Customer Reviews

The Magicians: A Novel

5 star:		(163)
4 star:		(107)
3 star:		(84)
2 star:		(101)
1 star:		(95)

 

 

Stop thinking this is a fantasy book. I know, I know, it's called "The Magicians," the plot synopsis references all three of the most famous fantasy series and describes a handful of familiar fantasy tropes, including the school of magic and the fairy tale land come to actual life. But forget all of that. I have read more fantasy books than I can remember -- I'm named for a character in perhaps the most famous fantasy series of all time -- and I'm telling you: "The Magicians" is not a fantasy.

It has fantastic elements, yes. There is magic; there is a school for magic, where the characters learn to cast spells, using hand gestures and arcane language and strange mystical components -- Ziploc bag full of mutton fat, anyone? -- and there is a voyage from this world to another, a land of naiads and fauns and magical speaking animals, gods and demons, kings and queens, quests and wishes. But this book is something very different from the usual fantasy novel. In "The Magicians," Lev Grossman has done something unusual, and remarkable, perhaps even unique: this is a grown-up fantasy. This book is to fantasy what "The Grapes of Wrath" is to travel books, what "The Metamorphosis" is to self-help: so much more depressing and visceral and funny and horrifying, and genuine, and fascinating, and hard to read and therefore valuable, that it doesn't belong in the same category despite sharing some central traits. The setting is imagined, and there are supernatural things that happen, but make no mistake: this is a serious novel.

Where the characters in most fantasy books are heroic, larger than life, the sort of people we wish we could be, these magicians are not: the characters are too close to plain old humanity, flawed, contradictory, foolish and foolhardy, to stand in as idealized versions of ourselves. Where most fantasy books provide an escape from our reality, this book does not. In point of fact, the moral of this book is that escape is not only impossible, but dangerous and harmful to attempt. The hero, Quentin Coldwater, attempts to escape every serious situation he faces, and every time, he ends up worse off than he would have been if he had just been able to deal with it, honestly and sincerely. But his response to his worsened circumstances is to try to escape again -- with predictable results. Every step Quentin takes is the wrong one, and every step sinks him deeper and deeper into a quagmire. The book gets hard to read: not because the writing is anything less than excellent, as it is top notch from first page to last, but because the urge to reach into the page and slap, shake, and eventually throttle the main character becomes overwhelming. But that desire, that feeling, should be familiar to every adult who has thought back on his or her life, and shook his or her head, thinking, "Why did I do that? How could I be that stupid?" That desire to smack Quentin is no different from the desire to smack our younger selves, and sometimes, that's a terribly annoying feeling to have, which makes this a somewhat annoying book to read.

The real triumph of this book, however, is that it is not only a serious novel, despite what I have been saying. Grossman is able to describe a world of wonder and imagination, and populate it with characters who are utterly unworthy of the magic all around them, who appreciate nothing, who completely flub their great chance -- just like I would have done if I lived through this experience, just as most of us do with our great chances in our real, mundane, unfantastic lives, which are also as full of wonder as any dreamed by a teller of tales. And because the characters are so real, so easy to relate to, it makes the fantasy seem just as real (which, of course, makes the real world just as fantastic). Brakebills reminded me of my own college experience, and yet it is a magical place. Fillory is indeed a fairy tale land come to life in this book, and I found myself wishing that I could believe I would have handled Fillory better than Quentin does -- but knowing that I would have done almost precisely the same things, made the same choices and the same mistakes. And the ending is glorious: the climactic action scene is thrilling and impossible to put down; the revealed secrets are both surprising and satisfying; the final resolution is, if not completely happy, at least hopeful.

