The Magicians: A Novel

This was a real page-turner of a book and I could hardly put it down. Grossman has finally come into his own as a writer after the mis-step with Warp and the good-but-flawed Codex. The story draws heavily from magic fantasy classics like Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, but it's not really what I'd call a fantasy, despite the magic. Quentin discovers he's a magician and enters the prestigious Brakebills Academy to study magic with other brilliant students. Although the Brakebills chapters were the most entertaining, in parts they read like a juvenile fantasy. Students are placed in groups according to their innate magical skill (much like students are sorted at Hogwards) He ends up in a group with the rather cloying name "The Physical Kids," whose talents lie with altering physical reality. But all they seem to do is drink wine and cook elaborate meals in their fancy frat-house, which is furnished with gorgeous antiques and includes several cozy bedrooms for crashing after a hard night of drinking. Yet they are supposed to be the brightest of the bright, go-getters who are considerably smarter and more academically driven than their non-magical peers. All the drinking simply doesn't compute - how could any kid get through the rigourous magical curriculum and still find the time to get completely soused every night? Quentin is supposed to have skipped a grade at Brakebills, but seemingly does nothing but party all the time. It's like some adolescent fantasy of what college is like - sharing a beautiful home with your pals, boozing it up all the time, and getting good grades while hardly studying at all. The relentless drinking seems especially nonsensical when the students have to be tatooed and their professor tells them to get drunk to dull the pain, despite the fact that a) there is a magic infirmary where magical healers could have provided magical painkillers, or even just ordinary drugs to dull the pain b) having that much alcohol in your blood while getting tatooed is very dangerous, it can make the bleeding much worse and even be fatal in some instances.

The relentless drinking really stuck in my craw, because it's described as something that is not only tolerated by encouraged by Brakebills, despite their philosophy of creating ethnical magicians. It seems pretty irresponsible to encourage a bunch of teenagers to acquire a taste for hard drinking.

After graduation, Brakebills students are given heaps of money and sent off into the world to do whatever they want. All that rigourous training doesn't seem to be terribly useful to the "Physical Kids" once they graduate. But Quentin's favorite books from childhood are the Fillory novels, which are an obvious allusion to the Chronicles of Narnia. One of his pals discovers a way to travel to Fillory, which turns out to be a real place. Unfortunately, it's terrifying and not the happy fairytale land that one would have hoped. Things go terribly awry and they barely manage to get back their own world. After the incident in Fillory, Quentin is morbidly depressed. He works a cover job arranged for him by Brakebills, doing absolutely nothing and collecting a hefty paycheck. Again it seem that Brakebills let down one of their brightest students. With no purpose or direction, clearing suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, Quentin could use some help from older, wiser magicians, but he's just left to sort it out on his own.

Fortunately the very end does offer some promise of things looking up for Quentin, including the return of a girl he used to crush on before he discovered his magical skills. Grossman lines up the ending for a sequel, which he is currently writing. The book does leave some important questions unanswered, but perhaps the sequel will provide more details.

Despite my criticism, I devoured this book in just a few sittings. Grossman is very good at making you want to turn the page. He may have even invented a new genre - the book is about magic, but it's not fantasy, nor is it magic realism. I don't even know how to describe it. Nevertheless it is top-notch entertainment and I highly recommend it.

I picked The Magicians up on my trip to BEA this year. I hadn't heard anything about it previously, but that is what BEA is supposed to be about. To find those gems you might not otherwise have come upon and The Magician is one of those gems. The Magicians is a pastiche of The Once and Future King, The Chronicles of Narnia along with the Harry Potter novels only aimed at adults. I read Lev Grossman's Codex a couple years ago and was severely underwhelmed so when I started The Magicians the bar was set fairly low. Having said that it is a truly magical and entertaining read, but make no mistakes this is not a book for children. Instead of very young people learning magic or getting involved in fanciful worlds his characters are college aged and in most cases very flawed.

