The Magicians by Lev Grossman

In Narnia or at the Dursleys, you're always cleaning the sink, or poking about a wardrobe, when your turn comes to be transported to a magical realm where you've been selected to battle against the forces of evil. Beats five nights in Cancun? Or, if your Quentin Coldwater, the lead character in Lev Grossman's The Magicians, your not cleaning the sink or poking about the wardrobe when the call comes but on your way to an admissions interview for Princeton when...

Quentin's interview never takes place. When Quentin and his friends arrive at the interviewer's home, they find him dead. Next, a mysterious paramedic passes along a mysterious envelope to Quentin and sends him on his way. The envelope contains a rough start/sketch of a rumored but never discovered sixth book in a series of fantasy novels set in the fantastical world of Fillory. Like many of his peers, Quentin adores these books. Eagerly starting on the manuscript, he discovers a ltter tucked into it which the wind tears from his hand before he has a chance to read it. Quentin pursues the note into a tangled community garden, right up to a fence the note temporarily gets blown against, and then, presto-chango, he enters another dimension and finds himself at the Brakebills Academy, a school for magicians.

So opens Lev Grossman's fantasy novelThe Magicians, a surreal book that often seems a grab-bag of every fantasy cliche and trope ever employed. Yet, it collects to examine. It's a fantasy novel written to question the writer's obvious love of fantasy novels. I come to it as an outsider, a person who hasn't and doesn't read fantasy novels. In fact, I come to it as somebody who generally doesn't read in the genres, those areas of fiction that insist on and a driven by story and pacing.

Grossman is a pretty good story-teller.I grew a bit bored at Brakebills, especially near the end of Quentin and his college chums' five year stay there. I couldn't quite figure out where or how they were to reenter the world; as the director quips to the recently admitted Quentin, magician "is not the obvious career path"(38). At Brakebills, Quentin and his friends acquire truly awesome powers; this isn't card-trick magic. This is the kind of magic that can change the weather, affect time and unleash natural forces as weapons.

Of course, magic is just a tool. As one of his professors offers "magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft...We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change o the world"(48). Neither Quentin nor the novel seems overly curious or in a hurry to discover why he's been recruited and to learn such a craft. Quentin is thrilled to be learning such a craft, even though it's not clear he has any long-desired "specific change to the world" in mind. Only with time, and the opening of new possibility made possible by magic, do we learn that Quentin hopes for a world like Fillory; a world full of spectacle, adventure and quest in which there are clear goods, bads, and noble ends.

As you might guess, that magic is real is not exactly a secret and folks with darker ends have learned the craft. Shortly after Quentin and his love interest and fellow student Alice enter their second chronological (and third academic) year at the academy, their class is attacked during a lecture in a class-room by a malevolent, magical force. After Quentin distracts a professor while he is in the midst of executing an ornate spell-cast, this force suddenly enters the room and stops time, literally. Or, more precisely, turns everyone in the classroom into statutes, leaving their consciousness intact. Grossman renders the buried-alive feeling in chilling detail. While the class sits in statuesque terror, the force enters: a small man in a a grey suit who seems chillingly non-plussed by the harm he's caused and who wanders about the room of terrified and paralyzed students like a cat toying with mice. The man holds the class in this death-lock for a good part of a day before suddenly vanishing, driven away apparently by the combined spell-casting power of the Brakebill's faculty working away all day outside the class-room.

Afterwards, contradicting the quaint, suited man who appeared to them, a professor of Quentin's refers to what attacked as "the beast" and inform "what we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool"(115). They learn that this beast, in the guise of a grey suited man had eaten the class leader for a snack. Afterward, classes resumes, study continues and the last two years of Quentin's sojourn at Brakebills contains some of the most beautifully rendered and imaginative incidents in the book, episodes that bring to mind Poe in their sublime beauty (the transformation of the class into a herd of Canadian Geese, a strange trek to the South Pole). Quentin and Alice's relationship progresses. But, all of it under the pall cast by this incident with the beast, this sudden burst of black magic which raises the central question of the book: what does one do with the power to alter the world to one's liking?