I won't say that this is a great book, on par with "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," but I will say that it is closer to those than it is to "The Hobbit" or the Xanth books. If you are a fan of literature, of thinking about your reading, then you must get this book, especially if you enjoy fantasy. If you are just looking for an escape, look elsewhere -- because this is not a fantasy. Or at least, it isn't only a fantasy. It's a wonder.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a well written story about a magical world, a fairly detailed world of rules and exceptions. The story, at one point, had a very poignant concept of what magic may be: That if the universe was a house that God made for everyone, that Magic was the tools he left behind, possibly by accident, in the garage. That perhaps using Magic was as dangerous as kids finding these power tools and such, and using them without direction or precaution.

The characters in the story are fairly fleshed out, in that you have a good sense of what drives them, what makes them tick, you can see the dynamics between them. The description of the magic school Brakebills is very well done, filled with things that people don't understand about and that has a life of its own. And while at the very end there's something that can lead to a sequel, there's definitely an ending to this book, no gimmick cliffhanger that requires you to wait for the next book.

Definitely, the book had the makings of a great story. Yet, I was left numb at the end, not happy, not sad, not scared. And that, really, is why I left this review with 3 stars. I read fiction to be entertained. This entertainment can be in the form of humor, feeling good, scared, excited, titillated, insightful, or some combination thereof. Instead, when I read this book, I saw through the eyes of a fairly apathetic protagonist, who messes things up and blames everyone else, who had chances to become a hero and fails each time. I read about a person who wanted something, got it, didn't like it, and became apathetic. I read about the antagonist being defeated, the protagonist winning in the end, and no one feeling ... well, happy for having accomplished anything. Perhaps this is what real life can be. But come on, that's not entertainment. And that's what's sad about this, that this book had the potential to be a GREAT story, but misses the mark significantly.

Would I recommend this book to someone else? Honestly, I'm not sure, and that's why I must conclude with 3 stars.

I'm interested in discussing this story with anyone else who is willing to, without putting any spoilers into play, so I'll do that via comments to my own review. Feel free to join in.

I read this book because it had such fantastic reviews that compared it to "Harry Potter and Narnia for grown-ups." I started reading this book and quickly came to despise the main character. I think that every character should have some flaws, but they should also have some redeeming qualities as well and Mr. Grossman seemed to neglect those in the characters he created. He makes the book 'adult' by putting in crude language and lewd scenes that didn't add to the story at all. I trudged through the entire book, hoping that the end would redeem the entire novel. Needless to say, I was disappointed. The story ended as it began, life still sucks for the main character and he has learned nothing despite his fantastic adventures. I will say that Mr. Grossman does write in a way that moves the plot very well, creates a magical world you did not expect, and has plot twists that are truly unpredictable. However, I would never recommend this book to anybody.

Ok right off the bat you get the distinct impression you've read all of this before.

Boy feels socially akward...boy discovers he's magical...boy gets into private magical school.

So right away you feel...wow that's very Harry Potter of you. Yet somehow it's not bad and the author even at times makes fun of this very obvious fact by referencing Rowlings work. I thought the book would feel stale, and oddly I found just the opposite. The differences are slight but they are there. Here it's college, the student body is much smaller and the quirkiness of the world is much more subdued.

Now the other obvious work at play here is C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books...except here it's called Fillory. But the rest is almost exactly the same. Childrens books written long ago where the young Chatwin siblings find themselves falling into a magical realm through a grandfather clock. Talking animals and all. Right down to the need for human Kings and Queens and the set of 4 thrones. ANd while for the majority of the book these tales remain as such...tales which our antagonist holds quite dear...the last quarter of the book finds a more real version which, while still resembling the childrens tales, ends up being far more sinister in actuality.
And for good measure I seemed to feel a dash of Neverending Story thrown in. The books he's been reading aren't fiction!

Now all that being said and all the painfully obvious similarities aside, I found an astonishing thing happen once I stopped thinking about those facts. I found that even though these ideas were recycled the author does manage to bring a fresh take on them. I enjoyed reading this book immensely and I really didn't expect that. He writes succinctly and manages to encompass a great span of time and events while still leaving the reader feeling as if nothing were left out. And maybe there's a bit of that "comfort food" mindset at play here. But it didn't matter while I was reading it. I was genuinely curious where the story was headed and I was engaged with the characters straight on through.
I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys fantasy books and those with a bit of a yearning for old childhood classics minus the childishness.

