Click the image to go to Powell's
“Quentin did a magic trick.”
And thus begins Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians.
First of all, this is my first book review. Be gentle with me.
The Magicians, plural, is by Lev Grossman. This is not to be confused with The Magician, singular, which is a classic (by W.S. Maugham) what I know nothing about.
Now that we’ve cleared that up. Lev Grossman works for Time Magazine writing their book reviews and other things like their recent “person of the year” article. I guess his title is “senior writer”. He also writes for Time’s Techland website. Obligatory twitter and blog links.
The Magicians is sort of an answer to everything that ever bothered or nagged you about Narnia and Harry Potter. In his book, Grossman uses a thinly veiled reference to Narnia with mystical land named “Filory”. And his Harry-Potter Hogwarts analog is an upscale, Anglophilic wizarding college in Upstate New York called “Brakebills”.
From his website:
“Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. He’s a senior in high school, and a certifiable genius, but he’s still secretly obsessed with a series of fantasy novels he read as a kid, about the adventures of five children in a magical land called Fillory. Compared to that, anything in his real life just seems gray and colorless.”
Before we get into any spoilers — and I promise I’ll warn you before we do — let’s hit the basics.
The Magicians is a tightly-worded, beautifully-written novel. You may come for the story, and it’s a story worth reading, but you will stay for the prose. This is the first place it separates from the Narnia books, which have tight-but-plain, shallow language, and the Potter books, which have so much unnecessary and ill-formed language Rowling must have assumed she was to be paid by the word. By contrast, The Magicians doesn’t waste a word. Entire seasons sweep by in a sentence without ever leaving the reader confused or disoriented. Each scene is exquisitely limned with words that are painted rather than written on the page. Grossman may have traded his soul for the artifact of prose — it was a worthwhile trade.
We’re still not into spoilers here, at least not in any significant sense of the word, but I have to talk about the tone and character of the story now. The book begins with seventeen-year-old Quentin in his final year of high school and moves quickly on to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. And here, again, we separate from other magical, school-yard, fairytale-land stories. Quentin and the other members of the cast are adults in the sense that young men sent off to war are adults. And the themes and events in the story reflect this. Grossman pulls no punches when dealing with the issues and mistakes young college students and later independent, privileged twenty-somethings make. The kind of issues that may haunt the reader’s own past, as much as they haunt the protagonists present.
This book is beyond the bright-eyed optimism of talented youths ala Pevensies or Potters. Instead it’s told from the bitter, none-of-this-is-what-I-signed-up-for “reality” of adulthood. Remember when you first learned that college was less about independence and more about hard work? So does Quentin. Remember figuring out that the life you’ve worked so hard to achieve has nothing to do with the happiness you were really looking for? So does Quentin. Remember losing something really precious, because you didn’t know how good you had it until you squandered it away? Yup, again, so does Quentin. Which is the third point of divergence from the children’s books; despite empathizing, even sympathizing, with poor Quentin Coldwater, you cannot forgive him. Not any more than you can let yourself off the hook for every fuck-up and faux pas you’ve ever committed. At times you will hate Quentin as much as you’ve ever hated yourself. And you’ll love every minute of it.
There’s not too much more, but it get’s spoilery. Read the rest after The Jump.
[The Jump!]
