. Lao, in which an extraordinary and unpredictable circus mysteriously alights upon a sleepy Arizona town during the dull days of the Depression. The Magician Out of Manchuria was originally published in 1968 by Pyramid Books in the same volume as a reprint of his 1937 novella The Unholy City, a truly weird and inaccessible story that, whatever its merits, may be responsible for Magician's obscurity. It was Finney's last published piece of fiction, reprinted only once, as a standalone volume published by Donald M. Grant in 1989. (Though somewhat hard to come by these days, copies can be located through BookFinder.)

As the story begins, the eponymous magician and his chela (apprentice) rescue and revive the drowned Lustful Queen of La. When she demands to know who he is, the magician speaks these words through the mouth of his chela:

"He is a simple magician out of Manchuria, coming south to find peaceful lands and prosperous villages where he may amuse the people with his arts. Along with his mastery of magic, he is able to read minds, tell time without consulting clocks, and find lost money. He asks no great payment for his entertainment, but he has always held that avariciousness is a sin. The mysterious Koot Hoomi Lal Singh has commented favorably upon the subtlety of his mind. The only thing he hates is politics, and it is because of the new politics in Manchuria that he has left there forever."

The Queen has also been dislocated by the new order -- she was murdered by the opportunistic Treasurer-Usurper of La, Khan Ali Bok -- though she is hardly a typical damsel in distress. Their adventures take them uncertainly towards reclaiming the throne of La.

Although it brims with the supernatural, Finney's book resonates in the real world. The story is rooted in China's modernization policies of 1958-1960, called the Great Leap Forward. (Readers bored by history can take heart in the fact that Finney's characters are too.) At first, the magician is content merely to survive, but the revivification of the Queen awakens his desires, and soon they embark on their small-scale revolt against the new order.

The story also has a thematic link to American history. Finney lived through the Great Depression and, according to Edward Hoagland's introduction to the 1983 Vintage reprint of The Circus of Dr. Lao, he "had been a 'Truman-type' of Democrat who voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt all four times." This is more than a biographical curiosity. The Circus of Doctor Lao and The Unholy City mention the Great Depression explicitly and criticize, respectively, its mundanity and tendency towards strife (this differs from many simplified histories of the period, which emphasize national unity in the face of adversity). Magician echoes these warnings, drawing a connection between America in the 1930s and China at the end of the 1950s. The magician himself notes "the perpetual coincidences of history, the curious patterns which seem to delight in repeating themselves."

Finney's view of progress culminates in a vast, repressive machine, an irrational, bureaucratic, urban society that tramples everything it can't assimilate. But he can't easily be accused of being reactionary or nostalgic. The magician is a rogue, and the Lustful Queen of La is petulant and catty. Gin Seng, another emblem of the old ways, is a languishing idiot, pampered by a blundering retinue. The proletariat is superstitious, vengeful, and fickle. It is a harsh ambiguity that Finney draws well: the new way of life kills magic and wonder, but the old way is full of discord and stupidity.

The magic itself is sometimes subtle, sometimes violent. In the case of the ship The Flower of the Lotus, the magic is among the most brilliant in fantastic literature. The ship's first transformation is presaged by the magician in a dream:

He dreamed that The Flower of the Lotus had multi-paired legs, as does the arachnid, and also had a voice, somewhat bell-like. She could walk upon the dry ground as well as sludge herself torpidly through the canal, and she could speak as she walked. In his dream he clambered off her onto the land, her great eye mild as a hound's, her splay feet sinking thickly into the mud. Her rudder left a trail behind, as does the tail of a crocodile when that saurian essays land travel, and her sail drooped as dismally as the wings of a vulture if that scavenger were to allow them to drag as it walked along. Her wooden sides creaked drearily.

In terms of inventiveness and detail this perhaps does not rate higher than Edgar Rice Burroughs; in terms of tone, however, this and other, longer scenes display a surrealism on the level of Stepan Chapman or Italo Calvino.

Stylistically, the book is extremely strange. Speech is stiff and formal. Yet it is a mistake to think the author was not aware of this. For example, in the face of a rapidly approaching storm, the magician and the chela launch into digressive monologues in a vacuum of action. The storm waits patiently, then speaks also, in its way. In fact, humor is evident everywhere -- in an impish delight in the huffy sexuality of the Lustful Queen of La, in the playful manipulations of the magician, and in the adolescent anxieties and frustrations of the chela.

The supporting characters are caricatures, but the magician and the Queen undergo growth and change. (Often literally: he, being descended on his maternal side from a snake, occasionally molts, and she, after being reincarnated, is given beauty she lacked in her former life.) What the magician gains in loyalty and honor throughout the story, the Queen loses in coarseness. While they don't become endearing, the main characters become three-dimensional as their maturing attitudes harmonize with their physical transformations.

This is a fine book for those who are fed up with mimetic or romantic fiction that panders to the reader, and who are prepared instead to be shocked and enchanted. A magician still needs an audience, and readers these days need some magic.

Mike Simanoff lives and works in New York City. You can find out more about him at his website.