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Magic Within by Manal Shakir: book review


Magic Within (2015) is set in Pakistan. It is primarily about two married couples: Shara and her husband Zain, and Adnan and his wife Reena. They have mutual friends but they do not know each other directly.

Shara and Reena don’t work and have a wide social network. They spend a lot of time with their women friends. Adnan and Zain work. Zain manages a medical equipment factory with his father, but he works late and sometimes doesn’t come home. Adnan is an accountant.

Two years into Shara and Zain’s marriage they were drifting apart. Zain was good looking and had past lovers and current admirers. He has a woman friend. Adnan and Reena are in a loveless marriage.

Shara dreams she is at the circus about to be shot out of a cannon. Over and over the dream appears. Adnan can’t sleep. He dreams he is at a circus. The recurring dreams are about a woman he is falling in love with. In their dreams they perform together.

The Mazhar’s House of Masti is a circus on the beach with music and magic, birds and animals, acrobats and aerobatics, tightropes and tricks, clowns, cannons and a circus master. It it is the place where allusion and reality, and fantasy and fact merge.

When Zain’s affair is discovered, Shara and Zain must make a decision about their relationship. When Adnan reveals to Reena that he is in love with a woman in his dreams, they too are faced with a decision. As the dreams become more frequent, the more Shara and Adnan have to separate fantasy from reality, but do they have the ability to do so?

The relationships are juxtaposed with the country’s turmoil: “it truly was an era of paranoia” due to high crime, drone attacks in the north, and sectarian violence. However this theme of Pakistan’s reality doesn’t reach its true potential and neither does the circus, although the circus does parallel the relationships to some extent. For example, as the relationships of the couple change, so does the imagery of the circus – initially vibrant, then becoming dilapidated. Is the circus in Shara and Adnan’s dreams a predictor of their lives in the future or are they messages to prevent their disintegrated marriages? The couples and their relationships are superficial and not developed enough to bring any suspense to their decisions. The novel is too dreamy and not substantial enough for me to enjoy the exploration of their relationships.

The magic within is actually in the design of the cover. The hardcover version of the book has a dust jacket (design above), but it also has a design on the hardcover - both back and front. 





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