Books The Houdini girl By Martyn Bedford. To fall in love is to engineer into existence the dream of being in love. In a novel of failed love, the reader is invited, in the opening pages, to adore the untenable facade, and to witness its woeful demolition, often while beside the abandoned lover, who writhes and weeps and rages as he watches his dream tumble apart to its extinction. Martyn Bedford's well-executed second novel.
Performance is the key.
Bedford is an agile performer, fluent in relating what happened and how. Unfortunately, with novels, the performance of style, or construction or voice, cannot be the key. It is a fairly simple story. Red falls for Rosa, a caustic but appealing Irish woman whose sexual facility and general good humor more than compensate for her reticence about her past. Red starts asking questions, and the arduous, 300-page search for the facts of Rosa's life begins.