We’ve all thought about it.
At some point or another, we’ve thought about how useful it would be to be a magician, and use it to go to a more interesting school, or travel to another world, or just use it to play a trick on someone. But how would we act in those situations? That’s what Lev Grossman has done in The Magicians—taken a bunch of bored, disinterested teenagers, and instead of making them heroes, thrown them in way over their heads in unfamiliar magical worlds.
It’s a little too easy to describe The Magicians as “Holden Caulfield in Narnia,” or “Harry Potter with sex and drugs,” but that’s selling it short. Though the magical worlds are derivative, that’s what makes it work. Grossman has taken mundane, relatable characters and thrown them into the fantastical worlds we already know about.
Quentin Coldwater, a depressed, brooding high school senior, thinks he’s going to a Princeton interview when he gets sucked from a Brooklyn alley into a school for magicians. He’s offered admission there, and the magicians at the school convince his parents to let him attend. Brakebills, the school seems like a good fit for Quentin, since he grew up loving books about Fillory, a magical land of magicians. He trains as a magician, graduates, and gets let loose back in New York with his magician friends, until they get a chance to actually go to Fillory.
It took me a while to get into this book, mostly because it takes a while for the plot to get interesting. At first I found it too slow, and too Harry Potterish. (The Harry Potter books do exist in the world of this book—a character jokingly refers to Welters, a game played at Brakebills, as Quidditch.) It’s necessary to set up the story, but Grossman spends a couple of hundred pages on Quentin’s Brakebills education. It’s fun and detailed, but he didn’t need to provide this much set-up.
But The Magicians gets a lot darker (and better) toward the middle: after graduating from Brakebills, Quentin and his classmates travel to Fillory, the Narnia-like world they read about as children. They set out to find a character from the Fillory novels who disappear, but end up fighting in a war against the evil forces that have taken over.
Fillory isn’t even the darkest (or best) part of the novel. That would be the ennui that Quentin and his classmates feel after graduating, when they’re living bored, privileged lives in New York and partying way too hard. Despite the unlimited potential open to them (they’re magicians!) they’re doing drugs, sleeping with each other, and struggling with existential angst and boring corporate jobs. The book works because the characters are from the world as we know it, and because Grossman has done a good job fleshing out Brakebills and Fillory with details. Plus, the book is full of pop culture references, and even the fact that Brakebills is in upstate New York makes it all hilariously mundane.
Even though it’s a book about magic, a lot of it is about the world that we live in. There aren’t any clear answers, but one of the biggest questions it asks is whether it’s possible to balance imagination and magic with adulthood and responsibility—a question that applies even to non-magicians. Quentin’s a cynical, depressive character, but Grossman works a balance between his deadpan tone and a childlike sense of wonder.
Quentin and his friends sometimes feel like characters from a teen movie: they’re a little too neatly pigeonholed into their roles, and they rely too heavily on stereotypes. (There’s the chubby, friendly, slacker; the pissy, temperamental gay guy, and the loud, brash daughter of Hollywood agents.) But since the worlds of the book aren’t incredibly original either, the characters work. Everything seems sort of familiar, so it’s best to just go with it and enjoy the ride.
The biggest problem with the book is that it’s uneven. Surprisingly, the fact that it’s partly about a school for magicians, partly about overfunded New York hipsters and partly about Narnia doesn’t work against it—it’s hilarious to see what happens when the worlds collide. The problem is that it’s just too slow to get going (with the descriptions of Brakebills) and then the Fillory adventures, which happen almost out of nowhere, seem rushed and tacked-on. But Grossman’s good writing moves the book along and keeps anyone who’s secretly wanted to be a magician entertained.
I agree with just about everything you had to say about this book. I remember reading it last summer and was mildly unimpressed with it. I guess I was expecting too much from it since it’s in my favorite genre, as I like to call it “urban fantasy.” What was most interesting to me was the in-between world, with the many squares and portals (I think) and it only ended up being a very small part of the larger (disjointed) picture.
By the way, found your blog from the jez #blogroll, woo!
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