Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim.  It was reassuringly solid.  The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he'd been a king in a magical land.  He didn't want it to be over; it wouldn't really be over till he let go and walked away.  He could still have it for a little longer.

But no, he couldn't.  It was done.  He patted the fountain one more time and set off through the empty dream-city.  He felt weightless and empty.  He'd stopped being who he was, but he wasn't sure yet who he was going to be next.  His head was still full of the End of the World:  the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the two mismatched wooden chairs, the ringing crescent moon, the sputtering comets.  The last sight of Julia, diving off the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future.

It was a new beginning for her, but he'd hit a dead end.  No more Fillory.  No further. (p. 15)

It has been a long and winding road for Quentin Coldwater, the main protagonist in Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy.  From an insecure, chronically depressed youth whose uncertainty and low self-esteem would manifest itself in bursts of petty spitefulness to the harrowed, grieving magician-king seeking new quests in the magical world of Fillory (itself an analogue to Narnia) in order to feel the void in his life caused by the apparent death of his ex-girlfriend Alice, Quentin has suffered mightily.  And rather vocally, to the displeasure of those who have little patience for those whose discomfort is made visible to all.  Yet in the twelve years from his arrive at the magical college of Brakebills to his recent expulsion from Fillory, Quentin has changed.  It is this change that provides the anchor around which the action of the concluding volume, The Magician's Land, transpires.

The action begins in media res, with Quentin and a girl, Plum (who had appeared earlier in a short story connected to the trilogy), attending a secret magicians' meeting.  The reader is not given any information other than there is a reward for an object that is being guarded.  Quentin and Plum, both desperate for income (the reasons for this are made clear in a later chapter), are chosen to participate in this hunt/theft.  From there, the first third or so of the novel bounces from this "present" back several months to when Quentin, newly arrived on Earth, is granted a professorship at his old university.  In addition, there are a few chapters about some disturbing changes going on in Fillory, as it seems old boundaries are failing and an end for the magical land may be nigh.

These early chapters take some time establishing a good rhythm, but around halfway in, the disparate threads connect.  The magical object turns out to have a direct bearing on what is occurring in Fillory, but there is more to it.  Quentin has taken upon himself an impossible task:  the creation of a new land.  Much of the middle third revolves around his quest to achieve the infinitely improbable, all the while being literally haunted by the spirit of the one he most cherishes.  Grossman does a good job in showing how Quentin's character has been changing throughout the series, but here in The Magician's Land, it becomes most visible.  There are several scenes where Quentin has to confront old, sometimes abandoned relationships and in them, through his vague sense of loss and acute hurt, we see the changes that have occurred over the past twelve years.  Now 30, he has developed a sense of empathy that the Quentin of the first two volumes did not possess.

This changing attitude can be seen in his interactions with Plum, who herself bears emotional scars from her childhood.  Her role in the concluding book is a major one, but even more than what she represents from a plot standpoint, her character is central to showing Quentin's maturation.  She is not his sidekick or his lover, but her interactions with him show how the breast-obsessed Quentin of The Magicians has come to appreciate women for more than their sexuality.  She is a strong character, one for whom magic is still a thing of wonder, and it is her steady yet buoyant personality that makes the first half of the book hold together.

There are others who undergo changes.  Janet in particular, through a story she narrates to Eliot after he has returned after the events of The Magician King, has grown perhaps more than any other character.  Her cynical, jaded promiscuous behavior, the source of division among the Physical Kids of Brakebills, has changed into something much more resolute and empathic.  Although she is not given as much space as several of the other characters, her character development serves as a parallel to Quentin's.  This parallel and others illustrates an important theme in the series, that of how maturation relates to dreams, beliefs, and magic.

The final third of the novel ties all of these thematic, characterization, and plot developments into something truly remarkable.  While there were times earlier in the novel that it felt like Grossman was close to belaboring his points, by the final 120 pages or so, everything just flows together wonderfully.  The Narnia parallels, which I had presumed existed so Grossman could utilize a familiar invented setting to make a point about our own world, are developed beyond what I had anticipated.  Quentin's desire to create a new, magical land stems not an arrogant desire to be a creator (although elements of this do blight his first, failed attempt), but instead is more an outgrowth of his new-found desire to understand rather than to be understood.  It is a touching moment when he realizes this and this new Quentin ends up having the strength to not just confront his most haunting memory but to mend the damage done.  This mending quality is explored in several places in the concluding chapters and by novel's end, we see, if not a Fillory and Quentin Unmarred (to lift a line from Tolkien), but a Fillory and Quentin Mended.  There are others at story's end who are also on their way to redemption, but only one other factors into the conclusion and just who that is would spoil the magic for those who intend to read this book.

