What Book to Read?

Lots of people have labelled The Magicians (2009) and its sequel, The Magician King (2011) ‘Harry Potter for grown-ups.’ Reading The Magicians, I couldn’t help comparing it with the Harry Potter stories – the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in particular. But the deeper allusion is to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy teenager from Brooklyn trying to decide which college he should go to. Without really meaning to, he finds himself accepted by Brakebills, the Ivy League of American colleges of magic. The early part of the book follows his experience of making friends with other students and learning magic. After graduation, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. But then he is offered the chance of adventure. Quentin, and most of his friends, grew up immersed in the fantasy world of Fillory, described in a series of five books in which a family of children visit an alternative world. What if Fillory really exists?

You can see at once that there is plenty of room for literary allusion. Brakebills and Hogwarts share a number of similarities, though Brakebills doesn’t go in for wands or broomsticks, and has a game called welters, rather than quidditch. Learning magic is not always interesting and takes a lot of hard work at both schools. The characters have obviously read the Harry Potter books; for example there’s a reference to fixing up Hermione’s teeth. But the parallels with Narnia are more fundamentally important in driving the plot in the second half of the book. This is not to say that the story follows that of Lewis’s Christian epic; it is rather a counter narrative. Nevertheless Grossman has been criticised for leaning too heavily on these two sets of stories; you can read his defence here. Personally I rather enjoy the references. There are others too, mischievously waiting to be noticed; example, to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, when one character speculates whether a porn magazine for intelligent trees would be called Enthouse, and to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King when Quentin is turned into a goose. No doubt there are lots of others, like the Dungeon and Dragons ones I don’t really recognise.

Quentin is certainly no Harry Potter. Although Harry suffers some teenage angst in The Order of the Phoenix, he is not a generation y character. Quentin is. This is reflected in his and his friends’ views of the world, and how they talk about it. After graduation, they live a purposeless, hedonistic life; their command of magic brings them no pleasure, and they have no interest in using their powers to some useful end. Their response to the idea of a flower that makes you happy if you smell it is to wonder what they could sell it for – ‘that would be worth bank here.’ Another friend wonders if they will have the chance to ‘experience a world that has not yet been fucked up by assholes.’ But they have no sense of social responsibility. Quentin seeks happiness that always seems just beyond his reach; what was his heart’s desire, once achieved, seems unsatisfying. Indeed his life is spiralling out of control; in a drunken state he even betrays his girlfriend with another member of the group. Quentin concludes that ‘he’d thought that doing magic was the hardest thing he would ever do, but the rest of it was so much harder.’ He keeps hoping that ‘everything broken was fixable’, but is he capable of fixing anything?

I didn’t find the first half of the book very satisfying. It’s true that most of the things that happen at the school and in the period after graduation are in some way linked to what happens later, but the story takes a while to develop and I found myself wondering where it was all going. But be assured it does go somewhere. Obviously I’m not going to tell you what happens, but the second half of the book is much more sophisticated than the first. The characters, though no less self-indulgent, become more interesting. For example, using the device of Fillory allows, maybe even requires, the characters to wonder if they are in a story, when their reality is already mixed up with magic. This is a clever literary ploy. About half way through the book, Quentin claims ‘You don’t just go on adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story; there’s nobody arranging everything for you.’ There is, of course – the author. But can he make them more than just characters in a pre-existing story? And so we read on to find out not just what will happen, but whether Quentin and his friends can actually take responsibility for their actions and begin to understand themselves.

I’m not sure you can say that this book is for grown-ups, and Harry Potter isn’t. They are both clearly coming of age stories – though J.K. Rowling has five books to bring Harry up to speed, and Grossman is trying to do it all in one. Presumably Quentin is a work in progress, and we’ll need to read the sequel to see how he works out. You can read more about Grossman here.