Brakebills magicians apparently graduate to various callings. Some "spent their time at suborbital altitudes keeping a weather eye out for stray asteroids and oversize solar flares and other potential planetary-scale disasters. Plenty went in for academic research"(210). Others "infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the scenes." There are "a few...[who] undertook massive art projects, manipulating the northern lights and things like that, decades-long enchantments that might only ever have an audience of one"(210). And, there are war-gamers which raises the question whether magic in pursuit of evil ends is actually worse than magic put to innocuous and silly ends. Quentin decides on a less exalted path. After graduation, he and a circle of Brakebills buddies move to New York, and realizing "they had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city"(227).

Of course, riot quickly turns sour for Quentin and his Brakebills gang, and soon everyone's just as miserable as a yuppy, master-of-the-universe can be in the big apple. They have power but lack wisdom. Quentin seems incapable of love, and filled with a withering lack of self-esteem he lashes out at Alice with a vulgar act of infidelity.

All turns to the better with the arrival of Quentin's nemesis and rival from Brakebills, Penny who announces that he's discovered a magic button. According to the fictional Fillory books that Quentin adores, the central characters in those books, the young Chatwin children, travel back and forth between Fillory and reality at the behest of those in Fillory. They are called to Fillory to fulfill missions.

Throughout the series, the Chatwin children are never able to get to Fillory when they wish to go there, only when called. With one exception: Martin Chatwin, in a fit of pique at not being chosen for one of the adventures, takes off for Fillory, complains to the Chatwins chosen for the adventure and then, in a tantrum, heads off into Fillory vowing to never leave. And, Martin never shows up again in the Fillroy books.

At the end of the last Fillory book, two of the Chatwin children, Helen and Jane, are offered a similar future. They are given five magical buttons which will allow them to travel back and forth to Fillory when they want and as they please. Howver, Helen rejects the offer and tries to hide the buttons. She believes that "a trip to Fillory had to be earned, that had always been the way. It was a reward for the worthy...the buttons were a perversion of this divine grace, a usurping of it"(247). Penny has discovered one of the buttons...and everyone is going to Fillory.

Recently, at a lecture presented at the University of South Carolina's Caught in the Creative Act series, the author of The Magicians claimed that he had the idea for a story taking place at a magicians' school prior to Harry Potter but only got down to serious work on it after Rowling's phenomenally popular books came out. In writing his book, he deliberately attempted to create a Harry Potter for adults. He wanted a book that included magic and fantasy but wanted his characters to be adults living in a world that is in every way like our own. He wanted his Harry to be an alienated smartest kid in his class who was pained by the world and sought escape through fiction. He wanted to create a novel that explored the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Ironically, when Quentin, Grossman's alienated, older and grittier version of Harry, experiences his greatest disillusionment, he doesn't escape figuratively into books. Instead he escapes literally into a landscape from a fiction. He discovers that a long beloved fictional landscape of his, Fillory, is real and escapes to it. Yet, Fillory is real to a point. It is real in that Quentin and his friends go their bodily and live and breath and interact with a physical world. It remains a fictional, fantasy world in one important respect. Good and evil are much more clearly demarcated in Fillory than they normally appear in my world and this makes action potentially clearer and less confusing.

There is genuine mystery and adventure in Fillory; nothing is virtual, nothing needs to be pretended. Early on in the novel, Quentin succinctly defines life as it inheres in this prototypic fantasy world: in Fillory, people "have adventures and explore magical lands and defend the gentle creatures who live there against the various forces that menace them"(6). So defined, it is the ideal and proper venue for magic.

Magic is about power and the desire to know magic is born of narcissism and powerlessness. At one point in the book, Richard, a Brakebill's graduate with a Christian bent, describes magic as "the tools" left behind by a maker, "a Person who built the house, and then He left"(233). Quentin and his friends dismiss Richard's implied chronology but his theory asks Quentin and his friends a question: " If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it?" and not surprisingly, "Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out there"(236). The trouble is they lack the wherewithal to define an end other than escaping their own vague discontent and ennui.

