The Magicians

[sawyl]

Inspired by a positive review by Cory Doctorow, I decided to pick up a copy of Lev Grossman's The Magicians when it came out in paperback. Having read it, I can now say that I liked it very much: it was like a wonderful mashup of The Secret History, A Wizard of Earthsea, and C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, all mixed with a heavy dose of existential ennui and a dash postmodernism. It was rather like reading an anti-Harry Potter novel.

The book opens with Quentin Coldwater and his overachieving friends, James and Julia, arriving for a perfectly normal interview with a recruiter from Princeton. But when they discover that their interviewer is dead, Quentin finds himself invited to a quite different sort of interview at Brakebill's College, an elite academy for potential magicians. Convinced that his dreams have come true — he is obsessed with a series of books about a Narnia-esque land called Fillory —
Quentin eagerly accepts the offer. So far, so Hogwarts. But Brakebills is much darker than Rowling's school. For one thing, its students are older, so their interests are more mature: sex, booze, snobbery and tangled relationships are big features of life at the college. For another, the work is a serious grind, the staff aren't hugely proficient and they don't really seem to do much in the way of pastoral care. Oh, and no-one likes or is particularly proficient at welters, the school's main sport.

The vibe of the college is generally one of unhappiness, particularly among Quentin's clique, the Physical Kids. With their little clubhouse and their own teacher — who in one of many nods to Dungeons and Dragons, is called Bigby! — and their general ennui, the Physical Kids reminded me of nothing quite so much as Richard Papen's classics group in Donna Tartt's The Secret History. They initially exude the same sort of depressive, directionless malaise that gradually degenerates into the same sort of alcoholic and incestuous ruin as in Tartt's novel — although the impetus comes from their total freedom, rather than a murder.

On graduation, Quentin and his girlfriend Alice join the other recently graduated members of their clique in New York in a maelstrom of booze and drugs and emotional disaster. But when a former college friend turns up unexpected with something he claims will allow them to get into the world of Fillory, the group jump at the chance to shake off their damage and to play at being kings and queens in fantasy land but the trip turns to be far from the perfect, antiseptic quest that they've all secretly being hankering for.

The Magicians really, really worked for me, but I gather from elsewhere that it is one of those books that divides opinion.

Steeped in the lore of Narnia and Roke and D&D and Harry Potter, I deeply appreciated Grossman's borrowings. I particularly liked the way he ruthlessly focused on many of the details that Lewis brushes over in his Narnia books: the way the rings of The Magician's Nephew, make access to Narnia too easy and arbitrary; how the dealing of death is always heroic and never visceral and unpleasant and compromising; and how the lead characters are never really damaged by their experiences.

I enjoyed the characters although, with the exception of Alice, I didn't really like them all that much. I even enjoyed Quentin; poor damaged Quentin, always discontent and often depressed even though, as Alice points out, he is living a what most people would consider to be a charmed life but seems to believe that if only he leaves Brooklyn, learns magic, travels to Fillory, he will finally be happy. But of course he never achieves contentment because by his own actions and thoughts and deeds he constantly sabotages his own attempts; for, as with Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea, Quentin's worst enemy is his own shadow.