In reading the final chapters, more so than thinking about how well Grossman constructed this conclusion and how much his characters had developed into mature, adult human beings, I was left thinking about those little acts of magic that occur when a person dreams of a different setting, of different outcomes and with worlds to explore.  In remembering myself as a younger reader who would daydream of historical events, I felt this sense of wonder sweep across me; behold, all things are now made new.  It is this sense of astonished wonder that Grossman explores in his final chapters.  It explains Quentin, yes, but it also explores why certain readers like to imagine themselves as magicians or wise rulers or valiant warriors or mysterious sages.  Our individual acts of sub-creation breathe life and meaning into the world around us.  As Quentin muses near the end:

The world was fucking awful.  It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.

He'd been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself.  The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring – a moving oasis.  He wasn't desolate, and he wasn't empty.  He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that's what being a magician was.  (p. 399)

Reading his journey to this point of observation has made The Magician's Land not only the best in the trilogy but also one of the more profound secondary world fantasies that I have read in some time.  Highly recommended.

Lev Grossman, The Magician King

Everybody watched him.  The clock-tree's branches creaked in the soundless wind.  He didn't move.  He thought about Julia's warning:  some great change of our fortunes.  His fortunes were riding high right now, he had to admit.  He had a goddamned castle, full of quiet courtyards and airy towers and golden Fillorian sunlight that poured like hot honey.  Suddenly he wasn't sure what he was wagering that against.  He could die in there.  Alice had died.

And he was a king now.  Did he even have the right to go galloping off after every magic bunny that wagged its cottontail at him?  That wasn't his job anymore.  All at once he felt selfish.  The clock-tree was right there in front of him, heaving and thrashing with power and the promise of adventure.  But his excitement was slipping away.  It was becoming contaminated with doubt.  Maybe they were right, his place was here.  Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. (p. 14-15)

When I reviewed Lev Grossman's The Magicians in August 2009, I opined "the novel felt as though I had read of one youth's survival of his previous life and self and that the stage was now set for an interesting character study that would play off of the fantasy tropes that had been explored over the course of this first novel."  The Magicians was in many respects a first stage, a travel through juvenile things and immature desires, passing through despair, ennui, and suffering, to something else.  When that novel concluded, its protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, appeared to be a changed young man, no longer 17 and full of vague dreams and youthful angst, but a mid-20s adult who had suffered and lost much of what he had loved.  The Magicians could have ended on that note, could have allowed us to imagine Quentin growing to accept what he did possess after his love was lost, but there were enough glints of future developments that Grossman wanted to develop, which lead to the writing of the sequel, The Magician King.

The Magician King opens two years later.  Quentin, along with Eliot, Janet, and Quentin's high school crush, Julia, are now the kings and queens of Fillory.  Amid the questing and balls and hunts, Quentin is still uneasy about the contrast between the life of plenty he now has and the remaining guilt from watching his love, Alice, die during a confrontation with the Beast.  He wants something else, something that makes him more than just a king at name.  Some might think this is a reversion to the old Quentin, the moody, despondent spoiled kid of the first novel and to some extent this is true, but for most of this novel, Quentin continues to mature and to develop as a person and as a leader.

Yet Quentin is not the sole primary protagonist.  Julia, whose story from the early chapters of The Magicians to its conclusion was more hinted at than told, comes into her own here.  For most of the novel, her backstory of how she became a magician is told in alternating chapters with the "present" of the quest that Quentin and she takes to find seven magical keys during an oceanic trip to the uncharted eastern boundaries of the Fillorian world.  Julia's character is fascinating in how much she suffers, how deep she searches, and how she transforms herself in her quest to learn magic after her rejection from Brakebills.  Grossman does an excellent job in developing her voice and having her past experiences serve as an echo for the events unfolding in the literary present.

The Magician King differs from its predecessor in that Grossman is in greater command of the story.  Whereas The Magicians was more of a reaction to other fantasies and other novels, replete with references to Harry Potter, Narnia, and 1980s and 1990s social commentaries, The Magician King is a much more assured novel that has a stronger voice of its own.  Although Quentin and Julia do not forego the occasional snarky aside about their quest (after all, they have been there, done that, and do own the t-shirts), their search to find the keys to prevent magic from being removed from all realms is played straight.  This is a more mature novel, one that does not eschew the incisive commentaries made in the first volume, but instead feels more confident in developing those themes and showing that in addition to fantasies being more dangerous than previously imagined, that they are also essential parts of our own lives and have an intrinsic worth much more valuable than the symbolic quests or adventures might indicate.

