Review | The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I read this book several weeks ago. I’ve been hesitant to review it, mostly because Aidan over at A Dribble of Ink wrote a fantastic review that expresses my feelings about the book far more eloquently than I could.

The Magicians
By Lev Grossman; Read by Mark Bramhall
Audible Download – 17 hours 24 mins [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
Published: 11 August 2009
Print: Hardcover, Viking Adult, 416 pages

Quentin is a high school kid who thinks he’s attending a private interview for admission to Princeton. In fact, the interview turns out to be for a place far stranger, Brakebills, a college devoted to teaching the magical arts. If this description sounds like Harry Potter: The College Years to you, you’re partly right. Quentin, like Harry, has always felt out-of-place in our mundane world. Yet in terms of style and focus, The Magicians is a very different book. Whereas J. K. Rowling largely relies on external symbolism and action to develop her characters, Grossman chooses to explore the inner lives of his characters in a manner reminiscent of FitzGerald, Faulkner, and other classical “literary” types.

This isn’t to say that The Magicians lacks appeal for readers who prefer page-turning action, suspense, and world-building. Although this is Grossman’s first fantasy novel, he certainly isn’t lacking in “geek cred”. At one point in the novel, one of the characters makes a quip of something to the effect that they should make a pornographic magazine for trees called Enthouse. Grossman is also a master world-builder. Central to the plot of the novel is a writer named Christopher Plover, who in the 1930s wrote a series of allegorical novels set in the fictional land of Fillory. So compelling is Grossman’s description of these novels that at first I was convinced that there was in fact a fantasy author who had escaped my notice. Only after Googling for Christopher Plover did I realize that he was actually Grossman’s creation.

The inclusion of Plover’s Fillory novels in the plot of The Magicians makes the book a discussion and critique of fantasy literature itself, what the genre is, is not, and should be.

The Magicians is the kind of novel that lends itself to close, careful reading and rereading. I’ll probably have more to say when I revisit it at some point in the future, a prospect I’m very much looking forward to.