Quick to reject Richard's God, they are keen on adventuring in Fillory, an improved and more stimulating version of reality. Fillory bests earth for Quentin and his magic cohorts in its presenting a clearly defined good and evil. This strongly demarcated good and evil gives rise to the quests and adventures that Fillory, like many fantasy lands, seems to provide by its makeup. Of course, what often underlies clear good and evil is a God. In the case of Fillory, there are a pair of twin God-rams, Ember and Umber.

Quentin and his friends desire to go adventuring without holding any ends or values of which they are conscious. At best, they possess a wavering faith in the reality of value itself, of unalloyed good and evil, an underlying order. Thus, encouraging his friends to join him in Fillory,Penny suggests "I think they'll probably give us a quest." The cowardly-cool Quentin cautions, "It's not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests"(267). Cynical Eliot mockingly asks, "So what do you think....we're going to meet a damsel in distress?"(267). Penny persists in believing; they will find an end in Fillory. Out of his hopelessness, Quentin suggests that maybe they could find the Questing Beast, an animal that can't be caught, to which Eliot again mockingly asks, "What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it?"(267). Quentin confesses he doesn't know but implies that simply having something you want but can't catch may be in itself end enough.

Once in Fillory, Quentin and his fellow students bumble around a bit before encountering a half-frozen nymph. This stereotypic, Fantasy book figure made real so thrills them that they hardly heed the nymph when she warns, "I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war"(292). She tosses them a horn to blow when all hope is lost and then disappears. Quickly, Quentin's gang realizes Fillory may be cursed and, regardless, is going through a rough spell. When they encounter malevolent beings, they realize that "this isn't a story! It's just one fucking thing after another!"(299) and someone's liable to get hurt.

Eventually, they encounter Humbledrum the bear and Farvel the birch at a tavern in a Fillory forest. Around drinks, this odd duo insists the Brakebills gang needs to save Fillory. To do so, they will need to go to Ember's Tomb, find and "wear the crown," assume the throne at Whitespire. According to these two, this will bring a new era of peace and justice to Fillory. The bear and the birch add that they will "have help"(311). So missioned, they set out, fight there way through the underground tomb/labyrinth complex and come to an underground chamber where they meet Ember.

Even if it's a God from a fantasy novel, what does one do when one comes face to face with a God? Penny "knew what to do. He dropped his backpack and walked over to stand in front of the ram. He got down on his knees in the sand and bowed his head"(346). Yet, Ember is not a God in being all-powerful; he admits there are "Higher Laws...the power to to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another"(348). Ember calls them to bear the crown and roll back an upsurge in an ongoing swell of evil.

Although impelled by desire, Quentin can't follow Penny in his religious impulse/desire; "He stayed standing...For some reason he wasn't ready to kneel down, not yet. He would in a minue, but somehow this didn't feel like the moment.Though it would have been nice-he'd been walking for so long"(346). Quentin's reaction to meeting God in-the-flesh/wool captures the novel's continually vacillation between honoring and mocking tease of the religious impulse.

Quentin's brain conquers his heart and he asks Ember how he could have allowed Fillory to fall on hard times. He inquires, "Ember, how come You're down here in this dungeon, and not up there on the surface helping people?"(348). Ember tries to explain and seems genuinely pained by the suffering of Fillory, of Quentin and his classmates. Of course, Quentin and his gang are a pretty self-centered crew. Janet complains to Ember: "We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and each other sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world. Do you realize that?"(349). This comic prayer of sorts brings a tear to Ember, and Quentin, in his and Grossman's inevitable resort to the smart-ass, can't help but compare it to the tear of the pollution-ad Indian from the seventies.

