The Magician King

I've long argued that one of the distinguishing marks of fantasy is an ongoing of what it means to be human, usually by placing humanity beside the fantastical. What Grossman has done with these two books is to have that same sort of conversation by placing irrevocably human characters beside the literary stereotype of humanity from the fantastic genre. This is the power of genre-busting, a necessary cleansing of the tropes and clichés to get back to the roots of the power of the genre. As the foundation of speculative fiction grows broader as well as deeper, the current generation of writers have that much more history to work against. In the Golden Age, it was simply enough to ask a different "What if" question than had been asked before. Not that every question has been answered by the genre, but those types of stories become formulaic, and the works of authors like Grossman (and Mieville and Banks and so on) remind us of that history as it works to build something new from it.

As I mentioned in my thoughts on The Magicians, the protagonist of The Magician King, Quentin Coldwater, dances on the line between likeability and not so much. He is not utterly unlikeable, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, but he is a hormonal and self-doubting young man who morosely questions nearly every move he makes—the opposite of the forthright hero of the fantasy genre. in The Magician King, however, Quentin is balanced by a long-time friend, Julia, who suddenly appears with as much magical skill and power as Quentin, if not more. Her history alternates with the ongoing thread of Quentin's adventure, providing a compelling view of magical powers gained by the most unorthodox of means, allowing Grossman to do more genre-busting from a different direction. Julia is a far more likeable character as she is a lot of things that Quentin is not, decisive and forthright, willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goals. She does face uncertainty at times, but it is because of questions posed on her by forces outside herself, while Quentin is continually handed everything he could want and still ponders his navel.

Together with an interesting cast of side characters, Quentin and Julia decide to travel the eastern sea of Fillory, Grossman's Narnia surrogate. The adventure feels very much like C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (book, not movie), complete with whimsical rationale for travelling. But after the adventurers complete their trivial task, they uncover an old legend and set about on a far bigger quest. And when that one goes all to heck, sending Quentin and Julia back to Earth with no way to return to Fillory, everything takes a decidedly more serious turn.

Grossman's writing is compelling; again I found it difficult to set the book down for a more than a few minutes. It's not just the story he tells, but he has so mastered the voices of his characters that you can feel them in your head as they narrate. Part of the complete "rightness" of the voices is they are products of their culture and time. Pop culture references abound, not because it's cool to reference other media in narration, but because young adults in their mid-20s would obviously have cultural signifiers that they would all be aware of. Heck, in my conversations with my mid-40s friends, the cultural references pile up like snow in Buffalo. Ironically, these references actually make the characters more accessible for me though years down the road, when a new reader doesn't know the same references, the narration will lose that level of familiarity. I nearly busted a gut at the perfectly appropriate Friends reference in the middle of a vital conversation. The content and context clash beautifully and realistically, setting up expectations and knocking them down, like the rest of the elements of the book. And Grossman's humor is wicked in other ways as well, piling up another reason why this book is just fun and capable of sustaining eventual rereadings.

It's tempting to say that the genre-busting that Lev Grossman practices in The Magicians is transformed into blatant cynicism in The Magician King, but I don't think it goes that far. The difficulty lies in the nature of the genre that Grossman is busting, the young adult fantasy novel. One of the distinguishing characteristics of that kind of novel is that the path they take is generally optimistic—there may be threats and villains to deal with, but given the expected audience, the outcome is always positive. Some people may be injured or die, but the protagonist comes through at the end if not unscathed then a better person than how they began the story. It's not at all clear that this is the case by the conclusion of The Magician King (or The Magicians either for that matter).

I've seen mentioned elsewhere that these books are part of a planned trilogy, the final book of which I look forward to reading upon its release. But true to his writing skill, Grossman ends this book in such a way that it doesn't need a sequel and yet the door remains open for one. I can honestly say I have no idea where he will take these characters next because I have utterly failed to predict how any of them have turned out in these first two novels. How delightful is that?

The Magicians

"Harry Potter for adults."

Nearly every review I read for this novel from Lev Grossman contained this little snippet of laconic summary. And I suppose on the surface, it contains an essence of the book, as though you were trying to convince someone in five words or less why this book is worth reading. But those four words carry so much connotation and weight that they overwhelm the power and artistry of what Grossman accomplishes in this thoughtful (and FUN!) book. Yes, the main character, Quentin Coldwater, receives an invitation to take an entrance exam for Brakebills, the North American school for magic that no one knows anything about. But the similarities end there.

First of all, Brakebills is a university rather than a high school, so the characters are older and thus offer a different dynamic than those of Harry Potter and friends. The students at Brakebills are young adults, arriving with personalities already mostly formed, whereas Harry and friends are shaped by Hogwarts. And, again, the characters in The Magicians are young adults on the verge of going out into the world and being responsible for themselves. Like college students everywhere, they are at least as interested in alcohol and sex as they are in their studies. And whereas Harry Potter takes seven increasingly large novels to even get out of Hogwarts, Quentin graduates from Brakebills' five-year program in half the novel.

