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Lev Grossman's 'The Magicians': adulthood as the ultimate magical dystopia

 

Once in a great while, book fiends have the same experience. A thousand books may pass before a devout reader’s eyes – some good, some bad, some even worse – before it happens: a frisson of amazement at reading the first few lines, paragraphs, or pages of a book and realizing, “By God, this is the real deal. This is Greatness.”

 

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is one of these books.

 

The Magicians has been bandied about like a quaffle between book reviewers as Harry Potter for grown-ups. It’s easy to see why: the tale centers on the angsty seventeen-year old Quentin Coldwater, his five years at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy learning to be a magician, and what happens to Quentin in the great world beyond. There are magical history classes; a complicated magical sport, welters; and references to quidditch and thestrals. Quentin has two close friends during his first year at Brakebills – a quiet, smart girl and a punkish, floundering boy. Hello, Ron and Hermione.

 

The story incorporates much more than Harry Potter lore, however. On one level, The Magicians serves as a paean to every influential children’s fantasy book written in the past 60 years. Fillory, the fictional land of magic that Quentin has been obsessed with since his childhood, is modeled on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. When the Fourth Year students at Brakebills leave for a chilly stint at Brakebills South in Antarctica, portions of Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea leap, inexorably, to mind. Quentin thinks of his time at the school as being a world through the looking-glass, and he is accompanied throughout by his faithful down-the-rabbit-hole companion, Alice. The Physical Kids, the clique Quentin and Alice eventually become part of, speak and act in that quirky, surreal manner characteristic of Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series or T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. One of the Fillory book characters, Martin Chatwin, bears a strong resemblance to a malicious, grey-suited Peter Pan. There are even a few tongue-in-cheek references to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings.

 

If The Magicians were nothing more than a medley of these fantasy hits, it would still be a great book. But what sets it apart from the others isn’t just the addition of a bit of sex and alcohol and soul-searching angst. In every book Mr. Grossman tips his hat to in The Magicians, magic is the doorway, the bridge from childhood and innocence into the adult world. It’s with the help of magic and the characters’ belief in its power for goodness and justice that makes them able to throw the ring into the fire, defeat the Dark Lord, face the shadow. In The Magicians, magic doesn’t lead Quentin & company into adulthood – it is adulthood. And it ain’t all that’s it’s cracked up to be.

 

What child doesn’t think that becoming an adult isn’t a little like becoming an all-powerful magician? Someday, we all think, I’ll be like that: able to do anything I want, whenever! To go anywhere, say anything, be anything! No one will be able to stop me or tell me what to do. Like Quentin thinks of Fillory, we imagine that our adult lives are where happiness will be a “real, actual, achievable possibility.”

 

It’s only when we cross that magical threshold of adulthood that we realize, as Quentin does, that what we thought would be full of freedom and opportunities and lively adventure is, often, “grim and repetitive and deceptive.” It’s riddled with pitfalls and sexual tensions and uncertainty. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities, but more often than not they are opportunities to screw up.

 

And few people are prepared for the uncertainty. As innocent young things, we imagine our adult selves will know exactly what to do and how to make the correct decisions at all times in our suddenly older and omniscient manifestations. When we get there, we often end up like Quentin at his entrance exam for Brakebills, trying to find the right answers when we were never sure of what the questions were to begin with. Quentin discovers that magic, like life, is hardly as comprehensible or as orderly as he had thought it would be: “It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules.”

 

Even when we finally get what we think we have wanted all along – as Quentin thinks when he finally gets into Fillory – it nearly always ends up not being as fantastic as we’d hoped. Sometimes, it ends up being downright awful.

 

In The Magicians, the only real evil is the disillusionment that comes with growing older; the only enemy, time.

 

It all sounds terribly depressing. What’s the fun of reading a fantasy book if it’s simply about the mundane truths of adulthood spiced up with a few spells? Amazingly, The Magicians isn’t depressing at all, partly because of Mr. Grossman’s hypnotically beautiful writing – a form of magic all by itself – and partly because the story ends on a strangely uplifting note: Fillory may not be what you thought it was, but you can still go there and find happiness at the same time.

 

Don’t miss this one, book divvies; The Magicians is a triumph. It’s the real deal, guaranteed.

 

Mr. Grossman is Time magazine's book critic. Take a gander at him and his site, here.