I got this book for my teenaged son, who reads a lot of fantasy. It took him forever to get through it (unlike him) and I kept nagging him to hurry up so I could read and review it. Once he finally and unenthusiastically slogged through it, I started it myself - and immediately saw what took him so long.

It's DULL: This book is unrelentingly boring. It manages to be long without anything exciting happening. Page after page of TELLING that the 'hero' is learning magic... but very little SHOWING. There is none of the excitement of, oh, say, Hogwarts... where we see in vivid detail how the magic works and what the spells are. The characters themselves are bored and miserable; how can the reader be excited by that? In fact, all but one of the characters are so desperately unlikable that it's really hard to care what happens to them. Hence - the reader plods on without being invested in the characters or their world. I would not have bothered reading past page 100 or so if I didn't have to review this dreck for Vine.

It's DERIVATIVE: As many have stated, this is a blatant cross between Harry Potter and Narnia. There's a little LotR thrown in as well. Quentin, boy miserable, is unexpectedly inducted into a school of magic (where his group participates in a magical game against other schools' groups... though not on broomsticks I grant you). PLUS - there's a magical land that children access through a clock, and in that land these (I kid you not) "Sons and Daughters of Earth" fight evil with the help of kindly magical talking Rams and sit on the 4 thrones that await them. (My son: How is it even legal for the author to take so many ideas from Narnia?) In the entire book, which seemed to be about 3000 pages long, I found two original thoughts: the migrating geese scene and the first Beast scene.

It's DENSE: There is so much filler in this book it that I have to wonder if the author was told that it had to be of a certain length. Again, the author has apparently never heard of 'show don't tell' and we are told for hundreds of pages about Quentin et all struggling through 5 (4 for some) years of Magician School.... but with very little showing of what goes on. In addition, there is just too much crammed in here: Hogwarts-I-Mean-Brakebills (the school), life after Brakebills which is filled with unlikable people drinking too much and acting pretentious, a really depressing and mostly boring time in Narnia-I-mean-Fillory, and the fallout from that. So much is going on - maybe that's why there is little detail and a lot of exposition.

It's DREARY & DEPRESSING: Nothing good happens, nothing exciting or wonderful happens, there is no happiness, nobody has any passion for anything other than hearing themselves talk, and the only likable character in the whole dreary book dies. Our 'hero' Quentin is miserable before Brakebills, during Brakebills, after Brakebills, in Fillory, after Fillory, and afterafter Fillory. It's quite a downer.

Bottom Line: If you're looking for original thought, exciting action and adventure, characters you care about, good writing, and some sort of story arc that has any meaning or value whatsoever.... look elsewhere. If you want to be bored and depressed, this could do it.

This book has one of the best final lines I've ever read. It's nothing dramatic or world-changing, but it does seem to be an apology for everything that has come before. And that is about the only good thing I can say about it.

The author is clumsy. Besides several grammatical errors and typos in the book (which I blame the editor for), he just isn't a very good writer. He loves redundancy: on page four, for example, he writes, about "the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles". Just how many innumerable ways can you use the same word? And three paragraphs later, he says that Quentin is "trapped in his own private individual winter", because private and individual don't mean the exact same thing in this context? That's just lazy writing. It's as if Lev Grossman thinks he's getting paid by the word.

Then there's a sentence that should win a prize for worst writing of all time: "He massaged the walls in search of a light switch."

I don't want to know why Quentin felt the need to massage the walls, nor do I want to know what would have happened if he had given the ceiling a happy ending. Mr. Grossman keeps searching for clever ways to show us just how inventive and intelligent he is, but instead he comes across as a cartoonishly bad writer. Even worse, he often comes across as being cynical and condescending regarding fantasies, putting down Middle Earth, Narnia and Hogwarts while trying to create something that doesn't hold a candle to any of those mythical lands.

