The Magicians — (2009-2011) Publisher: Quentin Coldwater's life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead — but a strange envelope bearing Quentin's name leads him down a very different path to any he'd ever imagined. The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it's a world that seems to answer all Quentin's desires. But the idyll cannot last — and when it's finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected...
 
 The Magicians
The Magicians by Lev Grossman is one of the most frequently reviewed fantasy novels of the last few years, which isn’t surprising because the author is a well known writer (and book reviewer) for TIME Magazine, and the book was very effectively hyped as “Harry Potter with college age students.” The end result of all of this is that lots of people who don’t regularly read fantasy have picked up this novel, and many of them had their expectations severely challenged. So, is The Magicians also worth the time for true-blooded, die-hard fantasy fans? In a word: yes.
You probably already know the basic plot summary for The Magicians. If not, “Harry Potter with college age students” is actually a fairly accurate way to sum up the plot at its most basic level. Quentin is a very bright teenager trying to test into a good college, but instead finds himself enrolling in Brakebills, a secret magic college hidden away in upstate New York. Like many teenagers, Quentin is 1) constantly dissatisfied with the world around him, 2) insecure and a bit full of himself at the same time, and 3) quite mopey. A good chunk of the story revolves around Quentin getting used to life as a brilliant and newly independent young man in a college full of other equally brilliant magic users, but there’s actually a larger plot that’s at first hardly noticeable but gradually becomes more apparent as the novel progresses.
This larger plot is the main reason why The Magicians is an interesting read for fantasy fans, because it involves a clever meta-fictional twist. Quentin never outgrew his love for a (fictional) series of five young adult fantasy novels set in Fillory, which has some strong echoes of Narnia. Quentin’s friends mercilessly tease him about still liking these children’s books, but he still finds comfort in re-reading them. In a hint of the future, one of the main things that draw Quentin towards the Brakebills magical college is a glimpse of an (thus far) unknown sixth novel in the Fillory series.
So what we have here is a young fantasy fan who suddenly finds himself confronted with the existence of very real magic, a reader of escapist books who becomes aware that the fiction he used as an escape is not entirely fictional. While the Harry Potter comparison is obvious, it’s also appropriate to compare The Magicians to a more adult version of The Neverending Story — the original novel by Michael Ende, not the horrid film adaptation that ends more or less exactly where the book starts to get interesting. Just like Bastian Balthazar Bux, Quentin must come to terms with the fact that a fantasy that becomes real may not be quite as easy to live with as one that remains safely in the realm of fiction.
Lev Grossman is doing more than just telling a story here. Indirectly, he’s having a conversation with fantasy readers about what it’s like to be a fan of stories that involve magic and alternate realities. Some characters make fun of Quentin for still liking the books he loved as a child; others take them just as seriously — or even more so — than he does. The meta-fictional aspect of the novel becomes much more important towards the end of the story, but it’s hard to go into too much detail without spoiling the most surprising twists. However, rest assured, there are a few more layers to this novel than just the by now almost commonplace premise, “a young person attends a magical school.”
It’s interesting to compare The Magicians with Jo Walton’s excellent Among Others, another recent fantasy novel that’s at the same time a good story and a conversation with genre fans. Among Others is an appreciative, even loving, approach to fantasy, whereas The Magicians has a much darker, almost satiric edge. Among Others’ main character, Mori, is aware that magic is real and is, at the same time, a big fan of SF and fantasy, but in her world there’s a clear separation between fiction and reality. In The Magicians, Quentin learns that magic is real, and comes to learn that what he thought of as fiction is based in reality, but that there are clear differences between the two. Mori’s story is a hopeful one, whereas Quentin gradually loses every illusion he had.
