Edward Eager, Half Magic

throat singing & measured complexity

“‘We could make it paper money,’ suggested Katharine.”

A writer introduces magic into a book with the same feeling of jittery dread — the same sudden loathing for the life-circumstances that have brought him to this point — as a gambler pushing his entire life savings onto Red at the Roulette table. The possible gains are enormous (they don’t turn works of domestic realism into theme parks, for God’s sakes), but the probabilities are stacked in favor of disaster.  

Make the magic too powerful and it could (like the introduction of near-universal cell service) instantly disable a thousand necessary plot devices. Make the magic too subtle — too well-embedded within an intricate system of wizards and spells and portals — and all that’s good in your book may disappear behind a scaffolding of tedious world-building. By the second or third chapter of a novel, a reader’s disbelief-suspension machinery is already in full use. Magic — with its demand for a rewriting of a fictional universe’s rules — tugs at the sleeve of an adult who is otherwise absorbed.

Successful uses of magic in fiction, then, deserve celebration. They ought to be studied; there should be oral histories involving all who were present. The model specimen is Edward Eager’s Half Magic. Eager wrote the book in the ’50’s, set it in the ’20’s, and has been making other fantasy writers look blundering for going on seventy years.

Half Magic tells the story of four bored-stiff children who, one summer morning, stumble upon what seems at first to be a nickel poking out of a crack in the sidewalk. The nickel turns out to be a magic talisman (its origins remain blissfully unexplored) with a quirk: it grants precisely half of its bearer’s every wish. So: wish, in a desperate moment at the office, to be home and end up beside the highway at a point precisely mid-commute. Wish for a new car and end up with a gleaming chassis. Half the fun of the book — more than half the fun — is watching the kids sort out the necessary mechanics:

“’I wish that the four of us, and Carrie the cat, may travel in the direction of home, only twice as far.’” 

"I wish," said Katharine, "that we may go back twice as far as to the days of King Arthur…”

Eager has calibrated the complexity of his magic perfectly. Not so simple as to run aground in the space of a Wikipedia summary (see: Liar Liar); not so complicated as to demand Talmudic exegesis (see: His Dark Materials). Eager’s talisman is just tricky enough to lure the child reader into a series of delicious quandaries. How should you phrase your wish if what you want is a talking cat? What if what you want is a mother who wholly believes in the talisman’s powers?

And the adult reader, for whom fractions may not be quite so novel, is busy chewing on such ineffables as: when a character is only half-present (shimmering ghost-like on a midday street) where does the non-present half of her go?

Every children’s author is, to a greater or lesser extent, a duettist. The violin plays for the children (the silly names, the cliffhangers); the cello plays for the adults (the agile prose, the wholesome morals). Occasionally an author will experiment with solo performance — think of Super Diaper Baby, with its gleeful surrender to juvenile anarchy — but most books exist in careful, and often uneasy, balance. 

Half Magic does something harder, and smarter.  

A few chapters in, when the coin’s idiosyncrasies are just becoming clear, the kids convene a meeting. They’re going to settle on some ground rules — how to share the coin; how to be sure that their adventures are fun for all of them (no meetings with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, they tell the bookish middle daughter, Katharine).

Katharine says, “I can't decide between wishing we could all fly like birds and wishing we had all the money in the world."

Jane, the eldest and bossiest, replies: 

“Those aren't any good… People always wish those in stories, and it never works out at all! They either fly too near the sun and get burned, or end up crushed under all the money!"

“We could make it paper money,” suggested Katharine.

I love this moment, first for the badminton rhythm of the exchange (it’s no surprise, reading it, that Eager worked as a lyricist). And also for its lightly-worn knowingness about the way these stories go (with its implicit assurance that the author knows better than to follow in their tracks). 

But mostly I love it for the deftness with which it speaks to both an adult and a child’s sensibilities. Jane’s warnings — that they’d be burned by the sun or crushed beneath a heap of money — read at first as figurative. We know about Icarus, we know about King Midas. These wishes do, in stories and in life, tend to end poorly.

But Katharine’s reply — that they might forestall their doom by wishing for paper money — functions as a kind of double punch-line: she’s misunderstanding Jane’s warning by taking it literally; and she’s also understanding Jane’s warning better than we did. To the listening child Katharine’s response is perfectly sensible, even ingenious. (The kids spend the next few minutes discussing “how many million dollars in large bills it would take to crush a person to death.”) In getting the joke, the adult realizes that it need not be read as a joke at all.  

This isn’t Eager performing a conventional duet; this is no pseudo-lascivious wink seeking vainly to amuse the adult suffering through Despicable Me 3 for the thousandth time. This is Eager engaged in something like Mongolian throat singing — two distinct but harmonious notes emerging from the same mouth at the same time. This is Eager being — as he is throughout the book — twice as good, twice as thoughtful, twice as smart, as he could probably have gotten away with being. Which is, if your goal is literary immortality, exactly good enough.