I wasn’t planning on reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. At least not anytime soon. My reading pile (like most of yours, I’m sure), is huge. Everest-sized. So adding books to it that I’m not sure I’ll like is an iffy proposition at best.
Why wouldn’t I like The Magicians, you ask? Well, there was this review from Ana at The Book Smuggler. I stumbled upon it and it made me think this might not be a book for me.
I unexpectedly received an ARC of it and decided to promote it to the top of the reading pile. I’m glad I did, because I loved it.
This isn’t going to be a debate with Ana about her reasons for not liking the book, which are all perfectly valid for her (and some I very much agree with; more on those in a bit). But this book worked for me. For most of its length it’s an Audi R8 firing all cylinders screaming down the highway at 140 miles per hour.
The Magicians is a odd beast — a literary amalgam of The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter with the wit and sensibility of a modern “literary” novel about angst-filled, disaffected teenagers trying to find their way in the world. Quentin is, by and large, fairly unlikeable — I’ll agree with Ana on that point. But not so unlikeable that I was turned off. I found him to be a realistic portrait of the kind of character Grossman was going for — a privileged kid growing up in New York City who is too intelligent and attentive for his own good. While his action sometimes (hell, often) portray him in a negative light, they also ring completely true.
The story involves Quentin’s discovery that magic is real and he is in fact a magician. He is asked to attend a secret school of magic in upstate New York, where his skills will be honed for the next five years through a combination of classwork and field tests (some of which are highly dangerous). He leaves behind his high school friends and family and departs for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.
Quentin is an unhappy teenager. When he was a child he loved a series of books about a mystical land named Fillory (an almost point-by-point ripoff of Narnia, to be honest). Fillory made him happy, and he obsessively rereads the books in an attempt to regain that happiness. He believes working real magic will make him happy, but even at Brakebills the happiness he so desperately craves eludes him.
After graduation he and his friends drift about aimlessly, wasting their time with parties and booze and sex and drugs. Quentin is on a downward spiral and knows it, but doesn’t know how to pull out of it.
Then all of them are stunned with the revelation that Fillory is not only real but in mortal danger, and that they are the only ones who have a chance of saving it.
The Magicians is something of a deconstruction of the fantasy genre as exemplified by C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, which is why the complete lack of originality of Fillory or Brakebills (which is simply Hogwarts with a name change) didn’t bother me overly much. Grossman isn’t trying to make them original — he’s using pre-existing tropes to examine his characters and their reactions to the fantastic. I got the impression that Grossman was least interested in writing the fantasy parts — the journey through Fillory when we finally reach it is the dullest, most uninteresting part of the book. And while I agree with Ana that Eliot is an almost shamefully cliched gay man, he wasn’t present enough in the text to bother me, and was more than eclipsed by the wonderful Alice.
The Magicians, ultimately, isn’t about magic — its heart centers on the lives of the people who wield magic. In that regard, it’s a triumph.
