The Magicians: A Novel

You can find this review and many others at youngadultfantasy.comThe common description of The Magicians is "Harry Potter for adults." While this is intriguing and somewhat accurate, I think overall it's an unfair introduction. For one, Grossman began writing this book in the mid-90's, and he's said that, at the time, it wasn't Harry Potter but rather A Wizard of Earthsea that was "the elephant in the room." The point being that this book isn't a derivative work. The magical-education trope has been a part of fantasy since the old days, and The Magicians intentionally plays off of countless fantasy tropes and clichés, mostly from The Chronicles of Narnia. My elevator pitch would be "pessimistic Narnia."The Magicians tells the coming-of-age of Quentin Coldwater, a high school graduate from Brooklyn who finds himself reeled into Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Quentin has always had a secret obsession with a series of fantasy novels about four siblings who travel through a grandfather clock into a magical land called Fillory, where adventures abound. (The world in this book is a world where characters are aware of fantasy novels including Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc., and it plays into their own experiences.) His life in Brooklyn has always felt mundane and meaningless, and he goes into Brakebills looking for something more, something special.The story covers several years, including all of Quentin's magical education and some of his life afterwards. There is an epic scope to the world here, though the story remains solidly with Quentin and his personal struggles. The book starts at a gentle pace and seems to meander a little bit. The reason for that is, in the first half of the novel there are large gaps in time between chapters, so there's no chapter-to-chapter suspense, except the suspense built by having a huge, magical world with unlimited possibilities. Even then, each chapter tells one specific, stand-alone chapter (see how that works?) in Quentin's life that plays powerfully by itself. And then the second half of the book picks up the overall pace and delivers big-time.My only complaint is with the character building. I can't quite place my finger on why, but something about the supporting cast in this book just didn't quite come to life for me. Maybe we just don't know enough about them, or they're a little too similar to one another, or they're just filler roles (for the time being (sequel coming)). Whatever the case, they didn't come off the page as real people to me, though they were entertaining and interesting in scene.The best thing about Grossman is that he earned my trust as an author pretty much immediately, and wherever the story went, I felt safe in his hands. He could teach an important lesson to many other fantasy authors with his ending and with novel-writing in general. There's a sequel to this book out already with more to come, but The Magicians ends with a bang, emphasis on the word ENDS. He completes the story in THIS book, ties up ALL the loose ends, settles EVERY conflict, answers EVERY question, etc. And then he still manages to leave an open door into book 2 in a very exciting way. Most importantly, he created a world that I'm dying to return to, as dark and depressing as it is at times. So I give The Magicians a heart-aching 4.5 out of 5 stars.

It’s hard to know where to start with a book like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. I have never read a book that has given me such mixed feelings. And by mixed feelings, I don’t mean “meh, it was ok”. I mean parts of it were absolutely brilliant, so brilliant that I find the main character Quentin is still hanging around in my head. And parts of it made me so mad that I wanted to put the book down and never pick it up again.The people and relationships that Grossman describes are probably the most realistic I’ve ever seen in the context of a fantasy novel. The main character, Quentin, is moody, depressed, selfish, and a genius who gets to fulfill the average fantasy reader’s greatest dream: Attending a school for magic in place of a normal college. Make no mistake, this is no harry potter tale, because the twist (which isn’t really a spoiler to anyone who is old enough to have graduated from college) is that even though his most secret and unrealistic dream comes true, Quentin is still depressed moody and selfish thereby exposing the myth that circumstances can dictate long term happiness.Grossman subverts the standard “going to magic school for training” narrative in a way that can only be compared to what Alan Moor to does to the standard super hero narrative in The Watchmen. That is, Grossman flips it on its head a tells it in a way that fulfills a lot of the tropes associated with the narrative but because Quentin is so very opposite of Harry Potter a weird upside down sort of tale forms that in the end feels way more realistic. Quentin finds all the magic he could possibly dream of, and it still he can’t be happy, or not for long, then he finds his way into the secondary fantasy world he has always dreamed of, and after the shine wears off he is still not happy, not fulfilled, feels a lack of purpose. The hero is supposed to live happily ever after, not get everything he/she ever wanted and then be unsatisfied. It is made even worse from the reader’s perspective because you can see the real, meaningful things in his life that Quentin just cannot, or will not, recognize. The unwritten refrain in Quentin’s head through the whole novel is “this is not how the story is supposed to go” so he continues searching, thinking there has to be more somehow, somewhere there must be a place where the world is not screwed up, or where Quentin has not screwed it up himself. But by waiting and hoping for that single non-existent something, everything else slips quietly away from him in a bleary haze of booze, and self-pity.There are a number of brilliant scenes interspersed throughout the novel that show just how deep Quentin’s issues go. These scenes, most times, depict Quentin catching one of his friends or acquaintances in their own moments of quiet despair, wrapped in their own self centric narratives. But Quentin is so inwardly focused that he cannot see it. It would force him to recognize that he is not the center of every story. I think these few scenes carry an extra emotional punch because other than this, they seem to have no purpose in the book whatsoever. And so the reader reacts in the same way Quentin reacts, with a little bit of confusion and a lack of understanding, until of course, unlike Quentin, the reader does eventually understand if they are paying attention.This strikes a number of personal chords with me, and maybe that is why I think this novel is so brilliant. I could almost forgive any writerly sin (and there a few in this book) for the unexpected vitality, and sheer weight and realness of the characters. However, I am not sure I can forgive him for the simple, unsubtle way he has ripped out some major chunks of The Chronicles of Narnia’s world and to a lesser extent the Harry Potter universe and plunked them down in his story barely altered. I won’t go into too much detail here, but basically Brakebills is the same as Hogwarts with less of a sense of wonder about it, and Fillory basically is Narnia. I would say Fillory is Narnia, but darker, however I think the actual Narnia can be pretty dark on its own in places.In speculative fiction, it is an often used practice to pull bits and pieces of setting or world building from The Greats and twist them around a little bit before use by an author in a new story. This is fine because usually you can sense that the authors have treated the source material with reverence, and by doing so treats the fandom with respect as well. This comes off to the average genre reader as a nod of respect and gratitude to “those who have gone before”. I can’t count how many times I have found references to Kurt Vonnegut, or Harlan Ellison, or any of a hundred other men and women who have made genre what it is today, hidden in some new book that I have recently picked up. And I love it when I find those Easter eggs. It gives me sense of belonging in a way.I say all of this I guess because if giving a nod to Harry Potter and Narnia is what Grossman did, I would have been absolutely fine with it. Instead, especially with Narnia, Grossman made a blatant copy of it. Right down to the “in between” place as a stopping point on the way to “Fillory”, and only two girls and two boys from our world can be kings and queens of “Fillory”. Fillory just feels very irreverent to the original Narnia, and for some reason makes me feel very protective of the original. I get what Grossman is doing, at least I think I do: If you went to Narnia, it wouldn’t be at all the way you imagined it would be. However, I feel that he could have shown this just as easily by making up a world that diverged from Narnia in a significant way.Anyway, in summary: It’s easy for me to see why most of the reviews for this book are either five stars or one star. I am on the fence as well, but I think that in the end, Grossman’s skill as a writer wins out.