The Magician King - By Lev Grossman - Book Review (original) (raw)

Further Adventures of a Magician From Brooklyn

Aug. 26, 2011

Sure, you’ve heard of the freshman 15. But what about the Fillory 15?

Fillory is the enchanted land Lev Grossman introduced in his 2009 fantasy novel, "The Magicians," about a Brooklyn teenager who learned that magic was real, and went on to claim one of the four Fillorian thrones. Now Grossman has written a sequel, “The Magician King,” and as it opens, His Royal Highness King Quentin Coldwater is getting a bit of a paunch. While out riding with his fellow royals through the enchanted woods, Quentin chafes against the luxurious boredom of their two-year reign and wishes for an adventure. “No wonder kings looked so fat in pictures,” he thinks, reflecting on his days spent reclining on pillows and his nights spent drinking to unconsciousness. “One minute you’re Prince Valiant, the next you’re Henry VIII.”

One of the pleasures of “The Magicians” was seeing the standard devices of the fantasy story (talking beasts, magical spells, swordplay) through the eyes of its pop-savvy characters, believable teenagers who read comics, used the Internet, drank to excess — and learned to their delight that they were, indeed, exactly as special as they’d always believed. Admission to Brakebills College, a school of magic in upstate New York, proved it. And that was before a small group of Brakebills grads, including Quentin, found their way into Fillory, which they had previously encountered only in a popular series of English fantasy novels. Fillory isn’t Narnia, quite, but it’s not not Narnia, either.

The Brakebills kids had also read their Tolkien — and Harry Potter, of course, to which “The Magicians” (wherein sorcery, far from solving its unhappy heroes’ problems, often seems to make things worse) sometimes seemed a direct rebuttal. Grossman’s book was not only a cracking yarn but also an exploration of the way fantasy entices the reader — especially the teenage reader — with visions of a majestic alternate future, a place where meaningful quests are handed out to those otherwise at sea. The novel mapped the gulf between Quentin’s ideas of heroism and the scary, awful reality of actually being a hero.

Given the disaster that accompanied Quentin’s previous quest (he lost the girl he loved and almost doomed Fillory), it’s a tad surprising to find him itching for adventure so soon. Yet here he is, setting sail across the wide Fillorian ocean on what he thinks will be a simple tax-collecting mission — but turns into a search for a golden key, provenance unknown. Quentin is restless, indecisive, frustrated and frustrating; Grossman, to his credit, isn’t afraid to explore his protagonist’s rougher edges, but hanging out with ever-dissatisfied Quentin can get a little tiring.

So it’s nice that “The Magician King” offers another point of view. Intercut with Quentin’s present-day adventure is the back story of spooky Queen Julia, another of Fillory’s four Earth-born rulers. Julia, once Quentin’s high school crush, also took the admissions exam for Brakebills, but failed. Nonetheless, she’s become a powerful magician, and in fact seems a pinch beyond human: she talks to animals, dispenses aphorisms like an oracle and forgoes contractions. What exactly happened to her?

Julia’s tale begins just after her failure at Brakebills, and it is driven by desperation. Having seen a magical future slip through her grasp, she abandons her normal life and feverishly explores an underground network of unregulated magicians. While in her scenes with Quentin she sometimes feels like a retread of Alice, a magician of unearthly power who provided much of the juice in “The Magicians,” in her own story she’s a character of real grit and fierce intelligence.

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Credit...Illustration by Marco Wagner

And near-toxic sadness. Julia’s hollowed-out heart will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever felt depression edging into despair. Depression is blackness, Julia realizes — “velvety soft blackness that she could curl up and fall asleep in” — while despair has no color at all. “Think of it,” Grossman writes, “as the difference between zero and the empty set, the set that contains nothing, not even zero.” These sections feel so urgent and empathetic that they shine an unflattering light on Quentin’s part of the story, however eventful it is.

That’s very eventful, to be sure, the quest narrative bubbling along with Grossman’s customary energy. In Venice, Quentin talks to a dragon, which from its home at the bottom of the Grand Canal offers gnomic wisdom in a voice “like some vast string instrument two levels below double bass,” rendered in boldfaced type. (It’s not as friendly as the Thames dragon, who supposedly wrote most of Pink Floyd’s stuff, “at least after Syd Barrett left,” but it looks, Quentin notices, canonical: “thoroughly, almost quintessentially draconian.”) Later, in a funny and lively battle, Quentin finally assembles all his magical skill to fight like a hero. Sliced in the side by an assailant’s sword, he sucks in air through his teeth, “exactly as if he’d cut himself chopping an onion.”

There’s also a trip to the underworld, though it feels slightly wan, at least compared with the perilous and deeply felt scene it closely resembles from Philip Pullman’s “Amber Spyglass.” (I was surprised that Quentin, surely a fan of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, didn’t note the similarities himself.)

All this is to say that Quentin’s escapades make up a perfectly serviceable hero’s journey, even if while reading of his adventures you find yourself wishing to rejoin Julia’s, whose more riveting story arrives every second chapter. Both tales, though, have at their heart an infatuation with the origins of magic, and both skitter appealingly on the border between sorcery, technology and theology.

In “The Magicians,” one of Quentin’s teachers, urging the class not to think too hard about where magic comes from, told the well-known story of Bertrand Russell’s encounter with a woman who insisted that the world was flat, and that it rode on the back of a turtle. When Russell asked what the turtle was standing on, she snapped, “It’s turtles all the way down!”

Both plotlines in “The Magician King” look deep into the well of magic in Grossman’s fictional universe, and both central characters learn it’s assuredly not turtles all the way down. Quentin’s golden key, it turns out, is tied fast to the magic that flows through him like blood. Julia winds up in France, where a collective of adepts has created an “institute for high-energy magical studies,” and her tenure there ends with the group’s tapping that energy source in an absolutely hair-raising set piece. I finished the scene shaking with nerves, and admiring Grossman’s willingness to go over the edge.

In future “Magicians” books (and this one’s finale makes clear there will be more), it will be interesting to see if Quentin retains his place at the center of the story, or whether Grossman will ease him aside, the way C. S. Lewis moved the Pevensie family offstage in latter-day Narnia. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to let other characters take over the spotlight; I’d like to learn more about the delightful lush Eliot, Quentin’s first Brakebills friend, who took nothing seriously on Earth but is a curiously conscientious king.

“Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story,” Quentin declares, framing the novel’s theme in neat miniature. But by the end of “The Magician King,” he comes to realize that he just might not be. It’s a harsh lesson, and one that, in keeping with the preoccupations and innovations of this serious, heartfelt novel, turns the machinery of fantasy inside out.

THE MAGICIAN KING

By Lev Grossman

400 pp. Viking. $26.95.

Dan Kois is a cultural critic and the author of “Facing Future,” about the Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

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