Book review: Babayaga, by Toby Barlow

Sadly, Gabriel Garcia Marquez may be dead, but the magical realism he invented still morphs; transforming and transmuting itself in new permutations that even Marquez might have regarded as abstruse or esoteric.

One such variation is Toby Barlow's second novel, set in Paris at the end of the 1950s, and prosaically matter of fact until a sexy, ageless witch muses about where to impale her lover's skull. That incident is merely a warm-up. Soon after, Barlow includes witches' songs into the narrative, then invites the reader to imagine a police inspector turned into a flea, the "elliptical wafts" which lift that flea above Notre Dame, the "kerosene raw" taste of blood sucked from a witch's scalp, and an enchanted rat drunk on vodka.

Barlow's central character, an American expatriate working in advertising but moonlighting for the CIA, seems entirely mundane by comparison with the bit players. Even he, though, sporadically rises to the occasion, as when he kisses his own witch lover "like a man who wanted to swallow life".

Prosaic things still happen to ordinary people in Barlow's novel, but mystery and fantasy are extravagantly mixed into the narrative at the same time. Corpses accumulate along the way, but the good and decent folk fend off lethal attacks, recover from blows on the head, and manage to tuck up with those they love. Even if it is hard to credit a policeman as a flea, a reader might still be beguiled by the flea's especially complicated reaction to discovering that his wife has taken an afternoon lover.

One of Barlow's inventions frets that fables no longer possess enough sting for their lessons to stick – but his do. Barlow conjures up a sense of delicious, sustained wonder about the world and all its works. Few other novels puzzle about the importance of not dreaming about whales because they are never there when you need them. Nor do other books includes a most engaging digression about the standing of stewardesses on aeroplanes, one which argues that they have walked "right out of a folk tale, a beautiful girl with a fool in a flying ship".

Although Babayaga relies on allusions to the Cold War, the feel of the story (if "feel" covers atmospherics, mood and pace) seems more reminiscent of Paris before or after the First World War. This is an opulent, indolent, mannered Paris, as self-absorbed and self-regarding as the city always is, but less battered and beleaguered than it actually was after the Second World War. There is an agreeable fin de siecle, Belle Epoque edge to the Paris which Barlow invents.

Barlow plays deftly with the city, relishing its rituals, wandering gleefully down its back alleys, sending his characters on strolls, out to dinner, or up staircases to assignations. He also observes those characters with a clinically close eye. An old lady is not allowed to nap without "sinking down into the bench like a fat, cooling scone on a baker's shelf". The physiognomy of a flea is minutely examined. The witches have exceptional powers, but not unlimited ones, and the act of casting spells wears them out. All in all, Barlow's is a quaint, bizarre but really rather charming cosmology.