Semi-Book Rec: "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman
I had heard this book being billed as "Harry Potter grown up", and recommended along the lines of "C.S. Lewis, but with sex!" And... it's sort of like that. It's a retake of the "lonely boy gets a chance to study at awesome magical school and has adventures" young adult fantasy plot, and there is indeed growing up and sex. There are also some very familiar plot devices on loan from Rowling, Lewis, and T.H. White, among others. And Grossman's writing style is lyrical and interesting, and the book did suck me in fairly quickly. Yet this was not a particularly good reading experience, mainly because the main character was so freaking unlikeable, and because the last third of the book was so anti-everything young adult fantasy novel trope. Generally speaking, I'm all for books where typical plot contrivances are shown to be useless and mockable, but when this is coupled with characters who are (mostly) useless and mockable, it doesn't end up working.
Let's start with what worked: Grossman's description of magic and the teaching of it is spot-on: magic is more difficult than a calculus exam taken in the dark with a five-piece swing band playing over your shoulder. And the teaching of it is best left to antisocial weirdos, in a rarefied, Anglophile school atmosphere that only the twice-selected of the selected few get into. To whit, a quotation from one of the professors:
"The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world. This is not to say we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is they do. Or perhaps they don't understand yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn't have to. He works with what he has. With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter."
The Magicians is strongest when Grossman describes just how difficult, dangerous, and interesting it is to be a magician, and what the costs of failure are. Unfortunately, those parts are few and far between as the teenage plight of the main character and the bickering between him and the rest of his compatriots takes center stage throughout most of the novel. The main character, Quentin, reminded me a lot of the guys I used to go to high school with, whose problems often sounded like one long whine along the lines of, "WOE I am reasonably smart, but secretly very sensitive, so I adopted this fake jerk surface attitude and now I wonder why I can't get a date and my family is so rich and I can go to Harvard, but no one likes me and I'm lonely and my life is hard and WOE." This got old pretty quick in high school, and it got old pretty quickly in the novel, too. I was willing to give Quentin the benefit of the doubt--after all, having your universe turned upside down by the revelation that magic does exist isn't something you process in a day, or even a month. But Quentin never got over this, and stubbornly refused to be happy, even when presented with all the things he had ever wanted. Now, take that character, age him about five years, and make him a magician with supreme, universe-altering powers, and give him access to wildly huge amounts of money, and guess where that gets him. (Hint: it ain't happy.) It's sort of like Catcher in the Rye, Part 2: Holden Caulfield, Magician!.
The other aspect of the plot that's handled in a fairly tricky fashion is the final third of the book, where all the main characters find that they're able to travel to the magical land of Fillory, the subject of children's books that Quentin knew obsessively. Fillory is obviously a parallel of Narnia, complete with talking bears, trees, and other magical creatures, and I got the repeated feeling that Grossman didn't care for Lewis' Aslan, a benevolent, God-like power who lets bad things happen to good people. (Quentin argues with the God-figure in Fillory, explicitly asking him, "You are a god, and things are really falling apart up there.... Why would You let Your people suffer like that?") The other portion of this part of the plot is the revealing of the Bad Guy and the battle against him, which is well-done and properly menacing, and hits all the notes perfectly for action and suspense. But, again, without particularly caring whether the main character makes it through or not, the battle doesn't have that much resonance, especially when an earlier, very obvious plot device comes into play.
The character who I liked the most was Alice, Quentin's love interest. In fact, I would have been far more interested in the story were it told from her point of view (although her single-minded to devotion to Quentin grew wearisome and seemed highly unrealistic.) Without going into too many plot specifics, Alice turns out to be the key to success on many levels, and on many occasions, and her choices reflect true bravery and courage. It's too bad that she ended up relegated to second-tier status when she could have easily held the plot up on her own.
In sum: this is definitely an arresting read, and I wish I could ask Grossman questions about his particular authorial choices (and axes to grind). I would like to shake the main character around until he came to his senses. But I do think Grossman did nail a central point--teenagers, and most people, if really finding themselves gifted with fearsome powers, would have a tough time distinguishing between good, evil, and pure selfishness. Magic isn't like an injection of ethics; it's like alcohol: it changes everyone who imbibes it, for better or worse.
Let's start with what worked: Grossman's description of magic and the teaching of it is spot-on: magic is more difficult than a calculus exam taken in the dark with a five-piece swing band playing over your shoulder. And the teaching of it is best left to antisocial weirdos, in a rarefied, Anglophile school atmosphere that only the twice-selected of the selected few get into. To whit, a quotation from one of the professors:
"The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world. This is not to say we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is they do. Or perhaps they don't understand yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn't have to. He works with what he has. With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter."
The Magicians is strongest when Grossman describes just how difficult, dangerous, and interesting it is to be a magician, and what the costs of failure are. Unfortunately, those parts are few and far between as the teenage plight of the main character and the bickering between him and the rest of his compatriots takes center stage throughout most of the novel. The main character, Quentin, reminded me a lot of the guys I used to go to high school with, whose problems often sounded like one long whine along the lines of, "WOE I am reasonably smart, but secretly very sensitive, so I adopted this fake jerk surface attitude and now I wonder why I can't get a date and my family is so rich and I can go to Harvard, but no one likes me and I'm lonely and my life is hard and WOE." This got old pretty quick in high school, and it got old pretty quickly in the novel, too. I was willing to give Quentin the benefit of the doubt--after all, having your universe turned upside down by the revelation that magic does exist isn't something you process in a day, or even a month. But Quentin never got over this, and stubbornly refused to be happy, even when presented with all the things he had ever wanted. Now, take that character, age him about five years, and make him a magician with supreme, universe-altering powers, and give him access to wildly huge amounts of money, and guess where that gets him. (Hint: it ain't happy.) It's sort of like Catcher in the Rye, Part 2: Holden Caulfield, Magician!.
The other aspect of the plot that's handled in a fairly tricky fashion is the final third of the book, where all the main characters find that they're able to travel to the magical land of Fillory, the subject of children's books that Quentin knew obsessively. Fillory is obviously a parallel of Narnia, complete with talking bears, trees, and other magical creatures, and I got the repeated feeling that Grossman didn't care for Lewis' Aslan, a benevolent, God-like power who lets bad things happen to good people. (Quentin argues with the God-figure in Fillory, explicitly asking him, "You are a god, and things are really falling apart up there.... Why would You let Your people suffer like that?") The other portion of this part of the plot is the revealing of the Bad Guy and the battle against him, which is well-done and properly menacing, and hits all the notes perfectly for action and suspense. But, again, without particularly caring whether the main character makes it through or not, the battle doesn't have that much resonance, especially when an earlier, very obvious plot device comes into play.
The character who I liked the most was Alice, Quentin's love interest. In fact, I would have been far more interested in the story were it told from her point of view (although her single-minded to devotion to Quentin grew wearisome and seemed highly unrealistic.) Without going into too many plot specifics, Alice turns out to be the key to success on many levels, and on many occasions, and her choices reflect true bravery and courage. It's too bad that she ended up relegated to second-tier status when she could have easily held the plot up on her own.
In sum: this is definitely an arresting read, and I wish I could ask Grossman questions about his particular authorial choices (and axes to grind). I would like to shake the main character around until he came to his senses. But I do think Grossman did nail a central point--teenagers, and most people, if really finding themselves gifted with fearsome powers, would have a tough time distinguishing between good, evil, and pure selfishness. Magic isn't like an injection of ethics; it's like alcohol: it changes everyone who imbibes it, for better or worse.