The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Vivid, Edgy Urban Portal Fantasy about Portal Fantasy Quentin Coldwater, seventeen, is an unhappy, cocky, competitive nerd who excels at passing tests. Although he hasn’t grown out of a childhood obsession with a Narnia-esque five-book fantasy series about visiting a world called Fillory, and his hobby is doing slight-of-hand magic tricks, Quentin can’t believe in magic. On this winter day in Brooklyn, he goes to his Princeton admissions interview only to find that the interviewer has just died. The paramedic hands Quentin an envelope that was supposedly left for him, sending him through an overgrown abandoned lot and into summer at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. He’s given an entrance examination consisting of normal mathematical problems as well as requests to translate Shakespeare into an imaginary language and to draw a rabbit that starts running around the test book eating other questions. When the Dean tells him to do some real magic—not sleight-of-hand tricks—a confused Quentin unconsciously recites something in his made-up language and tosses a deck of cards that assemble into a card house replicating Brakebills’ architecture. Thus begins Quentin’s magical education at Brakebills, the first and longest section of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009). Whereas J. K. Rowling draws out Harry Potter’s education at Hogwarts over seven novels, one for each year of Harry’s life, however, Grossman condenses Quentin’s five-year course of study (taking about four years because he skips one year) into about half of his novel. This telescoping still leaves plenty of opportunities to describe and explain magic, which requires natural aptitude, strong will, anger matched with restraint, and intense study and practice, including multiple languages, different “disciplines” of magic, complicated finger and hand gestures, and care for the circumstances around any spell. There is at least one college for magic on every major continent, and more than a few magicians passing as normal people: like Harry Potter, The Magicians requires a Herculean suspension of disbelief that nearly no one in our world would notice the magic going on around them. Not that Brakebills is Hogwarts and The Magicians a Harry Potter book! The pupils here are college students, the female characters are more compelling, the writing more sophisticated, the action spicier--smoking, drinking, swearing, snarking, drugs, and sex--and the psychology and the conflict much less black and white. There are no cartoonishly awful characters ala the Dursleys or Draco Malfoy and his minions. There is a strong homosexual supporting character (though Grossman imagines few people of color, leaving the book quite white). Quentin is often an unlikeable protagonist, being self-centered and causing harm to others, but his growth through suffering and guilt is well done and humanizing. Above all, about half-way through the novel, the characters and story graduate from the Hogwarts model of magical school education and begin a critical but affectionate and imaginative parody of The Chronicles of Narnia. The graphic violence and Big Brother-like ram gods of the portal world Fillory may make squeamish readers and Aslan lovers squirm. My favorite part of the book is Grossman’s celebration, deconstruction, and complication of Narnia. Grossman uses the omnipresent Fillory to explore the different ways in which children read such fantasy stories as children and remember and reread them as adults, to demonstrate the nearly overwhelming desire we have (especially but not only as children) for escape and adventure in fantasy worlds, and to make the fantasy (magic, etc.) of his own narrative world feel more real. Grossman’s writing is usually good to read, whether profane dialogue (“Wake up!” Alice said. “This isn't a story! It's just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there!”) or uncanny fantastic happenings or beings: “It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman's hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes--she appeared to be looking right at them--were midnight blue and didn't move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.” There are vivid descriptions of what it feels like to do magic: “. . . streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing--it was like they had been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.” There are impressive scenes that transcend genre, parody, pastiche, or whatever, like when Quentin encounters the Beast during a lecture, runs naked to the south pole, or first visits the Neitherlands. Grossman’s student characters speak American slang: “Dude,” “I'm freezing my tits off,” “You fucking fucked him,” etc. He makes funny and apt similes from our world’s popular culture, like Scooby-Doo, an anti-pollution commercial from the 1960s, and Andy Warhol. He inserts pop culture refs here and there, as when the students sing “Heart and Soul,” mock the wands of Harry Potter, do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” dance, or imagine a porn mag for trees called Enthouse. (Strangely, despite the pervasive influence of Narnia via Fillory--e.g., seemingly benevolent god and wicked witch, different time scales, inevitable ejection from the fantasy world, human siblings who become kings and queens, world between the worlds, etc.--the characters never mention C. S. Lewis’ books!) I enjoyed The Magicians and look forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy. People who like Harry Potter and Narnia but want something edgier and more ambiguous for older readers should like this one. View all my reviews
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