While the critical reaction to The Magicians was mainly positive, a few reviews I read accused it of being derivative. This is inaccurate and, I think, unfair. The book is knowingly referential and satirical, using the classic tropes of fantasy stories in a highly original way to explore what it might be like to actually experience them (verdict: less fun and scarier than you might expect). In a way, it’s like Northanger Abbey, with Narnia instead of Gothic novels. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessed with a series of World War II-era British children's books about a set of young brothers and sisters who find their way into a magical land called Fillory and have adventures there. Quentin’s fascination with Fillory continually motivates his actions throughout the book, for better or worse.
But it’s not just Narnia being referenced here. The Magicians gained a lot of buzz when it was published because of its familiar setup: An ordinary boy suddenly learns that he’s a magician and is whisked away to attend magic school. The similarity ends there, however; Brakebills is a college, not a secondary school, and Quentin is no world-saving hero but rather a somewhat self-centered, morally ambivalent, high-achieving student who, when offered admission to Brakebills, cynically (and delightfully realistically) wonders if it’s his best option:
Maybe he should ask to see a brochure….how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.
There are nice little jokes about quidditch and hobbits throughout, but this is definitely a book for world-weary adults, not young Harry Potter fans. An early review I read compared it to The Secret History (thus sealing my decision to read it, because The Secret History was one of my favorite books at a formative age), and that’s what I was most strongly reminded of. (Runner-up: It also reminded me slightly of Pamela Dean’s (coincidentally similarly titled) The Secret Country trilogy, in which a group of children discover that the imaginary land they created really exists, but is more real and dangerous than they ever intended.) At Brakebills, Quentin falls in with a clique of brilliant, charismatic, debauched students who ultimately discover that Fillory is a real world, gain the power to travel there, and must then deal with the horrifying consequences of their actions. While the characters aren’t as fully realized as in The Secret History (one of my favorite thing about that book is how deftly Donna Tartt makes you feel first fascination, then affection, then revulsion, all for the same set of people), the tone is similar. Both are books that probably work better on an intellectual level than an emotional one. For instance, Quentin isn’t always likable (in fact, I occasionally wanted to punch him), but he doesn’t really need to be, since the story follows the shattering of his illusions and the ramifications of his own flawed decisions.
There aren’t a lot of warm fuzzies in The Magicians, but it’s not all darkness by any means; wry humor abounds. And Grossman’s world-building doesn’t rely entirely on others’ work; there are plenty of genuinely cool magical touches. As a bookworm, I loved his description of the Brakebills library:
Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.
To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call numbers, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300–1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.
I can see why a few reviewers might complain that The Magicians left them cold, but for me, the book was so smart and intriguing, and such a clever commentary on the fantasy genre (I’m always a sucker for that intertextuality) that it was a slam dunk. I’ve added Grossman’s previous book, Codex (which sounds like a wacky version of Possession, involving scholars studying a newly discovered manuscript, but also somehow involving online role-playing games) to my to-be-read list, so we’ll see how that stacks up.
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