The Magicians (Lev Grossman)
First, as a general public service announcement, I have been told that Lev Grossman is the brother of the sculptor mathematician Bathsheba Grossman, who I can without reservation say kicks total butt. Did I mention she is a mathematics sculptor? Swoon!
So, the book. I do believe this is the kind of book one cannot read (well, certainly not if one is me) without feeling the need to wave one's hands about wildly, pontificate about it for hours, and buttonhole random people to rant at about it... for while I had both good and bad feelings about it, they were pronounced feelings; no apathy here! (In this respect it was just about the opposite of Time Traveler's Wife, to which julianyap compared it, my reaction to which was "Eh.") It's Contemporary New York Bored Teenagers Meet Harry Potter and Narnia, which pretty much sums up the book. As for the book itself, I really very much liked the first half (okay, the geese? awesome!), I hated and despised the third quarter (I might actually have given up reading it at this point were it not for promising I'd finish it) and thought the last quarter just about made up for the third quarter (I must say I didn't see any of that coming), except where it ended a little too abruptly. So overall, that's a win, I'd say.
Quentin, the main character, although he has his moments, mostly (starting on page 2 or so) makes me want to scream and beat my head against the wall -- I know it's intentional, but Quentin's anvilicious tenth iteration of "Why am I unhappy? Is it me, or is it just that the world sucks?" MADE ME WANT TO PUNCH HIM. (Why, yes, Quentin, it's you; and all of us know it.) (It does not help that I was never the sort of kid who wanted to escape into Fantasyland; yes, I read some books obsessively, but actually live there? Uh, no.) Alice is awesome, and I found myself surprised to rather like the Physical Kids. Brakebills (the Hogwarts analogue) I rather like, and Fillory (the Narnia analogue) makes me want to beat my head against the wall and beat the book against it (not that I would) - this, I think, is the biggest flaw in the book.
Let me, in fact, say more about Brakebills and Fillory under a cut. The deconstruction Brakebills does of Hogwarts I find rather entertaining, but then I'm a total sucker for school/college books in general. The grouping of students based on discipline I found rather more convincing than Hogwarts' House system (though this may be because as an undergraduate I felt little-to-no identification with my House, but much more so with my major), and the Quidditch-analogue also made a great deal more sense (possibly because it was not explained in nearly as great detail). My feeling was rather that Grossman was trying to make a magical school that made sense to an American college kid (whereas Hogwarts really doesn't at all -- someday when I have infinite time I shall rant about the pedagogy system in HP, which makes me cringe every time the kids enter a classroom -- but even aside from that HP is not, let's say, anything much like the experience I had at either American boarding-high-school or college), and I think he pretty much succeeded.
Fillory is where the book just entirely fell down flat. It seems like Grossman wants to have his cake and eat it too-- that is, he wants to skewer fantasy-escapism and present a compelling fantasy world at the same time. Hint: this introduces a logical inconsistency, because to do the skewering you have to make your fantasy world twee and pathetic, and not compelling at all.
Look, there's a reason Narnia has the power it does over generations of kids, even though, yes, there is a lot of twee about it. And no, it's not because of the talking beavers or because it makes throwaway references to the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, as Grossman appears to believe. It's because the reference is itself based on a tradition and archetypes that are far, far older and more coherent than the specific reference itself: when C.S. Lewis talks about the Deep Magic, he's talking about sacrifice and substitution and betrayal and forgiveness and love and death -- fundamental things. (And yeah, you may disagree with him about how these things ought to fit together, and you can certainly object to his sources if you like, that's fine, but that doesn't dissolve the framework that he's using.)
(This is the case for most fantasy works that survive over, oh, more than a ten-year period. Even (say) Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, which I personally cannot handle for more than about a quarter of a book without rolling my eyes and dropping the book, works for a lot of people because Jordan has constructed a mythos that is rooted in deeper ideas, of incarnation and humanity and gender (using, of course, scraps he dug from Tolkien and the Arthurian corpus and probably lots of other places-- but that's exactly my point; archetypes don't spring out of nowhere; they are, generally, made from other things). )
When Grossman tries to manufacture an ersatz Narnia, on the other hand, it's all fragmented and incoherent, borrowing superficial ideas from Narnia but without anything deep holding it together. One of the characters says that certain things don't work because of Higher Laws involving balance (so far so good), but in the absence of context (which there's really not), it's just a marked bid simply a) to make the plot work, and b) to Make A Point About Gods And Stuff. Let's just say that it didn't work when C.S. Lewis tried allegory by fiat either, in The Last Battle. Or: when was the last time you met a kid who was bowled over by C.S. Lewis's SF?
It really makes one wonder why the heck anyone, much less Quentin (who is presented as a self-absorbed twit, but not a stupid one by any means), would even finish a book set in this world, much less be obsessed with it. Which rather undercuts the whole point Grossman is trying to make.
Though again, the ending of the Fillory part of the book, with what it says about responsibility and abdication of same -- goes back to archetypes that the author himself believes and has carefully built up in the rest of the book (and I'm not even talking about the annoying Quentin's angst here, but more about, oh, Amanda) -- and almost, almost! brings the level of the whole thing up enough not to be irksome. And the ending -- well, you can read it in a number of ways (Abigail Nussbaum reads it quite negatively, in a way that had convinced me not to read it until julianyap encouraged it), but I'll choose to read it in a hopeful way: for me, symbolized by the redemption of (of all people) Eliot.
