SOURCE: “Rich and Strange,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring, 1993, p. 8.

In the following review, Schaumburger praises the intellectual rewards of The Last Magician but finds shortcomings in the novel's expansive range and underdeveloped characters.

The heroine of Janette Turner Hospital's novel Charades (1989) is told that she has a first-class “grab-bag mind,” full of arcane, unrelated, brain-teasing oddments of information. If you, too, delight in such intellectual quirkiness, you will applaud this Australian-born writer's latest effort, The Last Magician. Highly innovative and daring, this sensuous novel is bursting with images and ideas both rich and strange.

Most of its characters—or at least the seekers among them—seem to be walking almanacs of curious lore. They are obsessed with the case of a most significant person missing from their lives, who has probably been murdered. The detective elements in the plot do not appear by accident; Hospital is...