Book: The magicians

[liv]

Author: Lev Grossman

Details: (c) Lev Grossman, 2009; Pub Arrow Books 2009; ISBN 978-0-0995-3444-0

Verdict: The magicians is uneven but readable.

Reasons for reading it: There's been a fair amount of buzz about it, and I liked the premise.

How it came into my hands: jack leant it to me.

The Magicians is billed as "Harry Potter for grownups", and it sort of is, but it's also trying almost too hard to be self-referentially about what it's like to come of age in a post-HP world. The whole thing seems to veer between existing as a fantasy novel and a parody of a fantasy novel. It definitely grabbed me, I wanted to keep reading, and I cared about the characters and the setting even though the characters are basically obnoxious and the setting is as much grim as it's inventive. I think the most enjoyable parts of the book are where the narrative seems to forget that it's supposed to be all pretentious and angsty and litfic-y and it just dips into being a rollicking good story. Yes, the writing is sometimes clunky, with the character motivations spelled out in almost excruciating detail, but it still builds up tension by successfully creating a series of mysteries which are only gradually revealed.

The problem is that repeatedly, the "reveal" is that the mystery turns out to be sordid and miserable rather than romantic and exciting. After a few rounds of the reader's (and characters') expectations being disappointed by the seedy underpinnings of the magical world, yet hoping that this next mystery will turn out to make everything meaningful, well, it's hard to remain emotionally engaged. It may be cynical, but I suspect the key to the book is Grossman's author bio: He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and went on to the PhD program in comparative literature at Yale, although he left after three years without finishing a dissertation. It's very much about what happens if you're brilliantly talented and get access to a highly privileged life at an elite educational institution, but then mundane reality just doesn't live up to your ideals of saving the world with your amazing genius. In some ways Harry Potter and the methods of rationality handles this kind of angst better, but only in some ways, because Methods has lots of other axes to grind.

I tried to like the protagonist, because he's undoubtedly well drawn. The problem is that he's so very whiny, and so completely fails to grow up and get over his ridiculous self-centredness that it's a real struggle to have any sympathy for his problems, especially when they stem from being absurdly clever and somewhat wealthy. Which is not to say that privileged, intelligent people can't have troubles, and there are definitely glimmers of sympathy for some of Quentin's plight. But he wallows so much in self-pity because his parents pay more attention to eachother than to him, or because not all the women he's attracted to instantly fall into his arms, or because his friends don't instantly forgive them when he's obnoxious to them that even when he's self-aware of that he's being disgustingly self-pitying, it's hard to care. And Alice, well, Alice ticks most of the "strong female character" boxes, being generally awesome both academically and magically, but the development of her relationship with Quentin just makes her into a manic pixie dream girl and there's just no way he deserves her.

There are some great moments, unquestionably. Grossman appears to be particularly good at writing magical animals; the scene with the geese is rather moving. And Brakebills works very well both as a portrait of an elite university and as a parody of Hogwarts. The narrative hits just the right note of revulsion at the ivory tower life with its cliques and quaint traditions, mixed with love for the opportunity to devote yourself to really intense study in the company of intellectual giants, surrounded by beautiful old buildings and eating the most ludicrously expensive food. And by portraying magic as an intensely difficult academic subject, Grossman manages to both capture the bittersweet experience of devoting your life to a very difficult academic discipline, and creates a plausible and emotionally credible magic system.

I think Fillory worked less well as a parody of / response to Narnia, I think primarily because it comes right at the end of the book when we've already got the message that magical fantasy worlds aren't enough to counter the ennui felt by rich, over-educated 20-somethings who can't work out the meaning of life or even how to treat their fellow humans with a modicum of decency. And yes, heroic battles with evil fantasy creatures aren't particularly noble or uplifting when you're actually living through them, and people get hurt and die, but pretty much every character in a secondary world fantasy in the last 80 years has noticed this, so it's hard to tell whether it's supposed to be parody or just genre expectations.

It seems as if The Magicians is meant to be a bit slipstreamy, it's meant to appeal to both litfic readers who think they're superior to all those fantasy-reading nerds, and to the fantasy-reading nerds themselves. It's only partially successful in this, mainly because it doesn't quite mesh the two aspects, and because it isn't really as clever as it thinks it is.

