plous.qxd
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The eras and some of the circumstances are different, but the spirit of the resemblance is there. The hero of World of Wonders, Paul Dempster, is born in the tiny southern Ontario village of Deptford in 1910, to the town’s Baptist preacher and his madwoman wife. On August 30, 1918, Paul’s life is changed forever when, in defiance of his father’s orders, he sneaks into the village fair to see the carnival sideshow, becomes fascinated with the performance of the magician Willard the Wizard, only to be sodomized and kidnapped by Willard, a junkie who teaches Paul his entire repertoire of magic before his addiction finally debilitates and kills him. Enslaved to the traveling carnival for the next seven years, Paul never sees his family again. Through decades of wandering about Europe without a passport and surviving as a street performer, carnival magician, stage double, and skilled watchmaker, he emerges at last to become an international sensation who is selected by the BBC to star in a televised homage to the great 19th-century French illusionist Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin.
Glab’s true story of Frosch/Darke converges particularly well with Davies’s fictional story of Dempster/
