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The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well that was . . . disappointing. Which is a funny thing to say about a book written as well as this one, and that made me as happy as this one did at certain points (really, I would read hundreds of pages about the magic in this universe and how it works and doesn't, no plot required).

The thing is, this book doubled down. The series as a whole has been playing with coming of age narratives and coming into power narratives, trying out different ones, contrasting them, complicating them. And then this final book just . . . plays it straight. I was worried by the jacket copy which, in my edition, actually says something about "a boy becoming a man." Okay, but not really, I thought, that's just stupid marketing nonsense.

Guys. This book is about a boy becoming a man, and what that means for a boy who loves magic and stories about it. Really. Like, this book actually thinks Quentin is interesting (he is, in flashes, but come on, not really). It is actually invested in Quentin's angst over not being quite as special as he thought he would be. And then it's really interested in having a little interlude about how very special he truly is – no one loves fantasy literature like Quentin, apparently, to the point where the universe takes notice. For real.

Here's the thing. In every book of this trilogy, I found myself thinking at least once, okay, but why aren't we reading a book about her? It's always a her, and she's always interesting as hell, and her story is always more complicated and harrowing and difficult than Quentin's. In the second book, we did actually get to read about her, thank you very much, and it's no coincidence that book is my favorite. In this book, we don't get to read about her. And I would much, much rather have been. Because as this book was winding up, delivering a few thematic statements and the like, I just kept saying, wait, really? You're really . . . going with that? That's what this has all been for? We did all this to talk about the hero's journey of . . . getting over the ennui of being really lucky and privileged?

But as I said to my girlfriend, you can object to a lot of what Grossman is doing, but it's harder to object to how he's doing it. I really would read Grossman on magic for books and books. A sample:

And lately, they'd [books] begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act. Which sounded interesting, but so far the resulting offspring had been predictably derivative –in fiction – or stunningly boring – nonfiction. Hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the most vital. The librarian thought that the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other, and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics, which ended in a furious deadlock.

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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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