What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

The just released sequel, The Magician King, picks up where this left off and ads the question: “What if you found the fantasy land of your dreams but eventually got bored and restless? “What if it wasn’t enough?”

Quentin and his friends are now the kings and queens of Fillory, but the days and nights of royal luxury are starting to pall. After a morning hunt takes a sinister turn, Quentin and his old friend Julia charter a magical sailing ship and set out on an errand to the wild outer reaches of their kingdom. Their pleasure cruise becomes an adventure when the two are unceremoniously dumped back into the last place Quentin ever wants to see: his parent’s house in Chesterton, Massachusetts. And only the black, twisted magic that Julia learned on the streets can save them.

Magician King is still a dark, adult modern version of the young adult or childhood fantasy adventure and it still contemplates the question what if magic, and the fantasy land of your childhood, was real. But then it takes this background and foundation and forces the characters to wrestle with the complexity and difficulty of adulthood that remain even if magic exists. What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be willing to really give of yourself to something or someone larger than your own selfish interests. Does the happy ending still result?

Along the way Grossman also explores what the architecture or building blocks of magic might look like and how human interaction with that – past, present and future – might work or not work.

More after the jump …

As with the first book, there are really two seperate threads to the story. In this case, the two threads follow Quentin and his quest for adventure and psychological/spiritual growth and Julia’s path from Brakebill’s reject to master of magic – albeit a darker more black market version.

The Quentin thread follows closely on the style of the first book: equal parts serious and silly; hipster irony and casual vulgarity with classic fantasy aspects; genre and philosophical. I think this element – while still disjointed at times – works better because there is a narrative pull unifying it: Quentin wants to be in Fillory but is willing to risk that for his quest – to get to the bottom of certain relationships including the underlying connection of magic to earth and Fillory.

As the story develops, in classic quest fashion, Quentin begins to understand a lot more about himself and the impact of his actions.  But there are times where the persona wears thin. At times he seems just a self-interested jerk. At times he seems more than that – more aware more mature. But the flippancy, vulgarity and seeming innate selfishness ebb and flow making it hard to get a read on Quentin.

In contrast, the alternating chapters focused on Julia seem only loosely connected to epic fantasy as a genre. This is more magical realism or realistic fiction that happens to contain a fantastical element. It is the gritty story of someone who sacrifices everything at her disposal to gain the one thing she believes she wants only to find that this sacrifice has not only fundamentally changed her but has set off a series of unintended consequences – personal, physical, magical, spiritual, etc.

The two threads eventually intertwine, and this connection plays a role in the stories climax and conclusion, but they do not always sit easily together.  Julia’s story in fact has a great deal more power and drive than does Quentin’s. It has a cleanness and a hardness that makes it powerful and even gripping. Julia is a story obviously going somewhere and the tension builds and grows. Quentin’s ebs and flows, twists and turns, starts and stops. It just doesn’t have the oomph.

Despite all of this, The Magician King is an entertaining and enjoyable story. Even as you note the disjointed nature and wonder about this or that plot point and too easy resolution, or get a little lost as the genres and styles mix and meld, you want to keep reading. You want to keep reading both to enjoy the language and the story – to find out what happens but also how Grossman chooses to work it all out.

It could be that some of this is the nature of bringing the style and structure of fantasy into an adult world.  Adults are often not afforded the luxury of clean lines and choices; of heroism and friendship unsullied by conflict and complexity. Part of what Gossman is trying to do, I think, is say things just are not that easy – life is complex and messy and full of gray even as we seek simplicity and stability and moral clarity.

I am sure fans of the first book are even now devouring this sequel if they haven’t already finished.  But I would encourage anyone interested in the style, structure or themes of fantasy to check out the series. Even if you don’t think he quite pulls it off I think he will keep you entertained and intrigued about the process; make you think about your expectations and conceptions of genre and story. Of course, anyone who just enjoys an interesting story will get a kick out of it too.

Related articles

• Lev Grossman’s The Magician King: fantasy sequel, the banality of magic and the magic of banality (boingboing.net)
• ‘Magician King’: A Hauntingly Fantastic Follow-Up (npr.org)

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

The first section is – as many critics have noted – basically Harry Potter goes to college.  But despite its derivative nature – or perhaps because Grossman embraces it – this storyline is imaginative and entertaining for the most part.  This is where the basic hook works.  It is interesting to see a “magic is real” type storyline in a different setting and with a different tone and style.