Aside from Quentin, the other characters in The Magicians have their own reactions to the fact that magic is real, and approach the study and practice of it in a number of ways, from full-on obsession to vague disinterest. Many reviewers have complained about how negative the main characters are, and it’s true: there aren’t many examples here of people using their skills for good, or even just being thankful for their extraordinary gifts. There’s a lot of boredom, disinterest, cynicism. The most talented ones have the blasé attitude of a gifted person who looks down on those who manage to muster some excitement. There are cliques and power circles, and people stuck on the outside. And yes, as on almost any college campus, there’s a good amount of booze and casual sex. This is not a novel to read if you’re looking for faultless, likable characters, and that includes our hero Quentin, who is simply too myopic to see how lucky he is. In the middle of the novel, he sums this up very effectively by thinking “I got my heart’s desire [...] and there my troubles began,” but even earlier, well before he finds out about magic and Brakebills, we find out what Quentin’s general attitude is:
I should be happy, Quentin thought. I’m young and alive and healthy. I have good friends. I have two reasonably intact parents — viz., Dad, an editor of medical textbooks, and Mom, a commercial illustrator with ambitions, thwarted, of being a painter. I am a solid member of the middle-middle class. My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be.
But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.
To offset the general mopiness of the spoiled brats who populate The Magicians, there’s also a good amount of humor to be found. Lev Grossman, well aware that he’s echoing Harry Potter here and there, gives Brakebills its own magical competitive sport a la quidditch, but most of the students consider it more of an annoyance, ironically muttering “let me get my broom” or showing up drunk for the games. One of the more “frat boy”-like characters at one point exclaims “let’s get some unicorns up in this piece.” The scene set at the house of Alice’s parents is too hilarious to spoil for you here (but, typical for this novel, at the same time shows a glimpse of the bitter afterlife Brakebills graduates can look forward to). And finally, the description of one faux-Colonial McMansion shows that Grossman has mastered the rare art of writing about architecture in an entertaining way:
The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous — bulging in all directions with extra gables and roofs — that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.
Still, despite the brief flashes of humor, The Magicians is essentially a dark novel. Go through the list of characters and you’ll find that almost all of them have their dreams and expectations shattered at some point — the ones that actually have the ability and energy to dream, that is. The Magicians is the perfect antithesis of an escapist novel: it pulls the curtain up, reveals that magic is real, and then makes it clear that even young, gifted people often don’t have it in them to use it wisely or even appreciate it. That it does this by actually using some of the most beloved young adult fantasy fiction as a starting point makes the experience of reading it even more disconcerting. It’s no wonder that this novel got some very extreme reviews from fantasy fans.
I approached The Magicians expecting a gimmicky “adult Harry Potter” story, and was very pleasantly surprised. Yes, it’s a novel about teenagers in a magical college, but it also has some very complex characters, genuinely surprising twists, and a level of depth I didn’t expect in the least. That The Magicians manages to remain highly accessible and readable while delivering all of this is simply amazing. The various levels of cynicism in this novel may be hard to cope with for readers expecting a more traditionally escapist fantasy, but if you don’t mind having your expectations challenged, The Magicians delivers a very rewarding reading experience that will remain with you for a long time to come. Highly recommended. —Stefan Raets
 The Magicians
Quentin Coldwater was just another gifted kid trying to impress a pretty girl by getting into an Ivy League school. His life changes when he finds himself writing an entry test at an academy for magicians. Soon, he and a group of undergrads are doing their best to get ahead of the competition. Sadly, by the end of his first year, Quentin and his friends are doing their best to act urbane about their power for lack of anything else to do.
At times, I found these urbane characters an irritating distraction from an otherwise enjoyable fantasy. Sadly, they take Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings and try to turn all of them into The Great Gatsby and Interview With The Vampire. However, perhaps that’s the point: magic seems awesome, but if it doesn’t come naturally during puberty at the same time as a threat to the universe, it’s just another lot of work we have to do while figuring out what we’re “actually” supposed to do with our life.
Put another way: what’s the point of fantasy if it doesn’t offer us the chance to escape the mundane?
So readers looking for an innocent high fantasy in which quests are taken on and completed after gaining a sense of self-awareness, defeating evil, and saving the princess should probably skip The Magicians. This story refuses to attempt those things innocently.
