The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Jackie read The Magicians last year and liked it so much she bought me a copy for Christmas. Here's her review.

I finally got around to reading it myself. Jackie's review sums up quite well what I felt about it, for the most part. On balance, I liked it very much: I loved the first part, where Quentin's a student at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, which is almost half the book; the second half just devolves into a spiral of depression and philosophy and an extended section that reads like a scripted D&D adventure--probably on purpose, but I wasn't impressed.

The writing is very good throughout, but Grossman seems more interested in exploring his world than in making us care about it. As Jackie pointed out in her review, none of the characters are particularly likable, but I found most of them fascinating in one way or another. I liked Quentin until he graduated and turned into all the shiftless, drunken twenty-something guys I've ever known, and then in the latter sections of the book he just has no personality whatsoever. I should point out that I'm one of those people who cries very easily, especially when I'm reading, even when I'm reading really stupid books that I shouldn't be so emotionally invested in. But I didn't shed a single tear while reading The Magicians.

I'm trying hard to pinpoint my dissatisfaction with the book without making it sound like I was dissatisfied throughout. I can't stress enough how brilliant the first half of the book is. It perfectly captures the feeling of being a bright, unhappy college student without a meaningful future; it even perfectly captures the way bright, unhappy twenty-something guys act after college when their meaningless future turns into a meaningless present. It's when the story turns more definitively to fantasy that it falls apart. I got the impression that Grossman just didn't quite know how to end a book that's basically about how people remain unhappy even when they've got everything they've ever wanted.

It's a bleak book, but it's often very funny. The worldbuilding is excellent. And on a plus side, it probably won't make you cry.

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Lev Grossman’s The Magicians

Instead of Harry Potter living under a staircase, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (Viking Press, 2009) offers the reader a teenager obsessed with a series of children’s books about Fillory, a magical world.

Quentin, seventeen, is almost ready to go off to college. He is brilliant and bored. He’s smarter than his classmates and knows more than his teachers. He reads his Fillory books and does coin tricks.

Instead of a receiving an owl-dropped note from Hogwarts, Quentin finds his way to Brakebills through an enchanted weedy lot in New York City.

At his interview, he asks incredulously, “Don’t you want to see my SAT scores?”

This is, deliberately, a grown-up version of the Harry Potter series. And it is therefore, perhaps inevitably, more sophisticated and cynical.

What, asks the author of the reader, would you really do if you could do anything—manipulate reality, reverse entropy, travel to the moon in a magical bubble?

Quentin, during his undergraduate Brakebills days, meets two graduates, parents of a gifted young witch, who have sunk into ennui—the father spends his days reshaping their house into varieties of historical architecture. Their dullness is instructive, and depressing, to the boy wizard, who hasn’t a clue to what his life’s purpose is. He hasn’t even found his strongest talent, and none of the teachers can help him.

The most interesting, and most charming, part of The Magicians is Quentin’s school experience. Magical spells in Grossman’s view are more complex than in the Hogwart’s world—one must learn multiple languages and variations to cover all situations. And magic is dangerous.

Not only can one destroy oneself, Quentin learns, by overly emotional spell casting (one then turns into pure blue energy, neither dead nor alive), but one can even bring into the world beings from other realms, dangerous and Interested beings.

Quentin, like other gifted students—but not all—at Brakebills, finds his way at last to graduation and faces the possibility of a bored and cynical existence himself. He and his friends, by chance or fate, instead find a way into Fillory, where they discover at last the usefulness of sorcery and the true meaning of magic.

Grossman’s Quentin is not particularly likable, nor are any of the interesting characters in the novel; rather, the reader is asked to travel along as companion and observer.

Any child yearning to find the way through Platform 9 and three-quarters to the Hogwarts Express might feel less inclined to sorcery after reading The Magicians: it’s a chilling look at the real consequences of manipulating nature.

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