Magic and moping

[bloodygranuaile]

When I was home last my mom got me a copy of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which has been described in various review outlets as a grown-up, depressing version of Harry Potter, and other sort of “x version of y” statements, where “x” is something serious-sounding and “y” is a children's fantasy series.

The premise of The Magicians is something that (a) I, like many other nerd children, cherished as a secret hope from the time we passed 11 until sometimes in college, and that (b) addresses something I always wondered about Hogwarts—namely, how do witches and wizards continue to blend into the real world at all when their non-magical education ends at a sixth-grade level? So in this book, with its gritty realism and things, magic is collegiate-level stuff. And there are strong indications that undergrad collegiate-level is quite possibly way too young to be messing around with that sort of power.

The main character is Quentin Coldwater, a Sad Nerd in the grand tradition of other permanently mopey, maladjusted protagonists who feel that there ought to be something greater and more meaningful and fantastic out there than just regular boring modern life, which is probably a feeling that most people who pick up fantasy books with any regularity are familiar with at least some of the time, even if they aren't as solidly miserable as Quentin. Quentin is one of those gifted overachiever kids who learned to enjoy working ridiculously hard at boring things and thereby continue to get straight a-pluses forever. He is obsessed with a series of children's fantasy books about a place called Fillory, which sounds like kind of a wacky cross between Narnia and the universe of Winnie-the-Pooh. He is silently and mopily in love with his best friends' girlfriend who is also his other best friend, but thankfully we are spared any significant amount of self-pitying crap about this after the first chapter, and the only other times Julia comes back into the story it's about other stuff and is actually interesting. Quentin is suddenly removed from his life as a stereotypical Sad Nerd by admission to an elite college of magic somewhere in upstate New York called Brakebills, which, like regular college, oscillates back and forth between being awesome, and being dull hard work and bureaucracy coupled with the inescapable fact that you are still basically the same maladjusted vulgar asshole you were before you got there and it's going to take more than a couple of 200-level seminars to save you from yourself. Quentin spends a lot of time being miserable here, too, and although he also spends a lot of time being happy, every time he is miserable he is like EXTRA miserable because he feels all betrayed that he can still be miserable at magic college. Also he inadvertently summons a beast from some chaos dimension that eats one of his classmates, so he feels terrible about that for a while.

After graduating, the Brakebills alumni have what I personally think is the worst possible thing you can have after graduating, which is too much money to make them feel any pressure to go find a job. I think some people are probably dedicated enough that they can have lots of money and no career and find some sort of non-pointless rhythm and meaning in their lives on their own, and other people are self-aware enough to realize when they're not one of these people and they need a job to give shape to their days and keep them out of trouble. Sadly, none of the Brakebills alumni except for Alice (who they all make fun of for basically spending a year shut in the library learning more advanced magic on her own instead of partying) fit either of these descriptions, and so they fall into that Hollywoodesque cliche of partying and doing drugs all the time until it's not even fun anymore, but they are too lazy to break the habit and figure out something they actually want to be doing. Quentin continues to be miserable that he went to magic college and now has a bachelor's of magic or whatever but has nothing to do with himself.

After this depressing interlude a series of very odd things happen that results in them all actually getting into Fillory, where Quentin is miserable that all the dysfunctional personal drama their little clique has racked up by being drunk while irritable all the time (seriously, if there is one thing I learned in college, it is never drink unless you are perfectly happy, which is harder to do than it should be) has come into Fillory with them, and then he is miserable that he is miserable while in Fillory. While I have never successfully gone into any of the fantasy lands of any of my childhood books, the sense of anti-climax as Grossman conveys it is sadly relatable. Fillory turns out to have all sorts of problems of its own, involving a civil war and the beast from the chaos dimension, which Quentin and his friends get drawn into because they seriously just went in their like “We will find a Quest to go on and everything will be better!” and so hey look, they get a quest. They don't really understand it and by the time they figure it out... well, everything is really screwed up at that point, to say the least.

This book is very... collegiate, basically, and is very good at evoking both the companionate good parts of living with a lot of your peers and basically nobody else—particularly once you've managed to clique off—and the vulgar, unromantic, dirty parts of it that occasionally made me want to either go back to being eight or skip ahead to being fifty. The characters are depressingly believable. Learning to do magic is portrayed as so repetitive and mechanical that by the time the phrase “it was so magical, it was almost technological” shows up, you know exactly what Grossman means and it's not gadget geekery. Somehow the book ends up being more realistic than most of the “reality” shows made about people in that age range, although it's probably about as disheartening at times. For example, Brakebills, despite being in the US, suffers from a serious case of highly affected Britishness, from the campus' construction as an eighteenth-century English country house to the school uniform, and even to the polite and overpronounced way the faculty and half the students speak. Actual British schools probably aren't this British. And it's perfect, probably because a lot of East Coast non-magical colleges still have all this oddly European architecture (I remember scouting out colleges six years ago and almost every one attempted to reference at least one of their buildings as looking “like Hogwarts”) and because you just know that an American magic school full of nerds would have serious Anglophilia issues to the point of an inferiority complex, it just WOULD. And I say this as someone with a deep and abiding interest in Anglophilia myself.

Despite being more depressing and vulgar and generally modern than most stuff I read, The Magicians is a really, really good book, and it is still a really, really good fantasy book. It's just not a children's fantasy book. It is a college-age and college-grad fantasy book, particularly one for current and former Sad Nerds and people having existential quarter-life crises. I liked it a lot and I hope to read the sequel whenever it comes out.