It doesn't take this cold-hearted crew long to suss out that Ember is not ruling here but is captive. Not long after that, the beast appears and deals Ember what looks like a death-blow. The beast this time identifies himself. He is Martin Chatwin.

Like Quentin and his gang, Martin too was enamored of Fillory and wanted to never leave it. This desire to never leave is corrupting. At some level, Martin's desire to never leave Fillory, his use of magic, all speak to a more basic desire: to be God. Martin boasts, "I wasn't going to go back to Earth after I'd seen Fillory. I mean, you can't show a man paradise and then snatch it back again. That's what gods do. But I say: down with gods"(354). Martin has become God-like in his powers, but has lost his humanity in the process. Unlike Ember and Umber, he refuses to accept and submit to any laws. He views Quentin and his gang as a threat to him and demands their button. A battle royal ensues and Alice sacrifices herself to kill the Beast.

In the battle, Quentin is gravely wounded. He wakes up recovering in a hospital run by centaurs and to an overwhelming guilt, regret and despair over his loss of Alice. While recovering, he discovers again the manuscript presumably containing the sixth, and final Fillory novel he'd been give at the chaotic scene of the interview which opened the novel. He reads of Jane Chatwin's desire to travel to Fillory, her search to discover where Helen hid the buttons, her hope that they might still find and save Martin. When he finishes, the mysterious paramedic woman from the beginning of the novel appears in his room. It is Jane Chatwin who reveals to Quentin that she eventually lost her hope to save Martin and decided that, monster-grown, he must be killed and that she enlisted Quentin and his friends in that project without their knowledge or consent. Irony of ironies, Quentin discovers that Jane has been quietly controlling Quentin and his friends from the start and, in the end, successfully used them as a tool to kill Martin.

Jane has a magical watch that allows her to time-travel and Quentin begs her to reverse time in an effort to save Alice. But, Jane refuses. She has tried numerous times to kill Martin, often reversing time to achieve that end, and this is the only time she's succeeded. She tells Quentin, "Don't make me lecture you on the practicalities of chronological manipulation....Change one variable and you change them all. Did you think you were the first one to face Martin in that room? Do you think that was even the first time you faced him?...Ive tried it so many different ways. Everyone always died...As bas as it was, as bad as it is, this is by far the best outcome I've ever achieved"(380-381). Quentin tries to get the watch. Jane smashes it against the wall, and utters perhaps a bit of temporary wisdom in this restless, broken-hearted book: "It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost"(381).

The book turns even more mystical at this point with the arrival of the Questing Beast. Quentin pursues this mythic stag, and, after an epic pursuit, earns three wishes by wounding the beast with an arrow. He wishes for Alice but is denied; magic can only operate on what is in the world. Down to one wish, in direct contradiction to all his youthful yearning, he wishes to return home. Once home, he swears off magic for a long period, convinced that the urge to and use of magic is corrupting and dehumanizing. However, he can't live in a world without it, and at the end of the novel, he literally flies off when his Brakebill friends appear outside the glass of his office high-up in a skyscraper.

Fantasy novels assume their readers find the world mundane and boring and yearn for a better, more colorful world, one more complex in terms of its creatures but simpler in terms of its goods and evils. Quentin is typical in this regard. When he discovers Brakebills (after being secretly recruited) and is told "magic is real," he has a hard time believing it at first, "he checked himself. He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world-he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was"(37).

Yet, if magic can change the world, it can't change the heart. In fact, Grossman suggests magic is more likely to corrupt it than anything else. At the heart of the urge to magic lies a desire for power and control. Can one assume a virtually limitless power and yet restrain one's self and use it for altruistic purpose? At some level, there's a therapeutic value to limits but can one impose one by agreement, by choice. Although I'm sure Grossman and Quentin would scoff, The Magicians asks if it is possible to live without immutable boundaries or Gods. And, if we realize/know they don't exist, is it possible to replace them, via some imaginative and communal way, with an equally potent check on human desire. For, it seems we need our Gods, to lend us purpose and desire.