Quite appropriately, hardly a page in The Magicians goes by without Grossman's characters alluding to popular fantasies and then mocking what makes them "fantasies." However, don’t mistake the characters for the author. While his characters are busy nurturing their cynical worldview in a traditionally optimistic genre, Grossman orchestrates a surprisingly “by the numbers” fantasy in which we move from training to testing to questing.
Not only is there a school for magicians, there's also a talking bear, battle mages, and a Wonderland. I particularly enjoyed when the characters discovered that battle magic in Dungeons & Dragons has — through sheer coincidence — the fundamentals of offensive spell casting down. Another high point is the test in which Grossman's students race from South America to the South Pole with nothing but their spells and a bag of mutton fat. Later we follow one character in his search for the "questing beast." The questing beast is smug rather than noble, but it will grant three wishes if caught. So although Grossman’s allusions at first feel clever but mocking, they eventually build up to an impressive climax. And I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the falling action of a novel more than I did in The Magicians.
With The Magicians, Grossman’s achievement is that he manages to satisfy all of our expectations of a high fantasy while offering a bandage of irony for the self-esteem of adult readers that are too insecure to admit that they enjoy Harry Potter novels. —Ryan Skardal
 The Magicians
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians attempts to take the unreal world of fantasy — magic, spellcasting, other worlds, fabulous beasts — and tie it much more tightly to the real world than is usually done. And (I
think) the attempt as well is to tell a “realistic” novel which takes as its premise that magic exists and is being used (not quite the same thing as the first). I’d say he only partially succeeds, though he does so often enough that the book makes a worthy, if not fully satisfying, read.
The Magicians is divided into sections. Book One introduces Quentin on his way to a school interview with his best friend. Eventually, Quentin somehow ends up at Brakehill Academy for a different kind of test and interview — to enter Brakehill’s school of magic (which is like a grittier, more realistic Hogwarts). He passes and soon he is learning spells etc. with the rest of his cohort. We watch him year to year, growing more knowledgeable and powerful (though he’s far from the best), making a few friends and one girlfriend, until graduation into the real world.
Book Two is like a Bret Easton Ellis novel as Quentin and his friends wine and dine in NYC with little purpose while jealousies and sexual issues take over. Fortunately, this section is relatively brief and soon, thanks to a discovery by one of the group, the scene shifts again in Book Three to a Narnia book, though the land here is called Fillory (set in a magical world of several older novels Quentin and his friends had read as youths). Quentin and his friends, to various degrees, buy into (or not) the various ways Fillory is as the books said it was and also the various ways they should or should not enact the usual children-whisked-away-to-a-magical-land formula: should they become kings and queens? Perform a quest? Save the land from external or internal danger? Run like hell at the first sign of real danger? Book Four — the shortest section — deals with the aftermath of their actions and decisions.
The Magicians is uneven in pacing and impact, both book to book and within sections as well. The lengthy part one, dealing with his time at Brakewell’s, feels at times both too long and too short. Too long in that there are repetitive moments and times when you wish things would speed along a bit and, contrarily, too short in that the jumps forward in time seem a bit arbitrary and skip over some events you’d like to see. I found myself wishing Lev Grossman had been more selective in what he chose to show and not show us. The magic is also a bit ethereal — we’re told lots about it, but again in random pieces — I never felt it solidly connected as a system and especially as a system in the real world. One of the strengths in this section was the characterization, of both Quentin and several of his classmates, especially his closest friends.
Book Two felt contrived to me — the drinking and drugging and sex. We’re told that some magicians take responsible positions in the world, but those lines felt a bit throwaway. For a book that tries so hard to present itself as grounded in reality, what magicians actually do in our real world never felt real or much considered. And the section felt contrived as well for what it was meant to set up — issues of jealousy and anger that would have repercussions later.
