If they are new to you, you are either aged nine, or a Martian. Brown offers a good deal of dusty stuff from the self-development shelves
I have to agree with most of what Mantel says in her review.
Derren Brown's book is simply a load of mildly interesting tidbits snatched from popular science books. His writing, although improved from Pure Effect is weak and immature.
Those of you who are old enough to remember when word processing first became popular will remember receiving documents written using 10 different fonts and covered in clipart. Later when the internet became more popular people started to put up web pages that continually flashed and blinked with hundreds of animated gifs. Derren Brown does the same thing with words.
Apart from the writing style itself, the content reads like an something written by an excited A Level student. Mantel is correct, in that what Derren Brown covers in his book is nothing new. As a writer, her nose is probably put out a bit that Derren's book is being pushed hard over Crimbo.
My problem with the book is this.
Derren Brown is a talented entertainer. He has done more for magic and mentalism in the UK than any other modern performer. Before Derren Brown, magic in the UK was a joke. The public image of a magician was someone in a glittery waistcoat and top hat or a man in a flowing blouse performing to a soundtrack. We've never been keen on magic in the UK. Paul Daniels, an original and creative performer, is a national joke, even though he had one of the longest running magic shows on television, featuring a different large illusion every week. Derren Brown's original performance style made magic/mentalism acceptable (somewhat) to a UK audience. The success of Derren Brown proves his intellegence and originality.
Why then are his books so poor? I won't go into Pure Effect but the root of the problem applies to that as much as Tricks of the Mind. That is, he is writing for an undemanding audience. His latest work is timed for the christmas market. His audience will largely be made up of people receiving the book as a present and read by the same people in the last half and hour of their christmas dinner's digestive journey.
Derren Brown, his publisher, and booksellers all know that his book will be lapped up by undemanding christmas shoppers. The motivation to write a worthwhile book will be lacking. Magic books, especially in the field of mentalism, are the same. The authors understand that their readers are largely made up of people who have never performed on stage, hence the page after page on performance advice redundant to anyone who's given their act more that 10mins original thought or have even thought of having an act. Another thing Derren Brown's christmas offering and mentalism books have in common is the assumption that their readers have never read anything more demanding than a few pages of popular psychology. In fact, Derren Brown shows in Tricks of the Mind that he doesn't even think his readers have done this much.
Derren Brown is obviously an intellegent and original thinker. He must be aware that his writing is poor and is content banal. Tricks of the Mind is obviously then a christmas cash-in. The book talks about fakes and fakery but at the same time, Brown must be aware of the pretentiousness of his writing and content.
What would have been more interesting for me, although not such as christmas hit as Tricks of the Mind will probably turn out to be, would have been a straight biographical account of his career in magic and mentalism.
I just sell words, man. Editors sometimes call or email asking if it would be okay to change something as daft as A SINGLE WORD. I always say "of course you can. Do what you like with them. They're your property once I've invoiced for them." It beats ending up on the slush pile.
i must say, lets not get bogged down with trying to define what this book is and isn't...