So, the book. I do believe this is the kind of book one cannot read (well, certainly not if one is me) without feeling the need to wave one's hands about wildly, pontificate about it for hours, and buttonhole random people to rant at about it... for while I had both good and bad feelings about it, they were pronounced feelings; no apathy here! (In this respect it was just about the opposite of Time Traveler's Wife, to which julianyap compared it, my reaction to which was "Eh.") It's Contemporary New York Bored Teenagers Meet Harry Potter and Narnia, which pretty much sums up the book. As for the book itself, I really very much liked the first half (okay, the geese? awesome!), I hated and despised the third quarter (I might actually have given up reading it at this point were it not for promising I'd finish it) and thought the last quarter just about made up for the third quarter (I must say I didn't see any of that coming), except where it ended a little too abruptly. So overall, that's a win, I'd say.
Quentin, the main character, although he has his moments, mostly (starting on page 2 or so) makes me want to scream and beat my head against the wall -- I know it's intentional, but Quentin's anvilicious tenth iteration of "Why am I unhappy? Is it me, or is it just that the world sucks?" MADE ME WANT TO PUNCH HIM. (Why, yes, Quentin, it's you; and all of us know it.) (It does not help that I was never the sort of kid who wanted to escape into Fantasyland; yes, I read some books obsessively, but actually live there? Uh, no.) Alice is awesome, and I found myself surprised to rather like the Physical Kids. Brakebills (the Hogwarts analogue) I rather like, and Fillory (the Narnia analogue) makes me want to beat my head against the wall and beat the book against it (not that I would) - this, I think, is the biggest flaw in the book.
Let me, in fact, say more about Brakebills and Fillory under a cut. The deconstruction Brakebills does of Hogwarts I find rather entertaining, but then I'm a total sucker for school/college books in general. The grouping of students based on discipline I found rather more convincing than Hogwarts' House system (though this may be because as an undergraduate I felt little-to-no identification with my House, but much more so with my major), and the Quidditch-analogue also made a great deal more sense (possibly because it was not explained in nearly as great detail). My feeling was rather that Grossman was trying to make a magical school that made sense to an American college kid (whereas Hogwarts really doesn't at all -- someday when I have infinite time I shall rant about the pedagogy system in HP, which makes me cringe every time the kids enter a classroom -- but even aside from that HP is not, let's say, anything much like the experience I had at either American boarding-high-school or college), and I think he pretty much succeeded.
Fillory is where the book just entirely fell down flat. It seems like Grossman wants to have his cake and eat it too-- that is, he wants to skewer fantasy-escapism and present a compelling fantasy world at the same time. Hint: this introduces a logical inconsistency, because to do the skewering you have to make your fantasy world twee and pathetic, and not compelling at all.
Look, there's a reason Narnia has the power it does over generations of kids, even though, yes, there is a lot of twee about it. And no, it's not because of the talking beavers or because it makes throwaway references to the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, as Grossman appears to believe. It's because the reference is itself based on a tradition and archetypes that are far, far older and more coherent than the specific reference itself: when C.S. Lewis talks about the Deep Magic, he's talking about sacrifice and substitution and betrayal and forgiveness and love and death -- fundamental things. (And yeah, you may disagree with him about how these things ought to fit together, and you can certainly object to his sources if you like, that's fine, but that doesn't dissolve the framework that he's using.)
(This is the case for most fantasy works that survive over, oh, more than a ten-year period. Even (say) Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, which I personally cannot handle for more than about a quarter of a book without rolling my eyes and dropping the book, works for a lot of people because Jordan has constructed a mythos that is rooted in deeper ideas, of incarnation and humanity and gender (using, of course, scraps he dug from Tolkien and the Arthurian corpus and probably lots of other places-- but that's exactly my point; archetypes don't spring out of nowhere; they are, generally, made from other things). )
When Grossman tries to manufacture an ersatz Narnia, on the other hand, it's all fragmented and incoherent, borrowing superficial ideas from Narnia but without anything deep holding it together. One of the characters says that certain things don't work because of Higher Laws involving balance (so far so good), but in the absence of context (which there's really not), it's just a marked bid simply a) to make the plot work, and b) to Make A Point About Gods And Stuff. Let's just say that it didn't work when C.S. Lewis tried allegory by fiat either, in The Last Battle. Or: when was the last time you met a kid who was bowled over by C.S. Lewis's SF?
It really makes one wonder why the heck anyone, much less Quentin (who is presented as a self-absorbed twit, but not a stupid one by any means), would even finish a book set in this world, much less be obsessed with it. Which rather undercuts the whole point Grossman is trying to make.
Though again, the ending of the Fillory part of the book, with what it says about responsibility and abdication of same -- goes back to archetypes that the author himself believes and has carefully built up in the rest of the book (and I'm not even talking about the annoying Quentin's angst here, but more about, oh, Amanda) -- and almost, almost! brings the level of the whole thing up enough not to be irksome. And the ending -- well, you can read it in a number of ways (Abigail Nussbaum reads it quite negatively, in a way that had convinced me not to read it until julianyap encouraged it), but I'll choose to read it in a hopeful way: for me, symbolized by the redemption of (of all people) Eliot.