The Magician King by Lev Grossman

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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