All of this makes for a stronger novel.  Instead of outwardly trying to "subvert" tropes or to reveal the fallacies apparent in quest fantasies, as was his wont in The Magicians, Grossman here is content to let the story and characters tell their own tales, with the result that we see real growth in Quentin and Julia's characters throughout the novel.  This is not to say that we see full fruition here.  If anything, the latter events of the novel, especially at the conclusion, feel as though Quentin is taking body-blow after body-blow, leaving him battered and more rightfully fit to be disenchanted than at any previous point in the two novels.  Yet, he does not succumb to this and the novel concludes at an interesting stopping point.  Although Grossman has said there would be one more novel featuring Quentin, it would be interesting to imagine him going on from this point, continuing his development unseen by the reader. 

Some readers will not be enchanted with this novel.  Those who did not fancy Grossman's explorations of fantasy tropes through the lens of disaffected, callow upper-middle class youth likely will not interested in Quentin or Julia's stories, despite their developments in voice and presentation between the two novels.  Yet this complaint of there being "unlikeable" characters ultimately rings hollow.  What Grossman achieves is an increasingly complex understanding of shifting perspectives as youth develop into adults without falling into that fallacy that fantasies are things best left behind as one matures.  If anything, The Magician King advances the argument that what is important about fantasy is not the quest trope but rather the self-awareness and development that come from it.  As Quentin comes to realize:

This, now, this stopped him.  He'd known that adventures were supposed to be hard.  He'd understood that he would have to go a long way and solve difficult problems and fight foes and be brave and whatever else.  But this was hard in a way he hadn't counted on.  You couldn't kill it with a sword or fix it with a spell.  You couldn't fight it.  You just had to endure it, and you didn't look good or noble or heroic doing it.  You were just the guy people felt sorry for, that was all.  It didn't make a good story – in fact he saw now that the stories had it all wrong, about what you got, and what you gave.  It's not that he wasn't willing.  He just hadn't understood.  He wasn't ready for it. (p. 397)

Yet by the time he does realize this, everything is changing.  However, Quentin has grown and he accepts this and this character developments makes The Magician King a triumph and it sets the stage for new possibilities with the maturing Quentin.  Yet again I find myself satisfied with the conclusion and yet eagerly awaiting the likely final volume in Quentin's development.  What more can a reader ask?  Highly recommended.

Sometimes, "non-genre" does "genre" well, or at least differently

All paradigm shifts answer the amoral craving for novelty.  Obama's election victory did it.  So did the Auschwitz footage in its day.  Good and evil are irrelevant.  Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices.  Nothing's exempt.  One's own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine's egregiously overdue.  For ten, twenty, thirty years now I've been dragging myself through the motions.  How long do werewolves live?  Madeline asked recently.  According to WOCOP around four hundred years.  I don't know how.  Naturally one sets oneself challenges - Sanskrit, Kant, advanced calculus, t'ai chi – but that only addresses the problem of Time.  The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger.  (Vampires, not surprisingly, have an on-off love affair with catatonia.)  One by one I've exhausted the modes:  hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig.  My mechanism's worn out.  I don't have what it takes.  I still have feelings but I'm sick of having them.  Which is another feeling I'm sick of having.  I just...I just don't want any more life. (p. 7)

This quote, taken from Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf (released last month), underscores something that I've noticed from some so-called non-genre writers when they utilize SF/F genre staples such as a werewolf.  Whereas the werewolf in say something influenced (derived) from Stephanie Meyers' Twilight Saga might represent a conflicted, brooding, emo-inspired youth or where it might be a vicious, animalistic force depicting carnal lust and violence, here in Duncan's book (the opener of an apparent trilogy) the purported "last" werewolf  is shown going through a mid-life crisis of self-doubt and ennui.  For someone like myself who is entering mid-life, something rings truer in Duncan's werewolf than in others that I've read over the years.  Perhaps it's that sense of been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

Whatever it might be, I have noticed that some of the more recent "genre novels" by "non-genre" novelists have brought something to the table that made me pay closer attention to their own works.  Take for instance Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  When it was published five years ago, several SF/F fans derided it for being (to them a post-apocalyptic novel) a genre trope-laden novel in denial.  True, there is the post-apocalyptic setting, but what made McCarthy's take on it more powerful was not its similarities to 1950s-1960s post-nuclear event SF stories, but rather its core of the father/son dynamic and their search for peaceful refuge in a world seemingly devoid of peace or rest.  It wasn't a matter of what McCarthy "borrowed" or "stole" but rather what he added.  It doesn't matter as much if it's viewed as a genre novel that contains a strong commentary on familial bonding and hope or if it's seen as a social commentary that utilizes post-apocalyptic SF imagery to make its point.  What does matter is if McCarthy achieved something memorable and by and large he has done so with The Road.

