You Can't Revisit the Magic Land of Childhood

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 96
Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Quentin Coldwater is accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room. Adept at higher mathematics, he's also a talented stage illusionist. He's so good at everything, in fact, that everything now bores him. He's an outcast and third wheel among the genius set, the Ron Weasley of Brooklyn savants. Until one day he gets his chance: the entrance exam to North America's only certified university of legitimate wizardry.

Lev Grossman worked as Time magazine's in-house book critic while writing this, his third novel and first breakout success. Perhaps that explains why this reads as both a novel and a critique of its genre. Grossman's characters directly comment on how their story alternately resembles and differs from Harry Potter. Experienced readers will also recognize nods to L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis, Ursula le Guin, Susannah Clements, and others.

This novel's first half details Quentin's education. Though maybe “details” isn't the word: at Brakebills Academy, as with muggle college, schooling is mostly tedium. Quentin struggles with skillz drillz, homework, and social status, like undergrads everywhere. No trolls in the dungeon here. Well, one; but even that proves less adventurous, more an object lesson that all the knowledge on Earth means squat compared to preparation.

No, Quentin’s Brakebills education is characterized by hard work, discipline, and tedium. Magic here is a regimen. But it also features self-discovery, including the realities of adult relationships and sex. (These characters are college-aged, so the idea of sex feels less squicky than Hogwarts’ actual children.) Quentin spends four years transitioning to adulthood, where just like mundane college, the program is camouflage for school’s real lessons.

Throughout, Quentin dwells halfway in Fillory, the magical land from a series of mid-20th-Century British children’s novels. Though without faith himself, he appreciates the story’s Christian allegory, and believes his life would improve if he could travel to that land’s enchanted moral certitude. He loves how the story resolves, unlike life, which drags interminably. He knows it’s just a novel, but he spends hours wishing himself into Fillory.

Lev Grossman

Then, in the second half, the tone changes abruptly. One suspects the second half is the novel Grossman really wanted to write, because he invests such energy and detail. Out of college, Quentin and his friends are so powerful and wealthy that nothing matters. They drift through a rigamarole of dinner parties, alcohol, and meaningless sex. Until a classmate reappears with an artifact that promises to transport them where they’ve always wanted to go.

Fillory.

Yep, apparently everyone’s favorite portal fantasy really exists. The magic land of talking animals and moral allegory gives the protagonists something to live for. Which, sadly, forces Quentin to accept his profligacy and infidelity. Bequeathed all the power on Earth, he’s used it to think with his willie; why should some place as morally secure as Fillory welcome him? Still, he can’t abandon his childhood dream, so off he goes.

Except the parallel world Quentin discovers isn’t as ethically watertight as he remembers. Factions feud over scraps, while the creator-beasts which once guaranteed rectitude are strangely absent. The heroes commence a quest to recover Truth and Beauty, only to discover the one remaining loose end from their childhood novels has become monstrous and antiheroic. Turns out, you can only remain innocent and childlike forever, by destroying your innocence.

On one level, this forms a criticism of what happens when we reread childhood classics as adults. Nobody raised on Narnia, Oz, or other classic portal fantasies can return as grown-ups without having the experience somehow changed. (Grossman uses the word “portal” so often it becomes pointed.) And encountering works like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson as adults, we have our own distinct experiences, colored by our own lives.

At another level, Grossman undercuts even that reading. Confronted by the realization that moral certainty is phony, Quentin’s friends respond with cheap atheism that sounds like freshman philosophy major dribble. The opposite of theism, Grossman suggests, isn’t atheism, because both purport to know the Truth, which is ephemeral. Lacking pat answers, the characters lapse into bleak, lingering nihilism… which Grossman, mercifully, doesn’t resolve.

Grossman suggests throughout that humans need purpose, need moral framework, for life to have any meaning. Then he admits we cannot look outside ourselves for such purpose, because everyone else has the same limitations we do. Grossman does for agnosticism what Rowling did for Christianity: giving it a milieu that is simultaneously contemporary and mythical. This book isn’t easy. But it does suggest what it means to be human.