Comments

[rysmiel]

I've not read this primarily because of a strong impression that Grossman is reasonably good at portraying people who work very hard at complex academic stuff and are made miserable thereby, and utterly fails to get the kinds of joys that one could generally subsume under the heading of geeky.

I find it particularly hard not to read a bit more about the author than is normally fair into this situation because of having read and enjoyed his twin brother Austin Grossman's comedic superhero novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, which positively radiates joyful geekiness.

[liv]

Yeah, it is pretty much a book about how academic success makes you miserable even though you thought it would make you happy. It does have moments of geeky / academicy joy, it's not that it utterly fails to get that aspect. But it feels as if most of the joy in the book is there so that you feel more of a sense of loss when it turns out to be hollow and meaningless. It's depressing in the way that the worst of litfic can be, though the protag does comment that his misery is generally caused by his own unremittingly negative attitude, not really by his academic studies (or his failed relationships or any of his other problems.) If you hate that kind of thing then the book isn't well written enough to be worth ploughing through, I think.

[jack]

Austin Grossman's comedic superhero novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, which positively radiates joyful geekiness.

Oh, I didn't realise who that was by! I read that, and enjoyed it a lot, altough it still felt somewhat pointless by the end: your description of "joyful" nails exactly what was good about it, but I was bothered that there never seemed to be any point to what the characters were doing, they just seemed to be going through the motions of being heroes and villains because that's what heroes and villains do. And I suppose that was sort of the point, but it still felt unsatisfying...

[rysmiel]

I wouldn't claim any real virtues for that book other than joyful geekiness, true, but the geekiness was enough for me. (Malignant Hypercognitive Disorder gets referenced a fair bit around me these days.)

[jack]

Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't mean to imply you did, but I feel a bit defensive because a lot of people have pressed it on me saying "this is the best book ever", but haven't had the vocabulary to articulate that it's really, really good at this one thing, and everything else is ok, but not necessarily outstanding, but that if you're me, you should read it anyway, even if it's not literally the best book ever :)

[redbird]

This feels as though it connects a bit with what we were discussing yesterday about willingness to spend lots of time with characters who are unpleasant and/or have unsympathetic attitudes (unsympathetic to the specific reader, it almost doesn't matter whether the author finds them sympathetic). Though it's writ larger here, since it's not just Quentin who is like that, it's lots of people.

The other thing I didn't like was the Brakebills ethos, which seemed to be "you can use your knowledge and skills to do almost anything to benefit yourself, but no trying to improve the rest of the world." Magic used to get or keep well-paying Wall Street jobs, but not to help fund cancer research or a theatre production purely because the participants will enjoy writing, directing, or performing. (I'll grant that the years at magical college are years that aren't being spend majoring in biology or medicine: but if you can use it to get rich in the stock market, you should be able to use it to raise money for a research foundation.)

[If I'm wrong about details, anyone is welcome to correct me; I'm doing this from slightly old memory of a book read once.]

[liv]

The problem with Quentin is that he's not merely unsympathetic, he's whiny. You can have a good book with a villainous POV character, but Quentin is just boring, and he doesn't undergo any character development. I agree that the other characters aren't much better, but I think I might have got on better with a story from Janet's POV or even Eliot or Alice.

I didn't interpret the thing with not using magic (or magically derived income) to make the world a better place as a direct prohibition. I thought it was partly that there's some degree of importance placed on not letting the muggles know that magic exists, but they do mention in passing that some Brakebills graduates go on to use their magic to save endangered species.

I think the idea is more that the amount of effort and obsession you have to put in to becoming a sufficiently powerful magician to make a difference is so great that it ruins your character and leaves you unable to think of anything effective or worthwhile to do with your immense power. And once you've experienced the wonder of the magical world it's hard to care about mundane reality any more. This seems a really pessimistic view of human nature, but it's not completely unconnected to reality; think of the stereotypical Wall Street financier, who is probably at least as bright as Quentin &co, who likely benefitted from an exclusive, world-class education, and can't really think of anything to do with his absurdly vast income beyond making yet more money.

