The Magician King by Lev Grossman

[lightreads]

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’ve been sitting on this review for weeks, waiting for my thoughts to settle. This is a frustrating, slippery, controlled, funny, beautiful book, and it left me with very complicated feelings.



It’s a double-stranded narrative: one is Quentin, bored with being King of Fillory and off on a grand sea voyage that takes him through multiple worlds and to the making and unmaking of universes. The other is Julia. Oh, Julia. Who didn’t make it into special people magic school like Quentin, and who had to force her way into power by a completely different route. Her story is – jesus. It left me nailed to my chair, tears prickling just behind my eyes, having one of those weird experiences where you emerge from the book and wonder sincerely whether you’ve been breathing for the past ten minutes.



Here’s where the complicated feelings start. Quentin says early on that magic school had “taught them to be arch and ironic about magic, but Julia took it seriously.” Well, of course. Being arch and ironic about something is the privilege of those who were given it on a silver platter; it’s not often available to someone who had to tear out her soul by the roots just to get a glimpse. Grossman puts his finger closer to it when he says, “She didn’t hate Quentin, that wasn’t it. Quentin was fine. He was just in the way. He’d gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason: he passed a test and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her.” Which is a pithy summary of being on the wrong end of privilege, if I’ve ever heard one.



My point being that this book is arch and ironic about fantasy literature, right up to the point where it takes it deadly seriously. And I love that. Except the things you get to be arch and ironic about and the things you get to be serious about are really telling; they dig deep into whether you’ve had . . . access to fantasy, I guess. Whether anyone let you into the club, and how hard you had to work at it, depending on whether there was ever anyone like you or a world like yours in fantasy. Whether, to appropriate a perfect metaphor and shove it sideways, you have been permitted to dream of dragons.



I responded on this intense, visceral level to this book because I’ve been both Quentin and Julia at different times. I’ve taken both their routes in pursuit of power, education, money, respect. So the places where I could take this book with arch irony and the places where I had to take it deadly seriously are idiosyncratic, and they didn’t always line up with where Grossman was being arch and ironical and where he was being serious. Which doesn’t make this book wrong, it just made me pace a lot, and chew my nails, and want to strangle Quentin slightly more than he deserves strangling. (Which is still a moderate amount, by the way. There’s this moment early on where Quentin basically thinks “oh good, we’re traveling together, this is where we can fall in love and have sex.” And it is a measure of the effectiveness of the rest of this book how that becomes exponentially more self-absorbed and horrible the more you read.)



Anyway, long review short, it’s great. Seriously. There’s this definition of magic, “it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.” Which encapsulates a lot about this book, and the way it loves fantasy, and the way it uses that love to talk about writing your own story, and how being a hero is, as a nested folk tale says, about knowing the right cues, but how it’s also other stuff.





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Comments

[ecaterin]

Sounds amazing! I don't know whether to want to read this book....or to want *not* to read this book. IT SOUNDS VERY INTENSE. I MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT BE IN THE MOOD FOR INTENSE.

I spent the past while reading Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer, and then every article, interview, analysis and retrospective on the 1996 disaster that I could find. Plus a couple of documentaries.

Maybe I've had enough 'intense' for right now :D

[I recommend Into Thin Air with the highest praise. What a fantastic, heartbreaking, beautifully written piece of personal journalism.]

[lightreads]

Oooh, I have some Krakauer somewhere in here . . . yep, it's Under the Banner of Heaven. You're not the first to speak highly of him (though speaking of intense, I cannot cannot read his book about the kid who turned down a multi-million dollar football deal, went to iraq, and promptly died).

Magician King is a sequel, btw. The first book is slightly less intense, but still very good, I think.

[ecaterin]

What might make Into Thin Air a (slightly) easier read, is that despite the many many errors in judgement and episodes of random chance that led to the 1996 Everest disaster, there were also many many acts of heroism and humanity. It's a book that'll leave you reeling, but at the same time will leave you amazed at the robustness of the human animal, and the tenacity of people who were so hypoxic and delusional, that they were really were left with nothing but a bone-deep belief that they should go against instinct to save fellow climbers. It's not a book about blame, it's not a book about canonizing anyone for sainthood, it's a book about the human spirit - the irrational and the heroic, the foolish and the kind.

It'll stay with you, but it won't leave you despairing, yk?

[cahn]

OH! I just read this book last weekend (julianyap basically made me) and am still formulating a response. Like you, I must say I had a complicated reaction to it. Weirdly, I think, my one-sentence summary was on the lines of "this made me appreciate the first book better."

...I think what I'm trying to say here is that I took almost all of it archly ironically, which made me not like it as much as you do. I like your way of looking at that (arch irony vs. deadly seriously, and having to pick where you look at it which way) very much.

[lightreads]

Yeah, if I think about it too hard, I get a little disappointed, because the Fillory bits were so scripted. Particularly the end, where Quentin keeps making jokes about how this or that aspect of fantasy literature doesn't make sense, like how a god just shows up at the end but never helps, but these things are never actually explained. But yeah, same here, I appreciated the first book more, and in my case, I already liked it a fair amount.

[cahn]

the Fillory bits were so scripted.

Yeah, this is exactly what made my reaction complicated. The interesting thing was -- and I did actually rather like this -- I am not sure I would have noticed how scripted it was had he not written the first book first. Also I'm not sure I would say I was disappointed by it, though, so much as... uh... taken aback? The whole time I was sort of waiting for something dreadful and unscripted to happen (sort of the way the entire first book was), and it never did except maybe for the Reynard thing, but that itself was scripted dreadfulness that was later, scriptedly, redeemed.

Don't get me wrong, I did like the first book quite a bit. But there were bits that enraged me because I thought he didn't understand and didn't love fantasy, and this book made me realize that yes, he does understand and love it, and that the bits I thought were enraging were conscious choices and not dismissive throwaways.

[lightreads]

Yeah, I think this is definitely a guy who loves fantasy. Often in an unreserved unironic way that Quentin does, except he also has a lot of analytical chops.

But more interesting for me, I think he's really a guy who loves the way people love things. I think his Time article really brought that home -- he likes when people love things, and likes to know what that's about.

[cahn]

Interesting. I wonder if that informs his decision to put not one but two groups of magician-scientists in his world this time around, who love magic in a very analytical kind of way (something that annoyed me a lot about the first book was that there were none).

I blame you for making me finish my review and posting it! It's up now.