SOURCE: A review of The Last Magician, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 209–10.

In the following review, Willbands offers a positive assessment of The Last Magician.

Janette Turner Hospital's seventh work of fiction [The Last Magician] is set in Brisbane, at the edge of the Queensland rain forest, in Sydney, and briefly in New York. It is a very contemporary pondering of the nature of reality, time, disorder, and power, with a repeated reference to chaos theory and the possibility of falling through cracks in to a parallel universe, a dark reality of underworld horror.

The novel concerns two generations, with Cat, Catherine, Charlie, and Robbie in the first, and Robbie's son Gabriel and his girlfriend, the narrator Lucy, in the second. The first generation grows up in Brisbane, attending school, playing “chicken” on railroad tracks, swimming nude in a rain-forest waterfall pool. Cat, part heroine...