Magic isn't just for those who deserve it

I've been aware of Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy for some years now, but I've always been turned off by George R.R. Martin's really obnoxious quote on the cover of the book:

The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea.

Ugh, really?  Sometimes fantasy authors are such snobs.  As though JK Rowling and Lev Grossman were trying to write the same book.  As though a book aimed at children and young adults should be the same as a book aimed at adults.  As though .... anyway, I digress.  Suffice it to say that the quote itself was enough to turn me off the book.  When you combine that with the fact that I have been turning away from traditional fantasy in recent years, I just wasn't sure if this was going to be the book for me.

But I've heard a lot of positive things about the series as a whole, and I did want to try a complex doorstopper of a book on audio to see if I could handle one.  So The Magicians was it.

So what's this book about?  It's about a group of brilliant teenagers who go to Brakebills Academy to learn magic.  There, they learn how to do nearly anything they want to do, make new friends, fall in love, and then graduate.  And find that, when you can do pretty much whatever you want, it's hard to feel any sort of direction in life.  Until they one day learn that a beloved fantasy series from their childhood may have been real, and they journey into another world to try and live out all their childhood dreams.  And (of course) find that maybe the fantasy world is not quite the rainbows and unicorns they had expected.


This book felt very long to me for the first half or so. Much of the story was disjointed and things would come up that never really mattered again to the story as a whole.  For example, there's a lot of time spent describing a quidditch-like game while the students are in school, but the game does nothing for the plot.  Much of the action and development that takes place in Brakebills just felt very separate to me from what happened in the rest of the book, though I am sure I could flip that statement and say that if you really love world-building, then the first half of the book does that very well.

Most of the characters are not very likable.  Quentin, the main character, is a total tool.  Most of his friends aren't any better.  There is a lot of drinking and drugs and sleeping around and it is hard to respect or care about any of them.  I imagine that if you're a trust fund baby or a Hilton or an English aristocrat, this whole lifestyle may resonate with you, but it was pretty abhorrent to me.

But once I got to the second half of the story, I started enjoying it more.  I realized that Grossman's goal was not to create a group of characters that you like and cheer on, that go on a dangerous quest to make the world a better place.  It's more about regular, flawed people trying to get on in the world.  People who can do whatever they want, but instead spend their time doing pretty much nothing and going from love to hate to indifference and back again.  Once you recognize that, I think the story becomes much more real.

In fact, so much of quality fantasy literature is about normal people struggling to deserve the gifts they've been given.  From The Lord of the Rings to The Ocean at the End of the Lane to Harry Potter to pretty much every other book, people fall short of their hopes for themselves and other people's expectations of them.  And in your own life, I bet you stumble and feel lost and just try to keep it together for the next 24 hours rather than set huge, aspirational goals for how you will make the world a better place.  And so much of what we do - the decisions we make, the changes we effect - happen while we are waiting for our big moment to shine.  And then we look back and think of all the things that we should have, would have, could have done differently if we had thought things through.

The best books always reflect back upon our lives, and The Magicians is about the danger of putting too much power in the hands of people who are unworthy.  What would you do if your greatest wish came true?  You'd be thrilled for the first hour, happy for maybe a month, and then it would just become humdrum and part of your normal life.  That's what magic is to this group of characters.  Instead of giving them a purpose, it takes away their drive to do anything.  While it may sound odd that this is the aspect of the book I found most compelling, I think there's a lot to be said for bringing that to life.  And so I'll be reading on in this series to see what the author has in store for these characters.