And when things begin to slow down Grossman introduces a creative and well done challenge; a sort of senior project for magicians that involves a trip to the South Pole as geese and using magic to return home.  I also like the meeting in the cellar where each graduate was given a sort of built in emergency defense system as matriculation gift

This first part, however, really does feel like just an introduction.  It very much has the feel of the first book in a series.  Characters are introduced and the settings explored but a lot seems left to discover in further adventures.

The second half of the book is more involved but I am not sure it quite comes together either.  Quentin and his fellow magical graduates come to find out that Filory – the magical world explored in a popular series  from their childhood called Fillory and Further – is not a fictional world but a real place.  And as it turns out, a very dangerous place.

The group faces the challenge together and the result is mostly tragic.  There follows two interludes of sorts.  One where Quentin recovers injuries sustained in the events in Fillory and then his attempt to put his magical life behind him.

All these different pieces and parts – some interesting and entertaining others less so – give the book a sort of stop-start feeling.  It takes a while to get going; gains speed; rushes to a conclusion and then sort of peters out.

As this rundown has probably made clear, I have mixed feelings about The Magicians.  I enjoyed reading it.  It is a creative take, and interesting twist, on a popular genre and, IMO, an aspect of how so many come to be voracious readers as young people through adulthood.

But on the other hand, there is a sense that an opportunity was missed; that possibilities were left on the table; an experiment that didn’t quite work.  In his review in the NYT, Michael Agger notes that maybe this is the nature of the beast:

The Narnia books and the Harry Potter series captivate the young by putting young people in a world where adults are a distant, unsteady presence. “The Magicians” is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life. Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?

There is some merit to this I think.  Perhaps the result is interesting and entertaining but doesn’t quite come together in a neat package like we want it to.

The Complete Review, however, made a different argument which I found compelling.  The book should have been more definitively the start of a multi-book series:

The fact that The Magicians fits so openly in this line of fantasy tales turns out to be one of its more appealing elements. Grossman acknowledges his debts openly, and has some fun with them, and so that works out quite well. What works less well are his other ambitions: surprisingly, he doesn’t take a page from Rowling and Lewis and opt for the multi-volume epic (though a sequel is apparently in the works …), and instead stuffs all his material into far too little space. The resulting odd pacing, and the consequences of it, undermine the whole terribly: spread patiently over four or five volumes, this could have been a lot of fun. Crammed into one — think all of Harry Potter and Narnia packed together into four hundred pages — it has its moments but adds up to a surprisingly thin tale.

The more I thought about this the more I came to be persuaded.  The introduction and the hook of the story really are the strongest part.  Building on this to create a better paced, more coherent, first book in a series would have made for a stronger work.  There was even a natural cliffhanger with Quentin’s convalescence and meeting Jane Chatwin.  That was the perfect spot for a “To be continued …”

But alas, it was not to be.  It will be interesting, however, to see how the Grossman takes the story forward in the sequel.

Criticisms aside, I would think anyone who read fantasy when they were younger – or who reads it today – would get a kick of out The Magicians.  Even if it is in some ways a failed experiment it is still an interesting one.

Laura Miller had a problem.  When she was young she was absolutely captivated and enthralled with the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.  Given a copy of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by a school teacher she dove in an entered a new world.  Things would never be the same.

But eventually she grew older and began to find out things about Lewis and Narnia that changed her relationship with the series: the Christian underpinnings of the story, Lewis’s world view and political opinions, etc.  But as she pursued a career as a literary critic she decided to return to these books and she found there was still much about them that she loved.

The road that had once seemed to lead to free and open country had in reality doubled back to church.  Now I was trying to explain why my damning adolescent assessment of Chronicles wasn’t entirely sufficient, either.  As an adult, I’d discovered that I could follow Lewis pretty far without feeling obliged to return to Christianity, and that the old sensations of freedom, of wilderness in Narnia, remained.

She sets out to make sense of this journey.  The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is her answer in book form.

I guess you would have to put Magician’s Book into the category of creative non-fiction.  Good thing too, because otherwise it would be hard to categorize.  Part memoir, literary criticism, biography, and current events reporting it frequently slides between childhood memories, academic criticism, Freudian analysis, personal opinion, and interviews with other authors.

Sometimes this manages to flow and hold together in a coherent way and at others the transitions are a little rough.  I found the sections dealing with Lewis’s faith and politics were the least convincing – but perhaps that is my bias – but the book as a whole remains an insightful and engaging look at Lewis and Narnia.

The sections dealing with the politically incorrect nature of Lewis’s views, and their inclusion in his fiction, struck me as the weakest part of the book.  Miller left the Catholicism of her childhood and never looked back.  And as a result, she evidences little sympathy for Lewis’s faith or political worldview. This is the weakness of such a personal take, since Miller is left cold by the religious nature of the books she can’t see why others might feel differently.