I am not going to defend Harry Potter to anyone. While I loved the series, it's best not to examine the logic too much. But what some people don't seem to get - Lev Grossman included - is that the magic of these books stems as much from the main characters as it does from the plot. Harry Potter was a young boy who never knew his parents and was raised in a cruel fashion by piggish relatives, yet he retained a sense of curiosity and kindness that made millions care. Lucy was the girl all of us knew, so desperate to believe in the kindness of fauns, eager to look in the mirror and find out what her friends really thought about her. And Frodo - well, for God's sake, he was a hobbit! A tiny creature that could easily be overlooked in just about any setting, yet stronger than anyone three times his size.

And then there's Quentin, the star of The Magicians. He's whiny, constantly complaining, never satisfied with anything. He's not likable in any way, and nothing in the book makes anyone think differently. His role model is a tortured queer straight out of a 1920s novel, his girlfriend is an innocent waif he cheats on (with a woman straight out of a pulp noir mystery, a woman who exists only to seduce men) and then dies for him, and there is nothing in his existence that gives a reader any reason to justify reading about him. He is unlikable and he remains unlikable throughout. We are never given a chance to think well of him, which makes him a horrible star for a book, let alone a fantasy series.

And the villain's identity is apparent by the end of the first chapter, not that it makes much difference. Since you care so little about Quentin or his lousy friends, it's hard to care about anyone else in the book either. You'd find yourself happier massaging walls than reading this dirge of a novel.

My suggestion: buy The Hunger Games instead. If you don't like it, you're out a few dollars. But the main character is amazing, the writing is simple and honest, and the whole "too school for cool" air of The Magicians is nowhere to be found, thankfully. I bought four books from Amazon: The Help, The Magicians, The Last Child, and Hunger Games. A couple of weeks later, I ordered To Kill A Mockingbird because of The Help, John Hart's first two books because of The Last Child, and the other two books that finish the Hunger Games trilogy.

I didn't order any of Lev Grossman's other books, including his sequel to The Magicians.

I'll leave Quentin in his own private, individual winter. I'd rather read stories about characters I care about in worlds that fascinate me. I still love the AV Club, but I'm a little pissed off that I bought this book in the first place because of a good review by one of their critics.

I've seen a several reviews comparing this book to the Harry Potter series - including the dust jacket synopsis and some of the author reviews on the back cover. I would agree with this assessment, but you need to understand that this is the Harry Potter series with three important differences:

1) Harry discovered his magical nature and abilities upon going into college

2) Harry had such stunted emotional grown that he never stopped dreaming about the Narnia series of books

3) He and everyone he encountered at Hogwarts were all insufferable, drunken douchebags that make the cast of "Jersey Shore" look like people you'd be proud to introduce to mom and dad as your rolemodels for life.

There isn't a sympathetic character in the book. About half way through you really start wising the main character would hang himself to put both him and you out of your collective misery. There is no sense of wonder or amazement about the gifts and world he finds; its like you took your emo goth 14 year old neice with the cutting problem and the heroin addiction along with you on your vacation of a lifetime and let her pick all the activities.

The only reason I finished the book was that I pride myself on finishing everything I start. I wish I had put it down since it was a completely pointless chore to read and finish this putrid piece of dreck.

Save yourself the time and effort and avoid this at any cost.

If you put Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, a particularly bad episode of Gossip Girl and my 8th grade book report in a blender, you would get The Magicians as a result. Here's why:

The magical worlds and plots of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are blatantly borrowed from. When Grossman does add his own fantastical details they seem contrived to explain away ill-planned plot developments. On the other hand, the recycled elements from Rowling and others are also this book's one saving grace that prompted me to give it two stars.