Part of it is that you can be rich enough to afford just about any imaginable personal luxury, but unless you're Bill Gates rich or Warren Buffet rich, you can't really do much to fix the deep-rooted problems in the world. This is the whole post-fantasy theme that The Magicians is trying to explore: in the real world, getting the magical macguffin or having lots of talent doesn't lead to happily ever after. It's also an implicit critique of Harry Potter; one of the obvious holes in the HP worldbuilding is that you've got these immensely powerful wizards who pretty much just sit around running a high-class boarding school and completely fail to intervene in any of the urgent real world problems around them.

But I do agree, there's no real justification for the assumption that all Brakebills graduates are fated to end up like Alice's parents. There are plenty of satisfying life paths available to people who have nearly limitless financial resources and the ability to do magic (even if they can't just make an incantation that eliminates disease and poverty.)

[nameandnature]

It's very readable, if a bit grim in places. I reviewed it a while back and apparently I found it difficult to put down.

The sequel has Quentin growing up a bit more and becoming less annoying, if I remember rightly. I'll have to read that again, now you've reminded me of it.

[liv]

Thanks for linking to that! I definitely agree it's readable, I've been prolonging my breaks so I can read just one more chapter, and got through it quickly. I don't mind the grim, except that it's inconsistent, sometimes the narrative seems to get caught up in yay cool whizz-bang fantasy world, and then suddenly remembers that it's supposed to be grim and Adult.

And ok, it's some consolation that Quentin does eventually grow up, but if he hasn't managed it over the first 500 pages and by his mid-20s, I don't know if I can be bothered to spend more time in his head! It's really hard to care about how miserable he is when he's so consistently unpleasant. Nussbaum's review that you linked to is harsh, but her criticisms are qualitatively the same as mine; wealth that isn't quite opulent enough, indeed.

[jack]

I kept meaning to write my own review of it, but hadn't got round to it yet.

I thought there was one thing it did brilliantly, namely giving the right feel of a contemporary magical academy. It just felt _right_, exactly what Harry Potter or Wizard of Earthsea or Once and Future King would really be like if it existed as a university in the modern day. And I loved it for doing one thing I always look for in books better than almost anything else.

And the characters were reasonably done, although, I was definitely dissatisfied with how grim everything was. I empathised with the characters for not really being sure who was a friend and who was a chance acquaintance -- I often feel like that. But you described this aspect of the book better than I'd been able to -- the problem really is that they characters spend all their time being miserable and pointless, and I don't really want to spend a lot of time dwelling on that. It would be redeemed if they'd got better, but they go on messing stuff up.

And I was very disappointed by the Fillory section. It had some very good moments: I loved the way everything we knew about the Fillory books became suddenly relevant, without the infodumping having previously seemed blatant, and I loved some of the blending of the real world with a magical world, like Elliot flirting with the faun in the bar.

But it seemed the opposite of the school. The school seemed to parody Harry Potter's problems by being BETTER -- by being more realistic, more inventive, more consistent, and being what Hogwarts should have been (if being realistic rather than exciting had been its goal). But Fillory seemed to parody Narnia by being WORSE: it seemed to take all the flaws that C S Lewis covered up fairly well, and then just make them blatant, so it felt like "Narnia, but worse" which wasn't very attractive to read. I wanted to read a parody where all of the Narnia tropes made sense for some reason: where we learn WHY naiads are inscrutable, and the long-ago wars fit into some sensible historical context, and the Aslan replacement is trying to do good, but labouring under specific strictures. But instead I got a parody where random things that made no sense happened: a naiad gave an infodump, a bunch of "bad" creatures attack them in a dungeon, Ember dispenses cryptic and unhelpful chiding. And then the characters stand around saying "wow, that made no sense, it's like a lame book plot". That was bored-of-the-rings level parody, and it sort of broke my suspension of disbelief.

[liv]

Yeah, I think the magical academy is very good; even when it's pointing out the flaws in other fictional examples of magical academies, it still creates something that feels real. I did have some degree of empathy for Quentin; his flaws are similar to my flaws, but for someone who's supposed to be super-intelligent, he never seems to learn anything. And that makes for an unsatisfying book, if the whiny brat at the beginning is still the same whiny brat after hundreds of pages passing through all his formative years and having all these amazingly dramatic experiences.