Luckily, it’s a short section and then it’s off to Fillory. Here I think Grossman does a disservice to himself as Fillory, despite its obvious homage to other fantasy lands, is really quite a vivid setting and I would have liked to have spent much more time here. And more time as well with the characters as they explored the differences and quandaries of “real world” Fillory versus fantasy worlds in fiction — we deal with these issues (or at least the characters do) and it’s all quite compelling, but given short shrift. And because the problem sections or the “should we be following what most kids do in this situation” questions are handled so quickly, the scenes can sometimes devolve into standard cookie-cutter YA fantasy scenes. Cutting some of Book One to expand Book Three — both in action and introspection — would have helped. I did like the last book but won’t go into details, though I did feel Grossman copped out a bit on the very end — though again, I’ll skip the spoiler explanation.
In the end, The Magicians suffered from inconsistent pacing, some imbalance in where we spent our time, and from presenting itself as more “real” but never really succeeding. Where it mostly succeeded was in its characterization, its coming-of-age story, and its creation of a young fantasy world (though not enough time was spent there). There were obvious nods to fantasy authors such as J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, but sometimes it felt like an homage and other times it felt a bit derivative. The Magicians is a solid but not engrossing read — one that had great potential but never quite met it. —Bill Capossere
The Magicians
I think I get the point Lev Grossman is trying to make in The Magicians. It's best summed up by this quote, which is part of a lecture given to the protagonist, Quentin, by one of his companions:
"Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it; there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."
The Magicians is the story of Quentin, a gifted high school student who learns he has the potential to become a magician. He enrolls at Brakebills, a magical academy, and studies there for five years. That's Book I. (The novel is divided into four parts.) Book II deals with the jaded, booze-soaked lives of Quentin and his friends after graduation. In Book III, Quentin and company travel to the high-fantasy land of Fillory, and book IV covers the wrapping up of loose ends in Fillory and Quentin's return to the "real" world.
Grossman satirizes the Harry Potter series in Book I, and the Narnia series in Book III. Sometimes, he touches on real issues that are often left unexplained in fantasy novels, such as the question of what wizards do when they're finished with their schooling. It always did seem like there were more wizards than there were wizard jobs! But more often than not, the way Grossman deals with his source material is to suck the wonder out of it. Brakebills is painfully dull. Fillory can be downright nasty. This feeds into Grossman's message. Magical worlds, it seems, aren't all they're cracked up to be, and you wouldn't really want to go there.
Unfortunately, Grossman's message falls flat with me, for two reasons. One is that I intrinsically reject the idea that reading fantasy leads to becoming like Quentin, who is forever discontent and constantly looking for something better than what he has. Lots of people read fantasy without losing touch with reality. And while we may daydream about traveling to Hogwarts or Narnia, we don't reject real life for not resembling these fictional realms.
The second problem is Quentin himself. He's self-centered, arrogant, cowardly, and overall not a pleasant person with whom to spend 400 pages. He reminded me of some guys I went to college with: rich, white, male, brilliant, but convinced their lives sucked because no supermodels had deigned to go out with them. In his never-ending quest for the next big thing, Quentin ruins everything in his life that's worth having. This is clearly supposed to tie in with Grossman's moral, but instead it just turns me off the character. It makes me think that this would be a very different story if told through the eyes of one of the secondary characters. Some of them do truly heroic things, raising the question of whether fantasy can make its readers better rather than worse. I wonder how many people have been inspired to greater courage by the tales of their heroes.
It's even possible that this is the real point of The Magicians, but the focus on Quentin seems to imply otherwise. Quentin's yearning for fantasy lands is written as part and parcel of, and a metaphor for, his overall dissatisfaction with everything around him and his desire to escape reality.
I did like the plot involving the Chatwin siblings and the mystery of their eventual fates, and I must say that Grossman's writing is good, style-wise. However, The Magicians left me flat overall. Between the "disenchantment" of the fantasy realms and my lack of sympathy for Quentin, I just found it hard to care.
—Kelly Lasiter
 The Magician King
In Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater — a geeky fantasy-loving high school senior — has his life turned upside down when he is invited to take an entrance exam for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. After spending years learning the craft, and some time outside of school in a Bret Easton Ellis novel kind of existence, life is turned around again when he and several of his newfound magician friends discover that Fillory — the magical setting of a series of beloved children’s books (think Narnia and you’ve got it) — is real. And they can go there.
