Assume, while you read, that the history is good history. Moore’s suggestion for the secret of the Templars may not be the truth (nothing in this book is true, not in the way you’re thinking, even if it happened) but it fits with the facts (giving us another severed head, along with Northampton’s Templar church), just as Frances Tresham’s poor head gives us his history along with his life. The stories are boxes that contain mysteries—most of which are unresolved, while all solutions we are given open the door to larger problems and difficulties. Or to put it another way, Voice of the Fire is truth, of a kind, even if its truths are fictional and historical and magical, and so the explanations one gets are always partial and unsatisfactory, the stories, as with the stories of our lives, are unexplained and incomplete.

It is a pleasure to read, and to reread. Start where you like: the beginning and the end are both good places, but a circle begins anywhere, and so does a bonfire.

Do not trust the tales, or the town, or even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the fire.

This was my introduction to the 2003 edition of Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire. It was the first thing I wrote after a bout of meningitis, and I remember how scared I was to put words to paper again.

Art and Artifice by Jim Steinmeyer

Over a decade ago, I found myself invited to a “retreat,” at which several great minds in their respective fields—futurologists, cyberneticists, musicians and suchlike—and, inexplicably, me were gathered together to discuss the future, imagine the way things would change in the years ahead. We got some stuff right and lots of things wrong. One of the other people there was Jules Fisher, who really is one of the top people in his field, that of theatrical lighting, and a former magician, and we wound up talking about magic and theater. Some months later, out of the blue, he sent me a copy of Art and Artifice, in its original limited-print-run form, and I am still grateful.^*

There is a magic to illusion. It’s the magic you get sitting in the audience watching the girl (or the donkey) vanish or fly, from watching someone walk through a wall or produce a hatful of coins from the air. Your disbelief is suspended, the natural order of things is changed, the world is, for a moment, reimagined. And that thrill is too easily punctured by explanation—someone who has just seen, and been awed by, a miracle will feel cheated and cheapened by seeing it revealed as a trick, part optical illusion, part sliding panel, part bald-faced lie. It’s why magicians guard their secrets, get huffy and upset when anyone reveals anything; they don’t want it to take the magic away.

But there is another magic, equally as valid, and it’s the awe of understanding how something was done. The sheer giddy delight at mechanics, at the way that human intellect and imagination can be employed to dupe or trick or befuddle an audience, the intersection of science and showmanship and the power of the imagination. The way that a cliché like “They do it with mirrors” barely begins to cover what someone like Charles Morritt actually did. It’s the point where “How it was done” becomes, not the secret of magic, but part of a different language entirely. And nobody describes that ingenuity, the delight of putting it together combined with the aesthetics of invention, better than Jim Steinmeyer.