The Magicians deals with what people have to go through in order to learn magic properly and the consequences of getting involved with this world. What if you could do anything you wanted? Or go anywhere? What would you life mean? Those are the questions Grossman posits as you journey with Quentin Coldwater on his quest to become a magician and his obsession with Fillory and Further, a thinly veiled Narnia series he is infatuated with. There are sexual indiscretions and many morally questionable situations as the character make their way through the world. There is a good amount of action although most takes place in the last 1/4 of the book. Yet the book flows easily as I kept wanting to know what was next.

The story starts with Quentin getting invited to take an entrance exam to a magic school very mysteriously. Brakebills, is a very exclusive school for people who show a high aptitude for magic. This isn't hogwarts. The description of the way the students are taught is more reminiscent of Law School than anything else as most of the work is reading, rote memorization, and repetition of magical exercises. My biggest issue with the book is most of the characters do not develop much as they go along and are a bit dry with personality. One of the most interesting characters, Penny, is missing from a large chunk of the book as if the author forgot about him for 200 pages. However, Penny's disappearance is somewhat haphazardly explained. Once Quentin and his friends graduate from Brakebills and are forced into the real world it is very clear they have no place in it. Eventually Quentin and his friends journey into a world very similar to Narnia, which is a bit too much on the nose for me at times, but it does have its place as all the pieces do fall into place well. They encounter many magical and mythological creatures. A bit more background on the Fillory world would have been nice, but it does get filled in a bit towards the end. A couple of the major treads were a bit predictable, such as the revelation of a missing character from the Fillory series and another related character. Yet these flaws do not take away from the enjoyable reading experience.

The ending is fitting and leaves the character open for a succeeding adventure, but gives you closure on pretty much everything. Quentin's final transformation is actually quite interesting and I'm eager to see what other worlds Grossman has in store for him. I give The Magicians 8.5 out of 10 Hats. Grossman has grown quite a bit as a fiction writer and it shows. The core audience for The Magicians is probably people who rarely read fantasy or those who want to reminisce a bit about the books they read growing up. Those who are very well read in the fantasy genre may consider the concepts a bit over done, but Grossman does manage to stand apart and create a world where actions have very definitive repercussions.

Stop thinking this is a fantasy book. I know, I know, it's called "The Magicians," the plot synopsis references all three of the most famous fantasy series and describes a handful of familiar fantasy tropes, including the school of magic and the fairy tale land come to actual life. But forget all of that. I have read more fantasy books than I can remember -- I'm named for a character in perhaps the most famous fantasy series of all time -- and I'm telling you: "The Magicians" is not a fantasy.

It has fantastic elements, yes. There is magic; there is a school for magic, where the characters learn to cast spells, using hand gestures and arcane language and strange mystical components -- Ziploc bag full of mutton fat, anyone? -- and there is a voyage from this world to another, a land of naiads and fauns and magical speaking animals, gods and demons, kings and queens, quests and wishes. But this book is something very different from the usual fantasy novel. In "The Magicians," Lev Grossman has done something unusual, and remarkable, perhaps even unique: this is a grown-up fantasy. This book is to fantasy what "The Grapes of Wrath" is to travel books, what "The Metamorphosis" is to self-help: so much more depressing and visceral and funny and horrifying, and genuine, and fascinating, and hard to read and therefore valuable, that it doesn't belong in the same category despite sharing some central traits. The setting is imagined, and there are supernatural things that happen, but make no mistake: this is a serious novel.

