Goodreads Review: The Magicians

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Phoebe 1615 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2009%2F12%2F16%2Fgoodreads-review-the-magicians%2FGoodreads+Review%3A+The+Magicians2009-12-16+05%3A19%3A00Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fphoebeeating.dreamhosters.com%2F%3Fp%3D161

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the first chapter of The Magicians, our hero Quentin Coldwater, a charming, intelligent, rich, but perpetually unhappy young man, muses about the nature of Fillory, a fictional world and book series which form the backbone of Lev Grossman’s novel:

It was almost like the Fillory books–especially the first one, The World in the Walls–were about reading itself. When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slips through into Fillory [. . .], it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better. [. . .] In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn’t in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

The Magicians is, then, the story of a quest for happiness, like much of the escapist fantasy literature it recalls–but if the tone of this quote suggests, for you, that this is an impossible quest, then you’re right.

Quentin, the only American-sounding character in a book full of people who seem to speak with strange British lilts, is eighteen-years-old and bound for the Ivy Leagues. A strange encounter with a dead body changes his plans, however, and he ends up at Brakebills, a magical school nested in a pocket universe (where time runs two months behind the rest of the world) on Long Island. Though he’s cast in a Harry Potter role, as our star student and hero, he’s written much closer to a Donna Tartt character than he is one of J. K. Rowling’s. Blessed and brilliant, but also moody and insatiable, Quentin is often an unlikeable character. His behavior is at times off-putting; his reactions to others sour and unkind. But Grossman is wise enough not to ask us to cheer for him even when we are meant to empathize with him. This is, after all, a novel about misery and the search for unobtainable happiness–how strange it would be if our characters were happy!

Many reviews of The Magicians have centered on the novel’s first book; it’s often described wholesale as “Harry Potter with sex and booze”, but I found that viewing this section of the novel in only this light was limiting. Brakebills is an incredibly rich setting, and the most stunning examples of scene building and magic happen here. There is an absolutely stunning scene near the novel’s beginning featuring a magical feat that seems to owe quite a bit to the magic of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell–in fact, even the magic at the novel’s climax doesn’t quite live up to this display. There’s also one scene of true, and shudder-inducing terror. These sections were deliciously written, and much, much better than those about Grossman’s half-hearted Quidditch-rip-off (sorry, “welters”), for all their tongue-in-cheek similarities to Rowling.

Almost two hundred pages remain after Quentin leaves Brakebills. He departs for strange lands–Brooklyn, then Fillory itself. The narrative here takes on a tone that’s really crushing, appropriate for the empty and desperate lives that Quentin and his friends lead. I was surprised that the one bright spot I found in the story was Penny, a character who had previously been introduced as a foil and rival to Quentin. Even through to the novel’s climax, Quentin seems to view him this way, but I was never really sure if Grossman intended the readers to see him as such. Despite unfortunate fashion choices, he’s clearly the most dedicated magician of the bunch, and possesses an enthusiasm and naivety which is frankly refreshing after spending so much time with Quentin and his dry, dour, and amoral friends. And it is Penny, in the end, not Quentin, who makes the greater sacrifice. Perhaps Grossman was trying to tell us something about hope, and about potential: the most brilliant among us are often those who are, in the end, the most truly lost.

These are the questions that I found engaging in The Magicians–how can we still be hopeful, despite what we know of the world? Is there room for the magic of our childhood? Though it’s easy to focus on the intentional similarities between this and other works–and there’s plenty to focus on, if you want, with references that go far beyond the Pevensies and the Potters–it’s simply not as interesting as taking a close look at what this literature stands for here, and in the lives of young readers like our hero once was: hope and happiness, the kind that’s not always easy to find in grown-up books or in a grown-up world.

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