“Real” is a key word in The Magicians and in Grossman’s follow-up, The Magician King. Fillory, it turns out, is more “real” than people might want; it has all the ills — the violence, the death, the ugliness, the terror — that the real world does and that were left out of the children’s book version of the world. The regular old non-Fillory world that Quentin moves through, despite the presence of magic, is also “real.” Your problems don’t disappear with the ability to cast spells. You still have to get a job, you can still have screwed-up relationships, you can still get hangovers, people can still die. All your dreams can come true, but in the real world, some dreams are nightmares. Some dreams you’d rather wake up from.
I said in my review of The Magicians that I thought Grossman was trying to tightly tie together a fantasy novel and a literary realism novel, to blend the two genres seamlessly in a way that is rarely done. Plot- and setting-wise, we’re usually in a fantasy world start to finish, or we have two worlds and a portal between them but the two are wholly separate. One tends to be story-driven, one character-driven. In fantasy we’re often given types or are focused more on characters’ actions, while in literary realism we’re given the life of the interior mind and focused more on personal and interpersonal conflict (yes, these are generalizations — hold your indignant examples of exceptions). This bifurcation isn’t the case in Grossman’s universe. And because he throws those worlds together, he can also give us a lot of meta-discussion on the role of fantasy in life (not to mention a slew of terrifically fun allusions to try and catch). It’s a great concept, even if I thought The Magicians only partly succeeded. The failure in my mind wasn’t one of conception or theme, but rather pacing and balance. Another problem is that it is really tough to create a character full of ennui and adolescent angst and not drive your reader a bit crazy.
Happily, none of those problems are present in The Magician King, which is going on my early list of top ten fantasy novels of the year. In just about every way, it is a better book than The Magicians, repeating the first book’s strengths of characterization, concept, and style and improving in those areas The Magicians was a bit weak in. It is the work of an author more confident in both his material and his craft.
It begins with Quentin and his three friends from book one — Eliot, Janet, and Julie — ruling as the kings and queens of Fillory. As Mel Brooks famously said, “it’s good to be king.” You get good food, great service, nice rooms, and lots of leisure time (especially in a kingdom that requires little administration). Despite that, Quentin, whom one would think is living his dream — literally living in his fantasy world — isn’t happy. He realizes this when an adventure presents itself to him early on when the four are chasing after the Seeing Hare (aka the White Stag from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe):
He was restless. He was looking for something else. He didn’t know what it was... He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off.
Quentin passes on that adventure, but he eventually takes on another one, to sail to the Outer Island (aka the Lone Islands of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader); which leads to yet another one, to find seven golden keys which may just be essential to saving not just Fillory but magic itself. He’s joined on the way by Julie, who has gotten stranger and more remote over time; Bingle, the winner of the Best Swordsperson of Fillory tournament; Benedict, a surly teenage cartographer promoted to “field agent” by Quentin because he reminds him of his younger self; and one of the Talking Beasts, a sloth who actually talks very little.
We get several stories in The Magician King. One is a basic adventure story and it’s a lot of fun, with twists and turns and inventive settings, situations, and creatures which I don’t want to spoil by naming examples. The original fantasy elements have a true sense of wonder, while the borrowed/tweaked ones make the novel a joyful scavenger hunt of glittering allusions that never fail to bring a smile as you unearth them. Another story, told via staggered flashback chapters, belongs to Julie. It tells how she got her powers (she failed the entrance exam to Brakebills) and how she ended up with the others in Fillory. This plot line is much darker and more personal, a coming of age story for a young woman who has to fight her way through depression and obsession and who achieves her dream but, similar to Quentin in book one, at some cost. Because this storyline is broken up, and is less focused on general teen angst (Julia has actual cause for her anger and depression), cynicism, and privileged ennui then Quentin’s similar “how I got my magic and grew up” storyline from The Magicians, it is nowhere near as off-putting. And it becomes darkly, tragically compelling by its end.