Where the characters in most fantasy books are heroic, larger than life, the sort of people we wish we could be, these magicians are not: the characters are too close to plain old humanity, flawed, contradictory, foolish and foolhardy, to stand in as idealized versions of ourselves. Where most fantasy books provide an escape from our reality, this book does not. In point of fact, the moral of this book is that escape is not only impossible, but dangerous and harmful to attempt. The hero, Quentin Coldwater, attempts to escape every serious situation he faces, and every time, he ends up worse off than he would have been if he had just been able to deal with it, honestly and sincerely. But his response to his worsened circumstances is to try to escape again -- with predictable results. Every step Quentin takes is the wrong one, and every step sinks him deeper and deeper into a quagmire. The book gets hard to read: not because the writing is anything less than excellent, as it is top notch from first page to last, but because the urge to reach into the page and slap, shake, and eventually throttle the main character becomes overwhelming. But that desire, that feeling, should be familiar to every adult who has thought back on his or her life, and shook his or her head, thinking, "Why did I do that? How could I be that stupid?" That desire to smack Quentin is no different from the desire to smack our younger selves, and sometimes, that's a terribly annoying feeling to have, which makes this a somewhat annoying book to read.

The real triumph of this book, however, is that it is not only a serious novel, despite what I have been saying. Grossman is able to describe a world of wonder and imagination, and populate it with characters who are utterly unworthy of the magic all around them, who appreciate nothing, who completely flub their great chance -- just like I would have done if I lived through this experience, just as most of us do with our great chances in our real, mundane, unfantastic lives, which are also as full of wonder as any dreamed by a teller of tales. And because the characters are so real, so easy to relate to, it makes the fantasy seem just as real (which, of course, makes the real world just as fantastic). Brakebills reminded me of my own college experience, and yet it is a magical place. Fillory is indeed a fairy tale land come to life in this book, and I found myself wishing that I could believe I would have handled Fillory better than Quentin does -- but knowing that I would have done almost precisely the same things, made the same choices and the same mistakes. And the ending is glorious: the climactic action scene is thrilling and impossible to put down; the revealed secrets are both surprising and satisfying; the final resolution is, if not completely happy, at least hopeful.

I won't say that this is a great book, on par with "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," but I will say that it is closer to those than it is to "The Hobbit" or the Xanth books. If you are a fan of literature, of thinking about your reading, then you must get this book, especially if you enjoy fantasy. If you are just looking for an escape, look elsewhere -- because this is not a fantasy. Or at least, it isn't only a fantasy. It's a wonder.

I'm not rating on originality, it wasn't. I'm not rating on the intricate plot, it wasn't. Nor were the characters all that great. The book gets 5 stars for simply being itself: an un-glorified follow-up to the lion the witch in the wardrobe for a new generation of readers who are tired of near-deaths and almost fails. The book speaks of death, sex, and magic in a cadid voice with little need for bravado.

Simple put the book is a very entertaining read though my friends who obsess over the classics didn't appreciate the likeness to which the author borrows from other books. I don't care, this book was good and at the same time carried of the air of a book that doesn't think too highly of itself.

Much fuss has been made about The Magicians, the first foray into the Fantasy genre by Lev Grossman, uber-geek, author of Codex and Senior Writer for Time magazine. The most ironic of all? The book is not being marketed as a genre novel, but rather being shelved in the Literature section at most bookstores, despite being a Fantasy novel (full of every cliché in the book) through and through.

The thing is, though, The Magicians is a good crossover novel, bridging the gap between Literature-with-a-capital-L and Fantasy, by taking the usual tropes (magic school, dysfunctional band of misfits, wizards, `You're a wizard, Harry'-moments, fireballs, etc...) and throwing in all that stuff the literary folk like (sex, moral ambiguity, cocaine and whiskey, cancerous relationships, etc...). The Magicians is like Harry Potter meets The Graduate, with a little bit of Trainspotting thrown in for good measure.

Of course, general debauchery and acidic characters aren't a magical fix-all, able to turn any Fantasy novel into a work of literary genius; but Grossman is aware of this and uses these uncomfortable literary devices as an avenue to tell a sometimes funny, sometimes painful story of young people growing up in a world they hardly understand. Like Trainspotting, The Magicians is all about Quentin's inability to cope with the trials and travails of real life, and his constant search for Fillory, a magical world that Quentin knows will solve all his problems. As most of us know, though, finding that place rarely solves anything, rather it's often a slippery slope, leading to bigger and more serious problems.