Next week will see the American publication of Lev Grossman's The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel, The Magicians.  Two years ago, a lot of the controversy revolved around the "ripping-off" of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series in the form of the Brakebills magical academy and C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia for the setting (and many of the mechanics) of the fantasy portal world of Fillory.  Others did not like Grossman's novel because of the upper-middle class youth and their open insecurities and confused relationships; it read too much like an 1980s social commentary novel the likes of Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney might write.  There is something to that charge, something that appeals to me.  Perhaps it is Grossman's tackling of the consequences of escapist dreams co-existing with those capable of wielding magical forces.  Maybe it is the ripping away of aspirations to lay bare some rather brutal truths about the unfairness of life.  Possibly it is the traumas that make the fantasy world feel hollow and self-serving rather than something bigger, brighter, and better than "real life."  These things together make Grossman's last two novels refreshing reads.

Then there are authors who are doing weird fictions outside of genre imprints.  Jesse Ball's latest novel, The Curfew, tackles a dystopic future of a controlling government a bit differently than most dystopic fictions:

Who had overthrown it?  Why?  Such things weren't clear at all, just as it wasn't entirely clear that anything had been overthrown.  It was as if a curtain had been drawn and one could see to that curtain but not beyond.  One remembered that the world had been different, and not long ago.  But how?  This was the question that nagged at those who could not avoid asking questions.

The nothing that had changed at all was really beyond bearing.  Houses and buildings were full of desperate people who deeply misunderstood their desperation. This was due to artful explanation on the part of the government.  It is impossible to tell, many said out of the corners of their mouths, if the ministry is thinking well of us – if they are acting on our behalf.  Yet still there were acorns falling from trees, fish breaking the surfaces of ponds, etc.  In a long life, said many an old man, this is but one more thing.  Yet there were others who were young and knew nothing about the helplessness of life's condition.  Did they glow with light?  They did, but of course, it could not be seen.  And all the while, the grinding of bones like machinery, and the light step of tightrope walkers out beyond the windows. (p. 8-9)

The Curfew was an entertaining, thought-provoking novel not because it tackled the issue of a totalitarian novel head-on, but rather because it was obliquely referred to through metaphor and poetic turns of expression (Ball is a poet by trade).  The horror of the "curfew" builds slowly; we know there is something nefarious about the government, but seeing it through the eyes of its citizens makes it more monstrous because of how uncomfortably close it gets to describing a plutocratic republic.  By the time we get to the following dialogue, the action is more palpable because it is more implied than acted out directly:

Molly tugs on William's sleeve.

*Do you think that the world can be saved?

– The world saved?

William smiles.

– From what?

*Those people.  That, and, and Mother dying.

– That is part of our world, and can't be changed.  I don't know that I would want to live in a world where things had become better, but your mother was gone.  She always dreamed about that place, and I don't think I could go there without her.

Molly looks at her feet.  Then she looks out into the audience.  She appears to be looking right at them, one by one.

William draws in a deep breath.  He continues.

– But, for you, I want it to change.  One day you will be the only one of us three remaining, and then the world that includes us will be inside of you and nowhere else. (p. 185-186)

Ball's narrative works well because he hints at revolt and revolution against a repressive regime and he "shows" this through how furtive the opposition is to the "curfew" imposed upon them.   I especially enjoyed the subtle jabs employed by some of the characters because this felt more "real" to me than any imagined sudden open defiance to an insidious, established, totalitarian regime.

Perhaps this is where many people discover the appeal in these works noted above.  For some, the fantastical or SFnal are but window dressing for the spectacle that is human drama.  We can appreciate a good monster, but monsters as monstrums that evoke fear and wonder not because they are grotesque, but because they warn us through illumination of something within us.  These authors, in their own ways, do this through the use of genre elements to convey a sense of human curiosity and fallibility that is found more often in other literary branches than the purely speculative.  Sometimes, it does take an "outsider" to "steal" something to make something that if not quite sui generis, at least authentic to those readers who love a mixture of real-world concerns with the fantastic.

