Table of Contents
Phoenix Court Series
COULD IT BE MAGIC? | Paul Magrs
Introduction
COULD IT BE MAGIC?
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JEP
FOND OF A TREAT
About the Author
More by Paul Magrs
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
I sold my first novel and, together with a bunch of friends also in their mid-twenties, ran away to Edinburgh. In the summer of 1995 there was a lot going on. We arrived just as they were filming Trainspotting on Princes Street. It was the time when Cyber-cafes were opening up everywhere. We moved in during festival season, and the annual books jamboree was taking place in leafy Charlotte Square just a few blocks from where we were living. We were at the top of a warehouse, reachable only by umpteen flights of steps up a fire escape, high above the canyons and the restaurants of the New Town. We ran up and down the city all day and night. It was bliss.
That summer was all about dancing at CC Blooms till dawn, and sitting late at night in the Blue Moon café having Mexican food, or drinking lager and eating Loveheart sweets at Over the Rainbow, where they had a life-sized mannequin of Glinda the Good Witch in their window. Once, when my editor was visiting, we were drinking in there and Glinda’s head fell off spontaneously along with her tiara still attached and it bounced down the length of our table.
There are so many stories about Edinburgh in the mid-Nineties I could tell you. Some of them would make your hair curl.
The point is, I wrote a lot. Much of it was in the form of journals. I went to cafes and bars all across the city, writing and drawing all day long. I filled book after book in places like the City Café and Café Kudos. But mostly I was in the Blue Moon. It was the place that every evening began and ended: the magical Queer café that I fictionalised in my stories as The Scarlet Empress.
I started work on Could it be Magic? and it was a kind of sequel to both Marked for Life and Does it Show? Those two novels were first drafted in 1992 and 1991 respectively and they were linked by being set in the same place and time. I wanted to write a third book to connect and unify them, further developing the ideas and the stories I’d been working on. And so Could it be Magic? began with a party thrown for all the characters from those two previous books. It was a silly literary joke and a bookish knees-up, inviting all those characters to make cameos, updating us with what they’d all been up to. It set up the action for what was to come and it thrust into the spotlight the heroes of the current book.
I remember thinking a lot about magic and realism and how far magic can impinge upon a grittily realistic, sometimes hostile world. Could magic lead to salvation or just solipsistic madness? In this book I went on to push the surrealism as far as I could take it at that time. You’ll see where it goes when you get into this story. Some of the things I do here still feel pretty audacious to me, and that’s something I’m very glad about.
I’m not sure what readers knew what to make of it all. Perhaps the mix of elements was too rich and esoteric? Was I ahead of my time? Weren’t people ready for One Hundred Years of Solitude in a town just north of Darlington?
I was once accused of only writing Freakshow characters. Tattooed men, ancient lesbians, boys covered in leopard-skin spots, ballsy transvestites. Maybe twenty years on the world is more comfortable with a cast as mixed up as this? Maybe genre-mashing and all kinds of ambiguity are more welcome now than they were at the end of the last century? I’m not sure. I hope so.
Either way, Chatto and Windus and their paperback imprint, Vintage, had been publishing me since my first story came out in 1995. In quick succession they published Marked for Life, Does it Show?, my short story collection, Playing Out and then, in 1998, Could it be Magic? Pretty soon after that they dropped me. My editor left for the US and the incoming editor made it plain she had no interest in Queer Working Class Magical Realism. I was dumped and it felt absolutely terrible.
By then I had met the man, Jeremy Hoad, who was going to be my partner. I’d had two years in Edinburgh, whizzing around, having adventures, and a great deal had happened. I was in my late twenties and I had published four books. By 1998 I was down South. I had taken up a full time post as a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. I’d moved to Norwich and Jeremy moved south to be with me pretty soon afterwards. At twenty-seven I was teaching the MA course in Novel Writing begun by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson: the course that had produced Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro and a whole host of bookish luminaries. I was teaching with Andrew Motion, who was just about to be crowned Poet Laureate. It was a heady, hectic, over-busy, exhilarating and bizarre period in my life.
There are stories I could tell you about UEA and Norwich that would make your hair stand on end.
Anyhow, Could it be Magic? came out and I was teaching people who were older than me on a very prestigious postgraduate course. I had found my genre and completed a trilogy that had answered lots of the questions I had been formulating for myself during the 1990s: about Queerness and magic, storytelling and identity.
Big questions, it seemed to me. But at the time, despite some nice reviews, the world didn’t give all that much of a fuck, really. I was in a pushy, grabby, noisy, strange campus environment, working with all kinds of very creative
