The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Viking, 2009)

Quick review: The elements here—a college for magic, secret doors leading to a magical land with talking animals—are familiar to fantasy readers, but this is not a children’s book, and offers a lot of intrigue. Especially well done are the scenes at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Though not always successful, The Magicians will keep you reading.

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In the movie Shadowlands, a boy visiting C.S. Lewis wanders into the attic and finds an old wardrobe. Hoping against hope, he opens it. Of course, it's just a wardrobe. As The Magicians opens, 17-year-old Quentin Coldwater sees a mysterious vast cabinet in an old man's house. He can't help opening it—but it turns out to be just a liquor cabinet.

Quentin desperately wants magic to be real. His favorite childhood books, read obsessively over and over, are set in the Narnia-like magical land of Fillory, which can similarly be reached through a cabinet-like grandfather clock. To him, opening a door into such a world would be like "opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do but never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better" (p. 7). (That's a brave sentence in a book that might be said to be making that same promise.) Even when Quentin discovers magic is real, goes to college for it, and visits magical lands, he still must discover that even real magic can't actually live up to this promise either. Nothing can make you other than yourself.

I'm finding the reading experience of this book to be paradoxical. I loved it as I was reading it, could barely put it down, quickly forgave bothersome aspects. Yet as I've organized my thoughts for this review, the book's flaws seem more and more glaring. First, though, some praise.

I love good stories of apprenticeship, and for me the best parts of The Magicians look at how magically gifted young people learn their difficult, exacting craft at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. The classroom scenes, plus a grueling training episode in the Antarctic where students are transformed into geese for the flight down, are very satisfying to read.

Also, Grossman gets a lot of things right about magic. During Quentin's entrance exam, he's asked to perform some magic. He begins by doing the only kind he thinks he knows, card tricks, but something takes over:

With two hands together, as if he were releasing a dove, he tossed the deck of cards lightly up to the ceiling. The deck broke apart and scattered in flight, like a meteorite losing cohesion in the atmosphere, and as the cards fluttered back down to earth they stacked themselves on the tabletop. . . . He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a Queen—all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn't exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books. (p. 33)

That intriguing list pleases me in the way poetry does. Quentin's magic here mimics the creative process where if you let go in a certain disciplined way, your unconscious presents you with images that work, that signify and imply, even if your conscious mind isn't sure why yet. Horns, clocks, bees, and books sound random, but as it turns out, all have deep symbolic associations with both Brakebills and Fillory.

Fillory is a fun creation, also, bringing in elements from many children's magical adventure stories besides Narnia, such as E. Nesbit's Five Children books, Edward Eager, A Wrinkle in Time, and so on. I could understand why Quentin longs for this world. I also enjoyed the knowing, affectionate references to Harry Potter.

In the interests of keeping this review from getting longer than it already is, I haven't even touched on the book's other characters and the relationships among them. There are some interesting figures among the magician students, especially a Sebastian Flyte-like character named Eliot. I did, however, get tired of the adolescent posturing among Quentin and his friends, who often resemble spoiled rich kids. Don't they know how lucky they are?

A big strength of the Potter books is that you know what Potter and his friends are fighting for and why. But in The Magicians, and this is the crux of the book's faults, all their powerful magic doesn't seem to be good for much except as the private amusement of Quentin and his friends, an extremely talented, intelligent, privileged group living in a tiny enclave. They have enormous power to influence the world. Yet when they consider life after graduation, "No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters" (p. 210).

Forgive me while I lapse into sputtering, outraged indignation. Excuse me? How can you say such a thing and possibly be paying any attention to the world? Maybe illness, global warming, war, poverty, natural disasters, rape, murder, injustice, and despair just aren't compelling enough for these precious little darlings. In which case, fuck you, magicians.

It's not that they aren't allowed to interfere: "It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the scenes " (p. 210). Chic is so perfectly the operative motivating word there. Yes. The reason to influence world affairs would be the coolness factor.