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

When he left Brakebills for New York, Quentin had expected to be knocked down and ravished by the sheer gritty reality of it all: going from the jeweled chrysalis of Brakebills to the big, messy, dirty city, where real people led real lives in the real world and did real work for real money. And for a couple of weeks he had been. It was definitely real, if by real you meant non-magical and obsessed with money and amazingly filthy. He had completely forgotten what it was like to be in the mundane world all the time. Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words - concert posters, billboards, graffiti, maps, signs, warning labels, alternate-side parking regulations - but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did. At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty colored rock behind. To a magician's eyes, Manhattan looked like a desert (p. 226)

It is dangerous to judge a book by its cover...or by its cover blurbs. Too often, the unwary reader may be burnt by the platitudes or by the comparisons. Too often readers are suckered in by the blurbs about how Book X is like Book Y, just more of it and perhaps even better. Too often, these comparisons are very shallow and the reader often feels cheated. However, the opposite can occur. Jaded readers can react to the praise with a "So what? I'm not buying that crap," and their negative reactions to the blurbage can hurt their understanding of a novel.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is one of those novels that will likely generate a plethora of responses from both camps. There will be those who will be drawn in by the comparisons to Narnia or to Harry Potter, only to discover that it is something else altogether by its end. There are others who will view such comparisons as being a sign that the book is trying to leach off of the success of those books and thus they will focus overmuch on the similarities and not enough on how Grossman plays with reader preconceptions.

But none of this really discusses what the novel is. The long passage quoted at the top is meant to give a sense of one of the book's dominant themes, that of how "fantasy" means much more than just magicial vistas and wondrous experiences; the word also refers to the illusions that we create or come to believe in; the traps that our desires and self-pity may lay for us; the notion that what is "real" and what is "fantasy" can be conflated in ways that are dangerous and transformative. This I believe lies near, if not at, the heart of The Magicians.

The book covers a little over five years of time, from protagonist Quentin Coldwater's odd and sudden admission into the Brakehills School for Magic through graduation, post-graduate ennui, to a very real and terrifying encounter with a magical land, Fillory, that Quentin had hoped for years was a "real" place. For some, Brakehills might, with its traditions, separate branches of study, and even its special sport, might seem like a carbon copy of Hogwarts transferred to an American collegiate setting. The surface similarities are not an accident; I suspect Grossman purposely wanted to create the illusion of something "familiar" so he could then deconstruct it. There are certain events through the lengthy Part I (which comprises just over half of the novel) that show the consequences of believing that magic is somehow "safe" and that by practicing magic, the practitioners would somehow be aloof from the concerns of the world.

Instead, Grossman explores the consequences of trying to fit in, of how adolescents explore their environs in ways that may be self-destructive. His depictions of Quentin and his cohorts, several of whom come to have vivid, distinct personalities despite the overwhelming focus being on Quentin's self-discovery, read more like a modern form of The Catcher in the Rye than like anything to be found in magical school novels like the Harry Potter stories. While some may find Quentin's brooding and self-loathing to be a bit much, I found myself being reminded of my own experiences in college and of those who were my friends and acquaintances. This led to a connection with the characters that deepened as the story expanded from the Brakehills setting into post-graduation life in New York in Part II and then in the final parts, to Fillory and its aftermath.

Grossman's story subtly expanded its scope as it progressed. After all, a good portion of what young adults learn in life is not learned at school and the lessons that Quentin and his friends learned were, in many respects, devastating. This was not a "safe" story, nor did Grossman tell it in a "safe" fashion. The characters swear, they fuck, they betray and are betrayed, and their various self-illusions ultimately are stripped from them. It is an uncompromising view of adolescence and the lessons that so many adolescents learn as they mature into adults. The scars that are given in this story are graphic; this is not a novel for those who want an "escape" from certain uncomfortable facets of human existence.

Although some might find the prose to be a bit uneven at times, I found for the majority of the time that the descriptive, almost florid scenes, such as the one quoted above, served to accentuate the emotions that Quentin was experiencing. Grossman varies the pace and structure of his sentences and paragraphs well, creating a sense that the character's thoughts were as haphazard as the prose appeared to be at first glance. It added to the experience and I rarely felt that Grossman was lingering too long in one place or rushing through to get to the finale.

Speaking of the "finale," the story ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. The damage has been leveled and the recupuration appears to be set to begin. Such endings are tricky ones, as they can leave the reader feeling dissatisfied, wondering if the 400 page novel were but a prologue, but for me, the novel felt as though I had read of one youth's survival of his previous life and self and that the stage was now set for an interesting character study that would play off of the fantasy tropes that had been explored over the course of this first novel. I am eager to see what lies in store for Quentin and his friends after their experiences. I can't help but want to see how the characters will grow after their harrowing adventures and their losses. C'est la vie, no?

Publisher: Viking Books (US)

Release Date: August 11, 2009 (US)