The Magician King

[sawyl]

Having completely adored Lev Grossman's The Magicians — one of my favourite books of 2010 — I had high expectations for The Magician King. And despite the deliberately rather faltering start, with the protagonist repeatedly the cues telling him it's time for him to undertake his epic quest, I thought it definitely lived up to the standards set by its predecessor.

The story opens with Quentin, Eliot, Julia and Janet ensconced as kings and queens of Fillory. Despite living in luxury in a land where you really have to work hard to screw anything up, Quentin is characteristically dissatisfied with his lot and decides to try and liven it up with a quest or two. After decline a couple of obvious attempts by the universe to get him questing, he and Julia decide to set sail for Outer Island to discover why they haven't paid their taxes for a couple of years. When the arrive, they fail to find a grand conspiracy — the Outers haven't paid their taxes because they didn't think anyone cared, but they've got gold coming out the wazoo (technically, the wazoos of the native beetles) and they're more than happy to pay up — but as a by-the-way, Quentin learns that the Key to the World is apparently held slightly further east on After Island.

With the bit between his teeth, Quentin travels to After Island, where he and Julia use the key to unlock a magical door the world that takes them to... Quentin's parents house in Massachusetts. Stuck back on Earth and with Quentin's old contacts at Brakebills proving predictably useless, the pair are forced to fall back on Julia's knowledge of the underground magic scene. This leads into Julia's story which, via a series of flashbacks, explain how she spent her time while Quentin was at college and why, on each of her infrequent appearances in The Magicians, her appearance and manners were so radically different.

Although the most obvious allusion in book is to CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — the island journey; the magical jump into the middle of the ocean, perfectly placed to be rescued; the talking beast with words of wisdom; the discussion with god incarnate on one of the islands; the journey to the end of the world — the overarching allusion (and this may be giving something away) seems to me to be the myth of Inanna and idea of what it means to be a hero. As the stories — Quentin's and Julia's — unfold, Grossman has a lot of fun with the standard tropes of fantasy: Brakebills is riding high in the magical school world, thanks to a brilliant new welters player (the youngest for a century, perhaps?); the levels in the underground scene are stolen lock stock and barrel from Dungeons and Dragons (and every other role playing game ever) even to the point where Julia finds herself indulging in a bit of level grinding; there are magic mirrors and river dragons; creatures from legend and even something that might just be all Aristotelian Actuality, a being so perfect that it is completely committed to one course of action.

Although Quentin spends a deal of his time kvetching, as he did in The Magicians, he definitely shows signs of growing up and reconciling himself to the fact that his situation, the thing that he spent all his time complaining about until it was abruptly removed, was actually pretty close to perfect. He even manages some moments of spectacular heroism. His incarnation as the Magician King is a reminder of just what a spectacularly good magician he really is and how, during his recuperation from the events of Ember's Tomb in The Magicians, he was the one who completed Alice's grand projects. And his final acts of heroism? Painful and deeply wonderful: kudos to Grossman for not shirking the responsibilities of his narrative setup.

But for all that Quentin is the hero, the book is really the story of Julia and the quest for her humanity. It's clear from the outset (and from The Magicians) that there is something horribly Broken about Julia and that she has never really recovered from her rejection from Brakebills. Her horrific depression when she realises that a whole world of opportunity — the same one that Quentin spends most of the first book complaining about — has been ripped away is painful, but worse is the way that she completely renounces her old existence and her family in exchange for a course of action that doesn't bring her anything. While I loved Julia's story — I thought the section in Provence was superb, especially the holiday week — I wasn't entirely convinced that she and her support group were the smarted people in the world: there was a lot of tell rather than show, but then that may be because showing super-smart people doing super-smart stuff is (a) hard to write and (b) unpopular with people don't themselves have IQs 38 levels above super-genius — why else would Julia, with her brain the size of a planet, feel the need to comment on the meaning of hydroptic? That said, I found all the old school technology — bulletin boards! dial up! shells! — very charming.

So: highly recommended, but not as a standalone novel — Julia's story only makes sense in the context of what happens to Quentin in the first book (rather perversely Waterstones seem pushing The Magician King on a 3-for-2 without stocking The Magicians. Seems strange, but I guess it makes sense to someone in marketing)