If you share Miller’s secular liberalism then you will probably find her discussion of Lewis’s chauvinism and her relating how she found the religious elements of the Chronicles unpersuasive, or her mockery of the way certain Christians seem to worship Lewis, dead on.  Those who don’t share her perspective, however, will likely not learn much from these chapters.

There are two aspects that make the book in spite of these distractions: Miller’s attempt to understand, and describe, why she loved the books as a child (and what continues to make them so appealing to children); and her insights into what Lewis was attempting to accomplish in his literary efforts.

The first aspect benefits from the book’s eclectic style (the lack of a rigid format, etc.).  Miller’s exploration of her childhood love of Narnia, and larger topic of one’s first literary loves, reads like a conversation with an intelligent and knowledgeable friend.  Miller shares her own experiences, adds in biographical details about Lewis, shares quotes and experiences from other authors, discusses children’s literature, and even describes her interaction with her friends’ young children.  Put it all together and it is an interesting exploration of books, they way young people interact with them, and how this both impacts us and changes as we grow older.

With this as background, in the final chapters Miller provides a very useful conceptualization of Lewis’s work.  She uses her understand of Lewis’s academic work on Medieval Literature, and its underpinning world view, to help the readers understand the style and structure of The Chronicles.

She points out that their style and structure frequently turns people off:

The made-up-ness of Narnia has seemed particularly glaring to certain well-read adults who never encountered them as children.  Lewis’s mythic syncretism – fauns and dragons and dwarves and Arabian Nights exoticism all jumbled together – undermine the Chronicle’s religious integrity for readers like John Goldthwaite, and the Christian subtext spoils the imaginative freedom for readers like my own teenage self.  For Tolkien, these undigested borrowings and the lack of coherent, unified world-building make Narnia a flimsy, derivative concoction that spits in the eye of true sub-creation.  The idea that the Chronicles are allegories – a supposedly crude, reductive, pedantic for of literature – as well as a collection of insufficiently original tidbits, offends against the premium contemporary critics place on naturalism and novelty.

But Miller argues, rightfully to my mind, that these critics are frequently missing the point.  What readers, young and old, enjoy about the Chronicles is the joy Lewis put into them:

The Chronicles are unified, not by anything resembling the exhaustive cultural stuff that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth, not by a single aesthetic or style, and not even, really, by a cogent religious vision, but by readerly desire.  Lewis poured into his imaginary world everything that he had adored in the books he read as a child and in the handful of children’s books he had enjoyed as an adult.  And there is more, too: treasures collected from Dante, from Spenser, from Malory, from Austen, from old romances and ballads and fairy tales and pagan epics.  Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences.  In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.

And this is how she comes to understand her relationship with Lewis and the Chronicles.  That Lewis shared her love of books and reading and that by pouring his love into Narnia he has opened up those worlds to untold numbers of people.  What is wonderful about Narnia is what is wonderful about books and literature.

As Miller works this out the reader is brought a long on a wonderful journey exploring not just Lewis, his life and work, but books and literature.  And like Lewis, Miller’s love of both comes through.

I came away knowing more about Lewis and Narnia but also about literature and how it “works.” But I was also reminded of the magic of reading and failing in love with this experience as a child.

So no matter what your politics, faith, or even opinion of The Chronicles of Narnia, if you love reading I think you will enjoy this book.

The first focus, or theme if you will, of this year is myths and fables.  The idea is to explore in both fiction and non, the idea and practice of myths, fables, and stories.  Now, I am not an academic and don’t plan on presenting an online seminar or anything. It just means my reading, and thus my reviews, will be tied together by this thread.  Not all of it necessarily, but a chunk of it.

Just to give you a taste of what is coming, here are some of the books that will be reviewed and discussed in the coming days and weeks:

• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Magician’s Book: a Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura Miller
• The Narnian by Alan Jacobs
• A number of books from Cannongate Myth Series
• A number of young adult fantasy books.

I hope to be able to have the time and energy to write about all of this in a way that presents a semi-coherent theme.  Not by explicitly tying them all together but simply by allowing you to see the similar ideas and threads that naturally connect them.

I also have planned some reading on intellectuals I have long admired and studied.  Two in particular I will be reading on this year are William F. Buckley and George F. Kennan.  So stay tuned for that as well.

I hope this process will help me focus my writing and at the same time make reading this site more enjoyable and interesting.  Maybe the miscellany will be a little more collected that way.