The third storyline is the threat to Fillory and to magic itself, which reveals some surprising information about the nature of magic and explores myth and religion as well. As one might expect, the storylines converge at the end, though I think in ways that most people will not see coming, at least not for the vast majority of the novel.
Precise, fluid prose, smooth pacing, and crisp dialogue combine to sweep you effortlessly along; I read it in a single sitting quite happily. The melding/blurring of reality and fantasy, besides being a theme of the novel (most of the characters face a choice — possibly false — between the real world and the fantasy world) keeps the reader on his/her toes, persistently breaking our readerly expectations at the most basic level of the sentence, something I found constantly stimulating. The reference to the “protective plastic wrap” above is one such example, along with people performing magic on their iPhones, using GPS, or improving a “classic” spell by using Google Street View.
Characterization is consistently sharp and full, even for the secondary characters such as Benedict, Bingle, and yes, even the sloth. Julia grows the most, simply
because we see her over a greater stretch of time, but both main characters make significant personal journeys to parallel their geographic ones. And these journeys feel and are presented as the real awakening from adolescence to adulthood. Here is Quentin at one point:
He’d known that adventures were supposed to be hard. He’d understood that he would have to go a long way and solve difficult problems and fight foes and be brave... But this was hard in a way he hadn’t counted on. You couldn’t kill it with a sword or fix it with a spell. You couldn’t fight it. You just had to endure it, and you didn’t look good or noble or heroic doing it... It didn’t make a good story... He wasn’t ready for it.
Welcome to life, Quentin.
Along with the coming-of-age theme, the novel plumbs a lot of real-world questions: What does it mean to be happy? Can we ever be happy? When do we stop “becoming” who we are and can just be who we are? Do we ever? What makes a hero? How far should we seek our limits and once we find them, are we bound by them? Should we be? What responsibilities come with power? What is this need for fantasy that seems to be embedded in our consciousness — what are its benefits, its pitfalls?
The Magician King isn’t flawless. How magic works in our world is still a bit fuzzy, I think. It seems to me as if the magic here is like adding a drop or two of red food coloring to water and rather than having the water change color we end up with water and one or two drops of red. One character pretty much disappears (not any great loss at all). And there may be one or two other small flaws. But they are really minor complaints and hardly worth mentioning.
Is The Magician King a “fantasy book for grown-ups”? You know it’ll get called that at some point, as did Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which The Magician King feels a bit akin to — funnier, geekier, but without the richness of language and style) but the term makes me wince due to its obvious implication that fantasy isn’t for grownups (I’d actually say if you can’t enjoy fantasy your growth is stunted, but that’s just me). But I might call it a “grown-up fantasy book”: self-aware, sophisticated, thoughtful, confident, skilled and professional. Or I might just call it a great book and leave it at that. A must-read. —Bill Capossere
The Magician King
At the end of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Brakebills graduate Quentin Coldwater abandoned a cushy but dead-end insecure job to become co-ruler of the magical land of Fillory with his former classmates Eliot and Janet and his erstwhile flame Julia. I absolutely loved the drama of that final scene, with Eliot, Janet and Julia hovering thirty stories up in the air and shattering Quentin’s office window to drag him along on this new adventure.
The Magicians left lots of questions unanswered. How did Julia meet Eliot and Janet, and how exactly did she get so strong? What happened to Josh? Or Penny, for that matter? What was actually going on with the whole Neitherlands setup? Is it just a coincidence that it resembled a huge version of a welters board? (Or more likely the other way round: is the welters board meant to look like a small Neitherlands grid?) And what, most importantly, were these four disaffected young magicians thinking, installing themselves as the rulers of Narnia, sorry, Fillory? As much as I loved The Magicians for presenting a solid stand-on-its-own story, it was at the same time practically begging for a sequel. Thank goodness it’s finally here.
