Narniamania

The Magician King
By Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" has centaurs and water spirits and people turning into geese, but when I read it I thought one of its most powerful moments was a very human confrontation between two estranged friends, Quentin and Julia. The scene comes after our protagonist, Quentin, a Holden Caulfield in a Harry Potter world, has become a student at Brakebills, a secret magic school. Back home on a school break, he is visited by Julia, who had been one of his closest friends not long before. As the reader knows, Quentin harbored a crush on the beautiful, brilliant Julia all through high school, but she appears before him now looking disheveled, practically a stranger. They both took the Brakebills entrance exam together, but only Quentin passed. The sorcerers in charge of the school cast spells on Julia to make her forget her experience and to conceal all traces of their existence from the outside world, but somehow they didn't work correctly. Julia knows that Quentin is learning about magic, and she wants him to teach her. He can't, and she is heartbroken. 

It's a touching, even frightening scene. Like a lot in "The Magicians," it uses fantasy story tropes as a way to allegorically explore human experience - a  trick familiar from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and many other fantasy stories - but it also uses human experience as a way to explore the fantasy story. This, I thought, was something new.

That said, in the final pages of the book -- SPOILER ALERT (not really, this isn't much of a giveaway) -- Quentin  looks out his window and sees two of his friends from magic school flying outside of his window, joined by Julia. After all Grossman put Quentin through in "The Magicians," at this seemed like a happy ending. But Grossman isn't going to make things that easy.

Fillory Dillory Dock

"The Magician King" picks up several years later, with Quentin, Julia and friends back in Fillory, the magical world they discovered in the first novel. Fillory, obviously based upon C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, was the subject of a series of fantasy novels Quentin loved when he grew up. Once he became a magician, he learned that this world he thought was fictional was actually real. (Interesting touch: Though Grossman refers to Harry Potter, "The Lord of the Rings," "The Matrix" and other fantasy touchstones by name or direct implication, he studiously avoids mentioning Lewis' creation, and alters key elements of the Narnia stories just enough to avoid copyright infringement.)  

As a king of Fillory, Quentin is growing a little restless. When one of his servants is mysteriously killed, he sets out on a quest. However, the quest he sets out upon is a seemingly pointless voyage to a remote part of the kingdom in an effort to collect overdue taxes. 

Here Grossman introduces a theme that recurs throughout the novel: Heroes and heroines in search of one thing and finding another, stepping into the wrong story. 

Grossman alternates chapters about Quentin and his quest with chapters about what Julia was up to during the years her old friend was learning magic. It's a sad story, but as it goes on it starts to become clear that it isn't just a way to fill in Julia's back story, or to develop her character. It's central to the quest story, as well. Now, it's the readers who are searching for one thing and finding another.

tl;dr

I liked "The Magician King" better than the first book in many ways. In "The Magicians," Grossman's intellectual explorations of the fantasy genre sometimes got in the way of just telling a satisfying story. In the sequel, he's not hampered by having to introduce us to Brakebills, Fillory and other details of the world he's creating, and so he can get right to the action.

However, as with "The Magicians," the sense of action in "The Magician King" is not exactly "Die Hard." (For those keeping score, Grossman makes an explicit reference to "Die Hard" at one point.) Characters frequently rush headlong into adventure and midway through find that they don't know what they're doing, or why.

"The Magician King" does give us some good adventure, and some striking images of fantastical worlds, but Grossman is less interested in that kind of thing than he is in the meta-fiction under the surface. The sequel dives right into the heart of a question that Grossman left mostly unaddressed in "The Magicians": What is magic? Where does it come from? Perhaps inevitably, that leads to the Big Questions about gods and the nature of reality.

C.S. Lewis had the same questions too, when he was writing the Narnia books, and he filled them with allegories to his own somewhat unusual take on Christianity. Grossman doesn't buy that. (Quentin thinks that Fillory's Aslan-like character, Ember, is kind of a bore.) Instead, "The Magician King" tries to explore theological questions from a point of view that's post-religion. He ends up with a view of the universe as a kind of computer program, and magicians as hackers. He has a lot of fun with that idea, but, frankly it left me feeling a little cold. I didn't pick up a fantasy novel to read about computer programming. Maybe in the next book, Grossman will explore the idea further and find that all that stuff Quentin learned about the nature of reality and magic was a smokescreen over what's really going on.