SOURCE: “Circles of Hell,” in Macleans, October 5, 1992, p. 66.

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

When Janette Turner Hospital described her new novel to an audience of booksellers in Toronto in July, she linked her dense, lush writing style to the rain forest in Queensland, Australia, where she grew up. “The rain forest is nature at its most baroque,” said the internationally acclaimed writer, 50, now based in Kingston, Ont. “My prose reflects that.” As in much of her earlier work, Hospital's fifth and most ambitious novel, The Last Magician, possesses a narrative as twisting and tangled as jungle undergrowth. Part mystery, part philosophical exploration, it tells an intricate tale of sexual obsession, corruption and murder. But its essence is an emotionally charged meditation on loss and absence, on time and memory, on the head's ability to deny what the heart knows. Lucy...