At times characters are so poorly-conceived that they appear to be 8, 12, 20 and 40 years old all within the same scene, and they spontaneously and completely gratuitously engage in sexual deviance and drug abuse.

The book covers many years without any major skips forward through time. As a result, each event is merely skimmed over and mentioned on a surface level in a continuous list much like an 8th grade book report. (Or is that insulting to 8th graders?). Abusing an already-hackneyed gimmick, each chapter in the second half of the book seems to end in a cliffhanger.

Read this perhaps if you are made curious or nostalgic by the book blurb's comparison to HP and LOTR (as I was), but don't go in with the high expectations that such a blurb creates.

I loved this book while I was reading it. The story was well paced, with a story that seemed to expertly choose from Narnia and Potter to make something with a very original direction. It was refreshing to have characters cracking under the pressure of intense schooling, and it reminded me a little of law school. Maybe my favorite part was the writing. There are several passages that are clever, engaging, and looked like the writer had a blast writing it. Related to this is the really active way in which he engages the theme of giving incredible power a small group of elite, secretive people. This happens several times, when the dean gives a speech and when we see the listless, grown-up magicians.

I stopped loving this book after having to read the horrible ending. After that, the spell was broken, so to speak, and much of the novel began to unravel. First, the ending. It was like the ending to an awful movie that is just praying to make enough money to feed a sequel. He wants a sequel, that's fine. End it at the Questing Beast and then pick up the second book at the office job. But the window blowing out and the flying friends? I feel like he was maybe even ridiculing the reader, saying "so you suckers thought you could take a fantasy novel seriously? Well, here's the gay character, only now he's got angel wings! And for no reason, here's a skinny goth girl that up to till now has had roughly 20 pages where she was mostly just a lust object!" Easily the worst ending I've ever read.

Second, the Quentin/Alice relationship never quite seemed as deep as the author wanted us to believe. I always saw it as a relationship of convenience and figured they would break up after school. What attracted them to each other, other than proximity? They're both smart and driven, I guess. But do they have any other similar interests? She seems to know everything about him (or just knows everything, another problem) and he knows nothing about her, her moods, or what she wants. So what does he love about her? We're never told. In the last third, he loves her simply because the author says so, because the main character always has to have a love interest, and that's very unsatisfying.

Third, too much unexplained, inconsistent stuff. If magic is done by flexing your fingers and muttering certain words, why does the magic Quentin did at the beginning work? What is Quentin's specialty in magic? How is it that all the schoolteachers can't defeat the beast when it comes to the school but Alice can hold her own against it? The real problem isn't that these questions aren't answered, it's that they aren't considered at all. Quentin doesn't go around asking the history of magic prof, how could I have done magic in such a weird way? They marvel at Alice's skill, but no one questions it or thinks of how she's misrepresented herself to them. The issue of his specialty in magic is brought up in the crappy ending, but that's in the crappy ending and not helpful.

Finally, and most irresponsibly, the theme of how dangerous it is to be aimless and powerful was completely undermined by the ending. The Magicians is an analogy to the extremely wealthy and privileged. The school is an Ivy League college. The power and aimlessness the students feel when they leave is akin to what the very wealthy go through, since they don't have to get jobs. One must find meaning in one's life. This is what Alice keeps going on about. Yet, by the end, the characters are ready to go off on another wacky, decadent adventure, like trust fund kids looking to have fun at a remote resort in a third world country. The flying and angel wings and all that suggest that despite their intense experiences together, they don't take the world seriously at all.

To sum it up, I'm really disappointed by how badly Grossman dropped the ball. Hopefully he gets a new editor for the sequel.

Grossman does seem to understand one thing perfectly clearly. The characteristic function of the fantasy novel - the reason they are written and they are read - is to provide some measure of escape from the real world. So given that in his novel, ^The Magicians^, Grossman so completely and deliberately fails to achieve this objective, indeed, given that he takes the very opposite course and pens a novel so thoroughly mired in drudgery and mundanity, it is only fair to him to conclude that his intent is not to write fantasy.

