Book - The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
Dec. 20th, 2009 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwThere is undoubtedly a reader for whom The Magicians is the perfect book. I am not that reader.
Basically, if you ignore the last few pages, The Magicians is the Reese's peanut butter cup of novels, where the chocolate is fantasy and the peanut butter is something that tastes to me like existentialism. For this reader, these two great tastes did not taste great together. I spent the whole book going "but you got your PEANUT BUTTER in my CHOCOLATE."
This is the aspect that I'm sure many readers will love. The glowing back cover quotes talk about the book being "Harry Potter for grownups" or similar. By this they mean that they set the book in an anglophile prep school and it follows gifted magicians who are invited to attend a magic school that they may or may not have ever heard of before. But our protagonist (he is emphatically not a hero, fated or otherwise) spends much of the book feeling lonely and detached. Magic does not solve his problems, make him popular or even well-known, or give him purpose in life. I think anyone who has read a lot of fantasy occasionally goes "not every misfit is really an Ugly Duckling waiting to transform into a hero!" and this aspect of the book is aimed squarely at that reader. Quentin is not a hero, has no particular fate, and struggles with that.
The magical world is set up just like a high stakes top college. There is no real preparation of the students for life after college. Magic for its own sake is stressed. Magic is presented by the professors as a purely intellectual exercise of mind and will (and a few fancy hand gestures). Later developments in the story undercut this (alternate dimensions, magically gifted creatures in those dimensions) but human magic remains very intellectual. The protagonist and his group relate to the world in a way that is pretty much wholly intellectual. The novel is almost anti-sensual. Quentin and the folks at his school live in a literal magic bubble that sucks them in at the beginning of school and spits them back out at the end with no interaction with the regular world in between. I think this is meant to mirror the academic experience of many gifted people.
I think I could just have read through the book and gone ok, existentialist fantasy but not my cup of tea, whatever, except for a few things. 1) Alice. Poor Alice. She is one of Those Women in novels about men. She is more talented than him! And has a sad past that she rarely talks about! But she loves him and has sex with him and supports him and protects him. She gives up her career goals to stay with him and sacrifices her life to save him right after he cheated on her. 2) Julie. His sad artistic high school friend who doesn't make it into the college. She ends up strung out and longing for magic and offering to have sex with him to get some magic. His response is to feel bad her mind wasn't better wiped, and to ask the Dean to rewipe it. 3) Her name I forget, but the woman who was involved with Alice's brother, and the big secret sadness in Alice's past. She is a lame character start to finish, and she's made of cardboard. And she offers to have sex with our narrator toward the end, since they're both such wounded souls! 4) The casual way that the mysterious Narnia related woman explains the villain of the story's actions, after his demise (he has terrorized whole dimensions and eaten people alive) - don't judge him too harshly, she says, that author guy who wrote about us used to molest him, and that explains why he did all that he did. Granted, the mysterious woman is the villain's sister but still - childhood abuse as explanation for villainy is overused and often cliche in the first place and, when done in this offhand manner, comes across to me as disrespectful of abuse survivors in the second place. 5) After losing all he'd ever dreamed of and dying inside slowly in a high glass tower, his friends come to give him a new call to adventure in the last two pages. And we end with him stepping off the tower to join them. This is a) almost as cliche as the whole abuse-as-explanation-redemption-for-villain thing and b) totally uses magic to undercut the whole existential half of the story, which if you were planning to do you should set up thematically before the last two pages of the book - it feels like one of those happy endings badly added to movies by focus groups.
To sum up: beautifully, even compulsively written. Thoughtfully constructed for the most part. Full of presentations of women that offended me, issues that made me trigger about abuse and exploitation, and a worldview of magic I found offputting. I wouldn't say that this is a bad book in and of itself. I think a lot of people will like it because it does a lot of things well. But I truly wish I had never read it - it is well enough crafted to stick in my brain while being full of thoughts, feelings, etc. that I don't want in my brain.
Basically, if you ignore the last few pages, The Magicians is the Reese's peanut butter cup of novels, where the chocolate is fantasy and the peanut butter is something that tastes to me like existentialism. For this reader, these two great tastes did not taste great together. I spent the whole book going "but you got your PEANUT BUTTER in my CHOCOLATE."
This is the aspect that I'm sure many readers will love. The glowing back cover quotes talk about the book being "Harry Potter for grownups" or similar. By this they mean that they set the book in an anglophile prep school and it follows gifted magicians who are invited to attend a magic school that they may or may not have ever heard of before. But our protagonist (he is emphatically not a hero, fated or otherwise) spends much of the book feeling lonely and detached. Magic does not solve his problems, make him popular or even well-known, or give him purpose in life. I think anyone who has read a lot of fantasy occasionally goes "not every misfit is really an Ugly Duckling waiting to transform into a hero!" and this aspect of the book is aimed squarely at that reader. Quentin is not a hero, has no particular fate, and struggles with that.
The magical world is set up just like a high stakes top college. There is no real preparation of the students for life after college. Magic for its own sake is stressed. Magic is presented by the professors as a purely intellectual exercise of mind and will (and a few fancy hand gestures). Later developments in the story undercut this (alternate dimensions, magically gifted creatures in those dimensions) but human magic remains very intellectual. The protagonist and his group relate to the world in a way that is pretty much wholly intellectual. The novel is almost anti-sensual. Quentin and the folks at his school live in a literal magic bubble that sucks them in at the beginning of school and spits them back out at the end with no interaction with the regular world in between. I think this is meant to mirror the academic experience of many gifted people.
I think I could just have read through the book and gone ok, existentialist fantasy but not my cup of tea, whatever, except for a few things. 1) Alice. Poor Alice. She is one of Those Women in novels about men. She is more talented than him! And has a sad past that she rarely talks about! But she loves him and has sex with him and supports him and protects him. She gives up her career goals to stay with him and sacrifices her life to save him right after he cheated on her. 2) Julie. His sad artistic high school friend who doesn't make it into the college. She ends up strung out and longing for magic and offering to have sex with him to get some magic. His response is to feel bad her mind wasn't better wiped, and to ask the Dean to rewipe it. 3) Her name I forget, but the woman who was involved with Alice's brother, and the big secret sadness in Alice's past. She is a lame character start to finish, and she's made of cardboard. And she offers to have sex with our narrator toward the end, since they're both such wounded souls! 4) The casual way that the mysterious Narnia related woman explains the villain of the story's actions, after his demise (he has terrorized whole dimensions and eaten people alive) - don't judge him too harshly, she says, that author guy who wrote about us used to molest him, and that explains why he did all that he did. Granted, the mysterious woman is the villain's sister but still - childhood abuse as explanation for villainy is overused and often cliche in the first place and, when done in this offhand manner, comes across to me as disrespectful of abuse survivors in the second place. 5) After losing all he'd ever dreamed of and dying inside slowly in a high glass tower, his friends come to give him a new call to adventure in the last two pages. And we end with him stepping off the tower to join them. This is a) almost as cliche as the whole abuse-as-explanation-redemption-for-villain thing and b) totally uses magic to undercut the whole existential half of the story, which if you were planning to do you should set up thematically before the last two pages of the book - it feels like one of those happy endings badly added to movies by focus groups.
To sum up: beautifully, even compulsively written. Thoughtfully constructed for the most part. Full of presentations of women that offended me, issues that made me trigger about abuse and exploitation, and a worldview of magic I found offputting. I wouldn't say that this is a bad book in and of itself. I think a lot of people will like it because it does a lot of things well. But I truly wish I had never read it - it is well enough crafted to stick in my brain while being full of thoughts, feelings, etc. that I don't want in my brain.