This is because Grossman isn't telling a parable to children, he is asking a somewhat more meaningful question about how a world of magic would interact with the mundane world we live in. Harry Potter's mundane world is populated by single-dimensional symbols, people who are flattened because they know nothing about magic. Quentin's "real" world is Brooklyn, and the people he knows in it are multi-dimensional and at times inscrutable, just as the people who populate the readers' lives are.

Digging deeper, Quentin is also a far more complex character than Harry Potter. In fact, Quentin is not a very sympathetic character at all: he is dour and prickly, a far more realistic representation of teenaged boys than anything Harry Potter has to offer. The decisions Quentin sometimes makes are self-destructive and impossible to predict, much like those we ourselves make as we are trying to make our way into the "real" world. It just happens that Quentin's real world includes magic and not only does he have to deal with the politics of entry into adult life, he also has to deal with the politics of a world he did not believe existed and for which very people can offer him reasonable guidance. Grossman knows, as Quentin finds out, that college is just made to give its attendees the skill sets to succeed in the adult world, but how we fare depends almost solely on how well we use those acquired skills.

But Grossman doesn't rely on the clichés of Hogwarts alone as a starting point for his own work. Drifting through the first half of The Magicians is Fillory, a Narnia-surrogate that Quentin uses as a touchstone for what he expects of magic and also as an escape as he comes to grips with his mistakes and failures in the real world. Grossman's novels-within-the-novel are well-developed, including the story of the author and the children who supposedly visited him to tell their stories of the magical land of Fillory, hidden in a grandfather clock in their estate in the Cornish countryside. And soon after Quentin graduates from Brakebills, he discovers that Fillory isn't a fantasy—it's a real place that even most magicians didn't expect to exist—and he and his clique of fellow magician graduates, bored with the ease of the magic life in the mundane world, make plans to visit it. And what they find there, while somewhat similar to what they read about as children, turns out to be far more complex than the simple childish storytelling of children's books could possibly convey.

The power of The Magicians lay in its reality, a generally unspoken truth about the best fantasy novels. The fun of the Harry Potter and Narnia books lays in their escapism, in the underlying belief that everything is going to turn out well at the end. But there are no such assurances in The Magicians, as the characters' decisions have real effects on them and their lives. And being young adults, they don't always make the best decisions. Yes, magic pervades everything in the novels, but Grossman, and by extension his characters, still have to deal with it like real people: making and testing assumptions and dealing with the repercussions. And those friends are diverse, resembling more the wide lifestyles represented in The Breakfast Club than the surface differences in those that attend Hogwarts.

This makes The Magicians a much more compelling coming of age story, refusing to brighten the maturing process into a fairy tale. When Quentin and his friends fail, people can be hurt (and often are). Potentially, this kind of story could end up depressing, but it is actually worlds of fun. Life at Brakebills isn't that of a monastery—studying magic requires outrageous and sometimes silly activity. Quentin provides a wonderful voice to describe all this: cynical and unhappy but desperate to believe in something other than the slow death he sees in a mundane life. Grossman's language and style are engrossing, pulling the reader in as much by their exuberance about the story as by the events they describe. I really never did want to put The Magicians down until I had finished the last word.

If there is a weakness in the novel, it lies in its coda, the story of Quentin's life after he returns from Fillory. Disgusted with the magical life, he decides to go full-bore in the opposite direction, to become fully mundane and live a normal life. Except Quentin is merely deluding himself—he finds himself a high-priced consultant at a powerful company, a job for which he has absolutely no training, since Brakebills doesn't teach accounting and other mundane skills. His magical background gives him the best life most mundane people can imagine, and he has done nothing to earn it, flying the face of his decision to escape the effects of magic. His subconscious appears to be attempting to deal with the hypocrisy while he consciously avoids it himself, whiling away his hours in a worse mundane death than the one he envisioned in his youth—he does nothing important and any self-worth he might've gained during his magical escapades is slowly draining away. But in the final few pages, magic comes forth again to save him, and Quentin blithely accepts his savior. In one sense, if The Magicians is about how real people would deal with magic, Quentin's running away to magic at the end can be seen as a typical response: everyone, magical or otherwise, looks for the easiest way through. But part of what has made Grossman's story so compelling is the constant reminder that nothing comes without a price, so Quentin's escape seems to fly in the face of that moral. However, a bigger reality is what drives this authorial choice—it sets us up for sequels to The Magicans.

This book is much more than a more mature version of Harry Potter; it is a thoughtful and sometimes deep examination of the process of emerging into adult life with the trappings of a fantasy novel. I have seen this book appear on lists of books for kids who are ready for something after Harry Potter. I can see its inclusion in such lists, but you best be sure of the kids. There are moments in The Magicians that are depressing, not just sad. And there is sex and hardship and death, all components of the real world. I know some teenagers who could handle The Magicians, but they are the exception. If they are in high school still thinking fondly of Rowling and Potter, then this book might be good for them. And it's definitely the kind of book that thoughtful readers of fantasy will appreciate. And to be clear, again, if I have given the impression that this is all gothy emo stuff; it's not—this book is provocative and thoughtful and downright fun. (Just a note—I am more than halfway through the sequel, The Magician King, and I can forgive the wimpy conclusion to The Magicians, if only because it allows this other to be written. Thanks, Eric, for giving me both of them for my birthday!)