Book Review: Lev Grossman Works Magic

As readers, we love being absorbed into another reality, dystopian or utopian, and when that world is alive with strange and wonderful details, we never want to leave. Middle-earth or Panem, Narnia or Hogwarts: these universes are as strange as they are familiar, and as we read, we imagine ourselves fully a part of the unreal world. And that’s why we keep reading, because we all wish, even a little bit, that our reality was more like the unreality we find on these pages.

Lev Grossman, in his novels The Magicians and The Magician King, has not only dramatized this longing for unreality, but he has also created a strange, new world you will have a hard time leaving.

Quentin Coldwater is a high-school genius obsessed with a series of children’s books, five novels set in the mythical, magical land of Fillory (which bears more than a passing resemblance to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia). When The Magicians opens, Quentin is heading to a college interview, and even though his present and his future are, on paper, a few marks above average, Quentin is not happy. The girl he loves is dating his best friend. His parents don’t get him. And worst of all, his home in Brooklyn is Not Fillory. And if the college interview goes well, which it will, because he is a genius, then he will be going to college. Where he will not become a magician, and which will still be Not Fillory.

The college interview does not go well, which is due largely to the fatal cerebral hemorrhage the interviewer suffers right before Quentin arrives. A paramedic on the scene gives Quentin an ordinary manila envelope, and suddenly, he has left Brooklyn and reality behind. He is in Brakebills, a secret, elite college for magic hidden on the Hudson River in Upstate New York. He is asked if he wants to take the entrance exam: one of the stupidest questions in the history of questions. Quentin takes the exam, Quentin passes the exam, and Quentin becomes a magician.

At Brakebills, Quentin discovers that magic is hard work. It is a discipline that requires a lot more than mumbling some words and wishing really hard: it requires manual dexterity, tedious repetition, and dedicated study. And even then, to do real magic, Quentin needs something that can’t be taught. But Quentin has that something, and it turns out that that something is needed in the very real, very strange, land of Fillory.

Quentin catches glimpses of what he thinks might be happiness. But Quentin is, of course, learning much more than how to perform magic. Quentin is growing up, which means he has to learn that the world, even a world where Fillory exists, will not be good to him just because he is smart. It means discovering that the real dangers in any world do not care if he is disaffected, detached, ironic, or depressed. They are still dangerous. And growing up means falling in love for real, having his heart broken in the worst way and having to live with knowing he could have avoided breaking her heart.

The Magicians is told from Quentin’s point of view, but it’s the ensemble cast that keeps this novel from being insufferably Catcher-in-the-Rye-with-wands. Alice, the girl involved in the mutual breaking of hearts, is impossibly smart, impossibly tough, and impossibly vulnerable. Eliot, Quentin’s first friend at Brakebills, is fabulously gay, but that those jazz hands are almost, but not quite, hiding his drinking problem and his self-loathing. Janet is a bigger drama queen than Eliot, which is often hard to watch, considering how deeply and unfortunately she loves Eliot. Penny, well, Penny is that kid, the one who makes everyone uncomfortable because he’s logical and intelligent enough to be infuriatingly right all the time, and it’s not exactly his being right that causes the discomfort.

The novel has some flaws that are hard to overlook: some dialogue is truly awful, with an overreliance on pop-culture references and snappy comebacks, and the episodic structure of the book gives it an unfocused feel in certain stretches. Also unfortunate is how some of the characters are caricatures, and how you’ll wish you could strangle the ones who are fleshed out, because they repeatedly make bad choices when they know what the right choice is. But the beauty of the book is in its psychology; the psychological realism of The Magicians trumps every literary nit one can pick.

The Magicians is, really, a story about being unhappy long after one gets what one has always wanted. And The Magician King takes that a step further: Quentin is king of everything he ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough for him.

The writing in The Magician King is stronger, so strong that I found myself wishing that the two books had been compressed into one volume. The ensemble cast (spoilers: not all of that cast) of The Magicians is now ruling Fillory, and Quentin is bored. Where the others have upped being bored from a character trait to a lifestyle, Quentin wants more.

One of the queens of Fillory is Julia, the girl Quentin adores in the opening of The Magicians. Julia learned magic the way Quentin learned love: the hard way. Julia has scrabbled together a magical education outside of Brakebills, and it cost her, and she is more, and differently, powerful. Julia sat for the same exam as Quentin (it’s nicely hinted at in the first book), but she failed, and the charms cast to erase her memory of the school and her failure did not work.

The narrative of The Magician King switches between the present day, where Quentin and his fellow royals race against a very sinister clock, and the past, where we follow Julia's heartbreaking journey to learn and earn magic. The two story lines entwine and inform each other elegantly, but it is Julia's story that makes this the better of the two books. Julia scours the earth to gather arcane scraps of magical knowledge, a perilous journey that is in sharp contrast to the relative ease of Quentin's Ivy-League-esque acquisition of power.

The fantastical elements of Brakebills and Fillory are familiar not only because we've encountered similar versions of them in other novels. They are familiar because we have connected to Quentin (even when we want to strangle him) and Julia (even before we cry for her (. . . you will)). And that is the real reason we keep reading: we've made new friends, and we hate saying goodbye.