While the novel is replete with fantastical elements, from powerful arcane arts to talking animals, they are not its focus. They are mere window dressing. Behind the window, Grossman paints a tableau of the malaise of the wildly talented, good-looking and privileged. Quentin Coldwater is the protagonist. None of the usual fantasy plot-structures apply, there is no prophecy to be fulfilled and neither is there an epic battle between good and evil. Instead, the engine that drives the plot is Quentin's persistent dissatisfaction.

I offer the tersest possible summary of the novel: Whatever exquisite and extraordinary circumstance tall, handsome, brilliant Quentin finds himself in proves insufficient to inculcate in him a psychological state even faintly resembling happiness. These circumstances range from his imminent acceptance to Princeton, to his being one of a select group of the most talented students at already ridiculously selective college of magic, to his being deeply in love with a beautiful and talented woman, to his being a phenomenally well paid corporate executive, to his being offered the crown and keys to a Narnia like kingdom. They hit many points in between. Quentin always identifies something dissatisfying about his life. He always blames his circumstances for his unhappiness. Some people die. Quentin grows more misanthropic. Grossman leaves the reader uninformed as to whether Quentin has learned anything from his experiences. Quentin lays one more long bet on something else making him happy. The novel ends.

The three-fold theme of the novel amounts to this: it is perilously, depressingly, maddeningly hard to be enormously privileged and talented; and it may be better, after all, to be unexceptional and dull; and happiness, if anyone really ever gets their hands on it, requires an enormous amount of dedication and at least a little luck to maintain and obtain. Nothing Grossman offers is original, and each part of the theme is better addressed elsewhere in literature. A reader interested in the struggles of the brilliant and the privileged might read Bret Easton Ellis' ^American Psycho^, or some Jane Austen, or overcome the worthwhile challenge of Thomas Wolfe's ^Look Homeward, Angel^. Philip Larkin covered the second theme with twenty-four skillful lines in his poem "Born Yesterday". The third theme has been tired for hundreds of years, having been aired out thoroughly by Aristotle in his two Ethics and also addressed by such luminaries of philosophy as Hegel and Isaiah Berlin.

Moreover, and this is really the greatest flaw of the novel, the first and most prominent of the thematic threads is offensive, and taking Grossman's biography into account (elite public high-school, Harvard, some years at Yale, a stint of high-flying journalistic jobs, and a few attempts at writing novels) is disgustingly self-indulgent. It is challenging for me to imagine a more tiresome theme for a novel, than how hard it is to be good at nearly everything. Readers who struggle themselves to attain proficiency in their pursuits will be offended by the idea; equally well, readers who are talented but not ashamed or unhappy as a consequence will find the theme somewhat pathetic. And ultimately, that adjective sums up Quentin perfectly. He is disgustingly, aggravatingly and unswervingly pathetic. He is one of those characters of fiction whom you suspect initially might benefit from a fierce punch to the face, except that he receives it, and it does nothing to shake him out of his pathetic self-pitying stupor.

I think I may have liked the short story that Grossman could have written in lieu of this novel. Perhaps he thought tedium was a necessary ingredient to really convey the severe emotional challenge of brilliance, and his 416 page novel (running too long by several hundred pages) is certainly tedious.

Grossman's novel fits better into a sub-genre of literary fiction, perhaps we can call it "fantastical realism", than it fits into the genre of fantasy. As I said above, the fantastical elements are just there to embellish the severely mundane plot. Perhaps there are some great novels to be written in this sub-genre. ^The Magicians^ is not one of them. Efforts to fill that shelf with good books should be left in the hands of serious novelists, among whose number Grossman is not entitled to count himself. Grossman, whose command of the florid prose of the fantasy novelist is clumsy and repetitive, but not entirely without potential, should stick to writing straight fantasy.