At the start of The Magician King, Quentin, Janet, Eliot and Julia are comfortably set up as the kings and queens of Fillory, with Eliot the nominal High King. They lead the leisurely lives of figurehead royalty, eating and drinking luxuriously, going on the occasional royal hunt, waving to the populace from the balcony of their palace. They’re basically lazing around and enjoying themselves. The only thing that proves to be lacking in their lives as the rulers of a magical utopia proves to be, well, a challenge. Or as Quentin realizes, somewhat counter-intuitively in the first chapter of the novel:
Being king wasn’t the beginning of the story, it was the end. [...] This was the happily ever after part. Close the book, put it down, walk away.
Meanwhile, Julia has amped up her goth appearance and become increasingly quiet and mysterious. She’s “gone native” and, Quentin notes, seems to have given up using contractions altogether. Something has happened to her, something that left her powerful but damaged. Quentin wonders how expensive her education was, and it’s clear that he’s not thinking of the cost in terms of a monetary value.
Eventually, Quentin realizes that all this lying around isn’t exactly what he had in mind when he relocated to the magical realm of Fillory, so he jumps at the first chance to do something semi-meaningful: he will conduct an expedition to Outer Island, a tiny and remote speck-on-the-map, predominantly inhabited by fishermen who haven’t paid their taxes for a while. It’s clear that the taxes aren’t really what’s important here — after all, Fillory is a land of hyperabundance and the only problem with its economy is a chronic shortage of actual shortages. Quentin is just itching to do something heroic, and if that involves refitting a ship (the Muntjac) and setting out to talk to some yokels about their back taxes, at least it also includes an exciting sea voyage and some new horizons.
So Quentin sets out on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Muntjac, accompanied by a sullen apprentice cartographer named Benedict, the best swordsman in the realm (who goes by the unlikely name of Bingle), a talking sloth, and the ever-mysterious Julia. This journey will take them to the one place you’d least suspect — at least if you haven’t read the plot summary on the inside flap of the novel — and eventually to a quest that, yes, will determine the very fate of Fillory....
If you loved The Magicians as much as I did, you’ll probably be pleased with The Magician King. Yes, the novelty has worn off a bit, but in exchange you get a story that’s actually more structured and more obviously working its way towards a solid finale than the first novel’s. It’s a proper adventure, really, although as you’d probably expect there are some false starts, detours and roundabouts along the way. You’ll also get answers to some of the questions that were left unanswered in The Magicians, but new questions pop up to take their place. I wish authors did requests, because I now have a list of possible subjects for future stories that could expand on things that are only hinted at here. At one point, a character throws out the idea of inverse profundity — "The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.” I haven’t experienced that yet with these books. Quite the opposite, really.
The most noticeable change in The Magician King is that Julia takes over the spotlight for a good chunk of the novel. Once Lev Grossman has set up Quentin’s quest, roughly every other chapter starts filling in Julia’s story, recounting what happened to her between her failed entrance exam at Brakebills and the final scene of The Magicians. The good news is that she’s a fascinating character and that her storyline adds a whole new dimension to this fantasy universe. The bad news, at least for people who groused about the mopiness and general “insanely privileged but still too myopic to be happy” quality of people like Quentin and Eliot, is that Julia is, well, like that, too. Sort of. To be fair, her depression seems to be more of the chemical imbalance variety, rather than Quentin’s all-purpose teenage angst. More importantly (and fortunately) she’s got the gumption to actually do something about what’s lacking in her life. She picks herself up and finds her way into an underground scene for people who want to learn magic but didn’t make it into Brakebills. (Lev Grossman also put me out of my misery by finally throwing in a very welcome reference. Julia always reminded me of someone, but I could never put my finger on it, and now I finally know who it was: Fairuza Balk’s character in The Craft.) By the time Julia’s and Quentin’s plots converge, you’ll have answers to several questions, but again, also many new ones. Julia’s storyline is what makes The Magician King a great book.