I'll bend over backwards to be fair here and say that, yes, young people tend to be self-centered, and there's a reason the word glamor originally meant "magic, enchantment." But young people also tend to be idealistic, and you see none of that. Quentin is too busy searching for elusive personal happiness to care much about anyone or anything else. While his parents are a bit distant, he's hardly been abused or suffered anything worse than a little social awkwardness. Yet he's always feeling sorry for himself because life isn't exciting enough. HE CAN DO MAGIC but you know, yawn.

Or, as Grossman puts it, Quentin knows that after Brakebills "any one of a thousand options promised—basically guaranteed—a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him?" (p. 211). Gee, I dunno. Maybe because…he's a total prat? In the end, I just don't like Quentin very much.

Quentin's sweet girlfriend Alice finally tells him, "for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life" (p. 333). At great cost to himself and others, Quentin does at last learn this lesson, and resigns himself to as ordinary a life as a magician can have.

Now, I'm not saying this is some fantastic, stunning insight, since it boils down to "Wherever you go, there you are." I kind of expect better from Grossman than a piece of wisdom I first encountered from Buckaroo Banzai. Nevertheless, it's Quentin's and he worked hard for it. But Grossman is so invested in the Narnian secret-door hope that in the end, he betrays Alice's advice so that Quentin can really, truly start his real life of Fillorian grand adventure, hurray! This makes nonsense of Quentin's entire struggle throughout the book. And that is a very big problem.

The Fillorian section of the book, where Quentin and friends find a way into this magical land and go on a quest, contains a huge contradiction in the book's logic that I found extremely disappointing. This logic dictates that magic is difficult to learn, much more complicated than waving a wand and chanting a spell. As Grossman explains it, "The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors," such as "exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory" (p. 55).

Makes sense to me. In fact, I loved that, and thought it a big strength of the book, reminiscent of Le Guin's Earthsea wizard school, where young wizards must learn the true names of everything. Until we get to Fillory, the book is always underlining how important it is to thoroughly understand local considerations—called Circumstances—in spell casting.

Yet once in Fillory, all these stringent conditions go out the window: "He must have used a spell to speed up his reflexes, Fillorian Circumstances be damned" (p. 298). Just "be damned"? It's that easy? The characters are suddenly able to cast all kinds of spells—light spells, kinetic spells, weapon charms—and in the heat of battle too. It's beyond ridiculous that when it's easier for the plot, you can just say be damned to the laws of how magic works.

Similarly, when we first see the Beast, a dangerous character who slips into a Brakebills classroom due to a miscast spell, he's supremely powerful and frightening, in a wonderfully subtle way. The faculty—powerful magicians all—take hours to cast spells sufficient to banish him, and that's on their own territory which is heavily shielded. But when we next meet him, in Fillory, on his own ground, where he has easily defeated the old gods, Alice gives him a good beating, casting such spells as Fergus's Spectral Armory: "'Like it? Do you? Very basic principles. Second Year stuff! But then you never bothered with school, did you . . . You wouldn't have lasted an hour at Brakebills!'" (p. 360) This just doesn't make sense. Again, Grossman is ignoring his own rules that he set up because it's easier that way. I call foul.

I also wonder why these magicians can alter the physical world, but still get colds, blistered feet, and need to use condoms. It makes sense to me that they can't alter physical appearance permanently, but a healing spell should be basic magic.

Like so many books these days, The Magicians could have used better editing. I found extra words on a few pages. A "silver crown" on p. 311 is "a simple golden circlet" on p. 345. The most egregious example is the Fillory map on the endpapers. Good luck trying to follow anyone's journey, because the placements and directions don't correspond in any way to what's on the map.

Maybe no book can "get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better." But in my life as a reader, it sure has felt that way a lot of the time, even if the feeling is temporary. For all my problems with The Magicians, I'm glad I spent time there.

Grade: B+