Book review: The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Title: The Magicians
Author: Lev Grossman
Year of publication: 2009
Genre: Fantasy — Literary
My rating: 4.5 stars or A-

Quentin Coldwater is on his way to his college admissions interview. He thinks he’s off to Princeton. He’s not happy, though, despite having “painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness” — he sees that his life is all mapped out, and it is anticlimatic. To counter how mundane he finds real life, he holds on to his childhood fascination with the fictional Narnia-like world of Fillory, where happiness is possible.

But Quentin is very quickly hijacked away from his friends, family and plans and into a college of magic, the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. That’s right, boys and girls, it’s Harry Potter but American and set after high school. Except it’s nothing like Harry Potter and the only reason I feel obliged to mention Harry Potter is that every time a magic school comes up these days, Harry Potter has to be mentioned, even if to say, as with this case, that it’s nothing like it.

The whole section at the college is fanastic. For starters, over-achieving Quentin’s reaction to the school is a great character moment and funny as well:

Maybe he should ask to see a brochure…Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.

The characters he meets are fully-fleshed and very real, learning magic feels real and damn difficult, the whole college-friendships aspect of it is authentic, the chapter where they go to the Artic is wonderful, there’s fun moments and sweet moments and dark moments and there’s a couple of genuinely chilling moments which remind you that there’s evil things out there the students know nothing about. I adored this book all through the college part.

And then Quentin and his friends graduate. It’s very well set up in the first half that there isn’t really that much to do for wizards in the modern world and the biggest danger lies in failing to find something to keep those trained magical minds busy. Imagine the high achievers who go to the country’s best universities/colleges and work hard and graduate at the top of their class…and then can’t get jobs because of the economic climate and their own unsuited-ness to working with or for others. So it’s no suprise Quentin, always teetering on unhappiness and disappointment (even with magic college), falls into a self-destructive mode of behaviour when free of the pressure of college but with nothing worthwhile to replace it. It’s irritating, but not surprising.

It seems he might be saved, and his faltering, failing friendships and relationship might be saved, when a way into Fillory, land of his childhood imaginings, falls into his hands. This is his last chance of fulfilling his unarticulated dreams. It, too, is not like he expected.

This section, and the section afterwards, are where I really struggled with this book. Again, the events and their logic are well set up from hints and clues in the first half…intellectually. But I didn’t really feel it emotionally, especially the sacrifice that is made. Logically, it had to happen. Emotionally, it felt rushed and a stupid first-resort, not a desperate last-resort. And it took me several days off turning it over in my head until I felt comfortable with the way the book ended and the message I could take from it.

In the end, though, I did reconcile myself to it. I didn’t like the second half as much as I liked the first, but I still loved reading it. For all his mistakes, I genuinely liked Quentin and wanted him to find happiness. I adored most of the supporting cast, especially Alice and Eliot. And I liked the real-ness of the magic world Grossman created.

Verdict
Don’t be fooled by every review (including this one) that mentions Potter/Rowling or Narnia/Lewis. It draws on those tropes but is not a rehash of them. This book has excellent writing, very real and very flawed characters, an unusual plot, and an interesting look at the pursuit of childhood dreams.

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