Book review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman
The Magicians is sinister and dangerous and adult, high-stakes and smart and sharp, a fantasy novel about fantasy novels and for those of us who read them, and an exploration what happens when your wildest childhood fantasies are realised in adulthood. (Spoiler alert: it’s never as good as you hoped.) It’s a remarkable book.
Quentin Coldwater is a Brooklyn teenager who grew up obsessed with Fillory and Further – a Narnia-ish series of books written in the ’30s, about a family of English children who escape World War I by nipping out to a parallel world populated by evil witch villains and friendly animal companions. Now preparing for college, Quentin is unenthusiastic about his future despite being a young genius who could do anything he wants.
What Quentin really wants – what a lot of us want, actually – is for the world to be a bigger, more fantastic place than it is. Unlike us readers, though, he’s not constrained by the limitations of reality: his wish comes true when he’s invited to take the entrance examination at Brakebills, an elite college of magic in upstate New York. Unfortunately he’s not accepted, and that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He gets in.
Quentin’s education at Brakebills is incredible – its highlight comes when Quentin and his whole class are transfigured into geese and fly all the way to Antarctica for one freezing, rigorous semester. Nevertheless, he’s unsatisfied – the magic world is ultimately as mundane and difficult and disappointing as the real world. The only place he might still discover happiness is in Fillory, which may not be as fictional as he thought. Unfortunately he never gets to Fillory, and the that’s where the novel ends. Just kidding! He finds it.
If you ever dreamed of visiting a fantasy land from a much-loved book, you must must must read The Magicians. It explicitly references a tonne of fantasy novels, especially the Harry Potter series – the simplest way to describe it is “Harry Potter for adults”, or maybe “The Secret History set at Hogwarts”. The magic is mixed in with sex and alcohol and maddening social politics, and a dark streak of danger: in Harry Potter you always kind of knew Harry and Ron and Hermione were shielded from death, but there’s no similar sense here. It’s telling there’s no Dumbledore or Aslan or Gandalf stand-in – Quentin’s teachers are an unsure and wary of magic’s power as he is.
The pace of The Magicians is bloated and messy but its episodic nature suits Grossman’s story (it’s both easy and impossible to see how it might be adapted into a TV series). It’s never obvious where Quentin’s adventures will take him, though in hindsight it all seems inevitable. But it’s often hard to get a fix on the characters – oftentimes Grossman will describe some supporting character as being a certain way, and it’s the first time you got that sense from the character.
I dreamed about this book. The moment I finished it I picked up the recently released sequel, The Magician King. It’s dumb and hackneyed to review a book about magic and call it “enchanting”, but The Magicians really is enchanting.
Tags: Brakebills, Fillory, Harry Potter, Lev Grossman, magic, Narnia, Quentin Coldwater, The Magician King, The Magicians, The Secret History
