The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman

The Magician's Land, the last volume of a series we can now say forms The Magicians trilogy, does several admirable things. It brings the series to a satisfying close, not always possible in a loose serial narrative, and addresses the primary question left dangling at the end of the first book: what is magic for? And it does so with a brisk, well-written narrative that avoids the bloat and long-windedness that the genre has become prone to.

The Magician's Land has some faults too. These are minor faults, to be sure, but they make the reading experience an uneven one. The first is an over-large cast of focal characters, and a structure that flips between characters at will, which forces Quentin, the protagonist of the trilogy, towards the background at odd moments, even though the story of his growing maturity and quest for restitution is the focus of the novel. Plum, a young magician snatched by misadventure from the magical college of Brakebills, holds significant portions of the narrative, but there's no real reason for her to do so, except to act as a foil for Quentin. There's also a tendency for characters to speak with the mock-ironic tone of college students even in moments of genuine tenderness or emotion, which is rather at odds with the growing maturity of the central characters, he signature development of this final volume. Nevertheless, Grossman has a magician's gift for combining action, contemporary references, and moments of true fantasy and wonder, and his invented world of Fillory has gathered true weight and strangeness (and a touch of sadness) as the series continues.

These, however, are small matters. Although Grossman is at pains to point out that the grand fantasy quest (even the quest for self-knowledge) is more often than not incomplete or ambivalent, his characters both destroy and remake a world. And in this we finally touch on the answer to the challenge of the first novel. Magic is not neat, predictable, merely technical, or even necessarily useful. But it is creative, and in creation and dislocation the magician, like the novelist, brings new possibilities into the mundane world.

Fatherhood and writing

I found this reflection from Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians, among other things) quite intriguing. It's an extract from a reflective piece on how fatherhood changed his life and rerouted his writing.

In my case, becoming a father certainly changed my life. Curiously, I sent the manuscript of The Raven's Seal to my publisher just days before my son was born, and the fractured time outside looking after him as a baby was devoted to preparing The Raven's Seal for publication. Something about the urgency of both circumstances, I think, helped me focus.

But I do believe, like Grossman, that a wider sense of family and human relationships are important for a writer. And that writing plans need to be disturbed, even demolished sometimes, so that we can turn to what is really important, in living and writing.

Codex - Lev Grossman

Codex is not exactly a prologue to The Magicians, but a nicely constructed intellectual thriller that signals some of Lev Grossman's later work.
Again, the young male protagonist, Edward, is talented and smart, but not quite smart enough to achieve, or even know, exactly what he wants. Moreover, he is inevitably overshadowed, defeated even, by a more capable, or perhaps only more focused, woman, Margaret.
New York is again the setting, and again it is the city and the state's secret places, its libraries, that are the most interesting. Grossman is able to make the territory of the mind as engaging as the city streets - a hallmark of the intellectual thriller with a touch of metafictional conceit.
One thing that makes Codex particularly engaging is the way the story moves between the present-day narrative, the lost medieval codex of the title, and the open computer game-virtual world that reflects and in some ways binds them. All of these imaginary worlds are compelling, though for different reasons, and this is where the ability to create other worlds in books and games is singularly intriguing and a binding theme. And yet, as in The Magicians, the ultimate dreamworld, once achieved, somehow fails to satisfy, leaving the protagonist chastened if not wiser.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Magicians succeeds because Grossman tells a compelling story with psychological depth and great pace and verve, but it seems to me that it is based on two conceits that could have stood independently as novels in their own right, and somwhere between these two strands it leaves a central concern of the novel unresolved.
In the first place, The Magicians is plainly a Harry Potter for adults, replacing the magical boarding school with the magical college, and hence teenage angst with early-adulthood self-realization. Of course the young magicians are also college students, but here they get drunk, sleep with each other for the wrong (and right) reasons, suffer identity crises, ennui, career doubts, and generally fumble their way towards adulthood. Grossman captures their competitiveness and anxiety nicely, recasting apprentice magicians as essentially the top-tier of ivy-league students on competitive scholarships. The risk here (as it is in Harry Potter) is that the magical education systematizes and hence literalizes magic, turning it from an art to a craft, from a technique to a technology. Fortunately, Grossman mitigates this by revealing that there are depths beyond depths in the magic his students explore.
In itself, this advanced Harry Potter, the dealings of a hidden class of magicians in upstate New York would be intriguing, but here Grossman avoids engaging in this by introducing a second, though not unrelated strand.
This conceit is one of adult entry into a child’s world of wonder, specifically a faux-Narnia named Fillory. Here, adults with adult concerns attempt to discover and remain in a world of essentially childish magic and wish-fulfillment. The corollary to this, of course, is that one must be careful what one wishes for.
My main dissatisfaction with The Magicians is that when Grossman moves his characters from the subtle conflicts and perplexities of upstate New York into the childishly fantastical world of Fillory, he fails to answer the question that arises so compellingly for the graduate magicians: what is magic for? In mounting the quest into Fillory, he demonstrates that magic and fantasy of themselves cannot bring happiness any more than money or success, and that the regression into the child’s fantasy world can have destructive outcomes. Where magic comes from can remain a mystery, but how to use magic, and how to use it for the good, remain unanswered, and by the end Grossman seems to waver awkwardly between the possibility of renouncing magic altogether and the open-ended conjuring of higher, stranger planes of fantasy, a little like a Dungeon Master seeking even wilder adventures for his already over-powered players.