You've exactly put your finger on the problem of what's wrong with the Fillory stuff. I thought Pullman was bad, but at least he's passionately angry with Lewis, if anything he takes himself too seriously. But Grossman is trying to write comedic parody, and it isn't funny at all, it's just world-weary and cynical and pointless.

[kerrypolka]

I got the sample of it (the first five pages, or something like that) on my Kindle and although the worldbuilding seemed nice, I had exactly the same problems with the main character and narrative voice as you describe here. The first five pages were him hanging around with his "friends" pouting silently about how the girl he likes doesn't fancy him (after, like, a decade, and several years of her going out with someone else - WHY ARE YOU STILL UPSET ABOUT THIS ENOUGH TO TELL THE READER ABOUT IT, and also why are your friends still hanging out with you when you fancy one of them and resent them both). Then a dead body happens (excitement!), and the narrator checks out the (female) EMT and tells the reader that he finds her attractive but she probably won't go out with a sad sack like him, sigh.

I don't mind whiny petulant Nice Guy characters, but I do mind it when the author expects the audience to automatically sympathise with them because of how hard done by they are when any woman, including ones in relationships with other people or ones at emergency work, doesn't fancy them. I'm currently rereading Little Women, and Laurie does this a bit, but the reader isn't expected to go "damn, man, that is totally unreasonable of Jo not to like you back like that! It's hard being Theodore Laurence! Tell me more about your ennui!"

[liv]

Completely. The worst thing about it is that he doesn't get any better. I was fine with the first couple of chapters because it's a fairly standard beginning for a modern Bildungsroman, ok, you have this spoilt, whiny teenager with a horrible case of Nice Guyism, and he's about to have magical adventures where he will learn something about himself and discover that other people are just as real as he is. But no, he has all these magical adventures and doesn't learn one fucking thing. Pretty much all the female characters are introduced in terms of how much he's interested in their breasts and how sad it is that they are not attracted to him (no matter how inappropriate it would be for a liaison to develop). And when they are interested in him, how sad it is that they are not sufficiently perfect in their devoted adoration to forgive all his faults. And when they do in fact sacrifice themselves to save him, how sad it is that they're not there any more to be his manic pixie dreamgirl and give him something to live for... So yeah, if you hate that kind of thing, you should probably not bother with the rest.

[kerrypolka]

And when they do in fact sacrifice themselves to save him, how sad it is that they're not there any more to be his manic pixie dreamgirl

OH NOOOOOOO I AM SURPRISED BUT I SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN D: D: D:

[liv]

The annoying thing (apart from all the tiresome misogyny, obv) is that there are some good in-story reasons for Quentin to be whiny and and self-centred. Partly because it's a response to Narnia where it's an important plot point that Edmund is whiny and self-centred. [Although Grossman seems to have completely missed the theological point of that characterization (that Jesus saves miserable sinners, not admirable people or innocent people). I suspect from his name that he's likely at least culturally Jewish, and I've encountered this before with Jewish American lit geeks absolutely not getting the Christianity in Narnia. I once met a woman who was doing a children's lit PhD on the Narnia books, and I asked her how she felt as a Jewish scholar working on such a Christian story, to which her response was, oh yeah, I guess Lewis was a religious Christian, wasn't he? I'm not really interested in that aspect. Total *jawdrop* moment.]

The other reason is that the whole message of the book is that no external thing can make you happy, if you're not a fully actualized human being in yourself. Not money, not power, not love, not even being in a Story where your actions are meaningful and significant. I think it's saying that the American academic hothousing system is a major impediment to emotional growth, but it's possibly saying that emotional growth is just impossible and everybody is destined to starve in the midst of plenty forever and ever.

[jack]

"emotional growth is just impossible and everybody is destined to starve in the midst of plenty forever and ever."

I remember that they said some magicians did devote their lives to various worthy causes (even things like "hurricane prevention" and "poverty charities" where it's possible they ARE doing a lot of good but we don't know about it specifically), but it strongly implied that this was an essentially arbitrary choice, that no-one was really fulfilled whatever they did.

I don't know whether this is "the book says the world is like that" or "the book says that some people ARE fulfilled, but that Quentin et al never notice them".