Meanwhile, Quentin is on his quest, and in the process finds out all sorts of fascinating things about the nature of the Neitherlands, the current whereabouts of some of his other friends, and the origins of magic. For much of the novel, the entire quest seems to be one gigantic red herring. Quentin often has the feeling that he’s in a fantasy novel, just not a proper one. At one point, he hilariously realizes that it’s very hard to deliver his lines without sounding like a Monty Python skit. At other times, he feels like he’s improvising in a play to which everyone has the script, or like he might be a minor character in someone else’s story. He also feels the acute lack of a soundtrack during combat scenes. (At that point, I couldn’t help thinking of another movie: A Knight’s Tale, with its rock soundtrack that provided such a jarring but effective contrast with what was actually happening on screen. Both of these novels often create a literary version of that type of cognitive dissonance, e.g. when someone uses Google Street View to pinpoint the exact location for a magical portal, or uses magic to jailbreak an iPhone.)
The Magician King is a deceptively cheerful book, because even if it all seems like a lark for Quentin early on, there’s a darker undercurrent right from the beginning. Regardless, it’s again a highly entertaining book to read because it’s filled with cultural references, from Shakespeare to video games and, of course, lots of fantasy. There are so many of these that the prose practically sparkles with possible points of contact for the larger geek culture out there. Grossman also sets up several scenes perfectly, leading you to expect something to happen, only to find out that you’re having the rug pulled out from under you, sometimes in a way that’s truly, horribly shocking. I fell for these hook, line and sinker. Be warned, gentle reader.
If you loved The Magicians, you probably don’t need much convincing to check out this sequel. Yes, it’s a very different book: the whole Harry Potter shtick is basically gone, Quentin has gained some welcome confidence, Julia is front and center. At the same time, it riffs on the same themes and ideas that made The Magicians so good, and it adds some layers to the story and the fantasy universe. Some of these don’t exactly line up for me yet, but maybe all will be explained in another sequel? There’d better be another book in this series, because dammit, I want more. —Stefan Raets
 The Magician King
Quentin Coldwater returns and he is now both a magician of Earth and a king of Fillory, Lev Grossman’s version of Narnia. Quentin is in search of a quest, the one that’s for him and him alone, and it doesn’t take long for him to find it.
It also doesn’t take long for Quentin to begin wryly reflecting on the world around him, and Grossman can hardly resist either. Between them, Lev and Quentin manage to make allusions to just about every nerdy, geeky, suburban aspect of North American life that Grossman thinks his audience can think of, ranging from iPhones to D&D to John Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Keeping up on these inside jokes can get a little tiresome, but who are we to scoff at something that clearly brings Grossman so much satisfaction?
Besides, this self-aware atmosphere allows Grossman a lot of freedoms — ones that few fantasy writers enjoy. For example, Fillory allows Grossman to create impressive high fantasy moments, such as Quentin’s hunt for the Seeing Hare, a Unique Beast that will foretell the future (death and despair, unfortunately). However, Grossman is also able to describe swords and sorcery using the parlance of our times. Everyone will have their own favorite line, but mine might have been “if you’re enough a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted,” not even comparative religion studies. Even Quentin, who dresses like a king of the Renaissance, looks at the people in Fillory and wonders “what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.”
However, if a clever, amusing voice were the only thing driving The Magician King, it would surely be received as a disappointment. Instead, Grossman demonstrates that he has honed his fantasy chops. Critics will find it difficult to simply label The Magician King as “Harry Potter for adults” as they did with its predecessor. There’s just too much plot, and readers will almost certainly enjoy reading a clever rendition of their favorite trope, whether it be dragons, trickster deities, or even a brief war of the gods. Grossman has done his homework, and it shows. Even the sword dueling is quite impressive.
Clearly, Grossman has matured, and I think it’s fair to say his protagonist has as well. Quentin’s ennui about the world was appropriate for The Magicians, but would have felt a little strained here. Now, Quentin’s reflections are less prone to clever whining and more akin to intelligent epiphanies. When Quentin attempts to learn to use a sword, he finds it difficult and reflects “that was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.” Well said, Quentin.
The Magician King is a very enjoyable fantasy, one that is sure to impress fans of The Magicians and that will also hopefully satisfy Lev Grossman’s detractors. It’s clear that he has the potential to become one of the best authors SFF has to offer. —Ryan Skardal
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