Like anyone dealing with the pains of growing up, of having distant, ambivalent parents and friends whose true intentions are often muddy, Quentin is full of his own shortcomings and dichotomies. He's a brilliant, troubled man, searching as much for himself as anything else, and makes some bad decisions throughout the course of the novel. Midway throught the novel, Quentin is let loose into the world with little direction, near limitless access to money and drugs, and all his relationships falling to pieces around him. This period of the novel was difficult to read, as Quentin becomes unlikable and brash and confused, deserving little sympathy from the reader. Like reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, the reader often wonders why they should even bother reading on, if there are any redeeming qualities left in Quentin. Like Donaldson, though, Grossman is very deliberate in this emotional breakdown of his protagonist, and it plays an important role in Quentin finding the motivation he needs to remove himself from the downward spiral.

When Quentin is finally introduced to the land of Fillory, much later in the novel than expected, it's as much a breath of fresh air for the reader as it is for Quentin and his friends. Desperate for a change, for a purpose in his life, Quentin embraces this newfound adventure and jumps in head first, expecting all of his problems to be solved. Like any wonder drug, Fillory is not what it seems, and certainly not the land he remembers from his childhood stories. As frustrating and unlikable as Quentin becomes, I couldn't put the novel down. I became as addicted to Quentin's search for answers as he was.

The main knock on The Magicians is that it's little more than a rip-off of Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia, just given a fresh coat of angry red paint. This is true, in every way. Rather than hurt the novel, though, Grossman turns this into a strength by playing with the cliches and expectations set by the reader familiar with the works of Lewis and Rowling. The `Harry Potter' aspects that make up the first two-thirds of the novel are much stronger than the `Narnia' aspects, but this isn't your little brother's Harry Potter; rather it's a sex and alcohol fuelled binge that will hit way too close to home for a lot of people. Imagine Harry Potter with a line of coke, a tumbler of bad whiskey and a cigarette burning to ashes in his hand. Oddly, despite being relieved by the change brought about in Quentin, the story loses some of its steam once the narrative shifts from our world to the storybook world. Fillory comes and goes so fast that I wondered whether it wouldn't have been left better as an analogy for Quentin's quest for answers, rather than an actual plot device. In the final third of the novel, the story goes from feeling like a nicely self-contained character-piece to a prologue for a much larger, more typical man-from-our-world-finds-magical-world story.

In a novel that would be so easy to dislike (whether because of the familiar stories being told, or the often hard-to-like characters), Grossman refuses to let the go by crafting characters that, though you may always not like them, you certainly recognize them. In them you see your friends, you see your family and you see yourself. One shining light in Quentin's life, and for the reader, is Alice, a young wizard who rarely falls into the caustic lifestyle of her peers. I've perhaps been hard on the cast, but they are often as equally charming and funny as they are hard to get along with, thanks to Grossman's sharp prose and clever dialogue.

Brakebills, the magical school that Quentin attends, lacks the depth and charm of Hogwarts, and Fillory, despite being almost a carbon copy, certainly doesn't touch Narnia's place in the Fantasy-world pantheon, but that's not what Grossman was aiming for. The Magicians is a novel where pop-culture references, binge drinking, internal struggles and the trials of friendship are more important to the narrative than talking Lions, broomstick sports, religious analogies or Death Eaters.

If it seems I've been hard on the novel, consider this: The Magicians is my favourite novel of the year. The characters are flawed and realistic, eliciting real emotion out of me, rather than telling me what fake emotions I should feel. The Magicians excels as a crossover novel because of its uncompromising nature, its ruthless insistence to deal with real world issues and its ability to use the Fantasy trappings as a setting for the story, rather than a reason for the telling. Grossman balances the sorry side of life by also revealing those genuine moments that often occur between friends. The Magicians is a multifaceted exploration of growing up, and, as Quentin learns, bringing down the Dark Lord is rarely as important as the journey to get there.