Maciek's Reviews > The Magicians

Having never heard of Lev Grossman I picked up two of his novels at the thrift store, basing solely on the premises from the back covers - Codex and The Magicians. I decided to read The Magicians first, because Grossman's first two books have both been bombs - Warp vanished without a trace, and Codex received largely negative reviews. But The Magicians was a huge success, so it couldn't be all that bad, right? After my admiration for Peter Straub's Shadowland (which deals with roughly the same topic, but is a far, far superior work) I was all set-up and full of expectations.

The Magicians failed to meet any of them. I found this novel to be largely tedious and uninteresting. Here are several reasons why:

1)The incredible amount of exposition and absolute lack of detail. Grossman spends page after page TELLING how his hero, Quentin, is learning magic but he never shows it. Part of the incredible allure of fantasy novels is the detailed construction of alternate worlds/universes; there's nothing like that here. Everything is extremely flat and without any flair of ,let's say, Hogwarts; where the reader can see for himself how unique magic really is - in vivid detail.
Even the Fillory books - fantasy novels which Quentin is a fan of - are special because Grossman tells us they are special. It's as he distrusted his readers and had to tell them everything - hence the reader plods on, and never cares about the characters and setting whose features and qualities are forced upon him.

2) The book is extremely DERIVATIVE. It's as if after the failure of his first two novels Grossman decided to "borrow" the tropes of well known fantasy works (most notably Harry Potter and Narnia) and base his story around other people's accomplishments. Consider:
A group of teenagers receive invitations to attend a school of magic, which is housed in a decaying gohtic castle, located just a few hours from a major metropolitan area. The castle is hiddent from public view by powerfull illusion spells and is governed by a childlike, yet powerful white bearded authority figure, who also happens to have a magical map showing where anyone is at any given moment. The process of learning magic turns out to be mostly tedious memorizing incantations and learning proper inflection. The school adapts a British educational system and is full of quirky effects, like disappearing doors.
The Fillory is a magical land entered through a clock where "Sons and Daughters of Earth" fight evil to become the royalty.
How is it possible to steal so many ideas and not get sued?

3) The book is full of filler. Grossman clammed 5 years of magical school (4 for some) and then squeezed adventures after the school (which include travelling into the world of Fillory) on 400 pages...most of which consist of students swearing, having sex, drinking booze and acting like pricks Grossman devised them to be. But everything is touched only on the surface; there's simply no room for anything to develop. Too much is trying to go on on a space too small - and that's why there's so little detail and so much exposition. It's almost as if we were presented with a summary of Quentin's struggle through magical school and his life after it.

4)The work is extremely self-indulgent. Grossman comes from an academic family and is a Harvard alumni (where he got a degree in comparative literature), currently holding a job of a reviewer at TIME magazine.
This is not a man with an original vision (how many original ideas are there in The Magicians andyway? I counted two) who chose to express it on paper; we are unfortunatelly dealing with the case of a pretentious academic who considers himself above the genre he chose to write in, and who has produced a sour and joyless (and ultimately pointless) exercise in this very genre, designed especially for people just like him. Since Less Than Zero already came out 20 years ago he decided to use storylines and themes from famous fantasy works to sell his product and disguise his lack of originality.
Much of Fantasy literature is didactic in nature. Young people can learn how to be a better human being, how to be brave in face of grave danger, to appreciate frienship and learn to be selfless when the situation requires it.
There is nothing to learn in The Magicians. While the disilusion in Less Than Zero worked, it doesn't work here because the protagonist is a self-pityng, self-oriented miserable teenager simply because Grossman forced him to be one. Quentin is not happy before enrolling at magical school, he's not happy at the school and he's not happy after the school. He hooks up with the hot girl, but is not happy with her so she sleeps with someone else - then he's even more not happy. Quentin starts out as a selfish bastard, migrates into an even more selfish bastard and ends up after four hundred pages - yeah, you guessed it - as a selfish bastard. Grossman never once allowes Quentin to take his head out of his (Quentin's, not Grossman's) ass to see the wonder he was allowed to experience, but instead forces him to be a smug and miserable selfish asshole to the very end, to illustrate his disilussion with the magical world because he decided that the protagonist will be disilusioned, no matter what he will see there (To his credit: he didn't even try to present much). In Grossman's world (both fantasy and magical) everything is forced upon the reader, including his message - it's rather simple, but the reader is forced to undergo great pains to arrive at the conclusion that is painfully obvious from the very beginning.

If you want to be bored and depressed simply because the author bores you and tells you to be depressed, you might get something from The Magicians. If you're looking for "realistic" and "adult" protagonists who are said to posess these qualities simply because they are all selfish, drink alcohol and swear and have sex this might be your thing. If you think that the novel will offer an unique take on the loss of innocence in a magical world, you might be disappointed - our heroes could have been plumbers and hygiene technicians, and Grossman still would ram his point home. (THERE IS NO HOPE, GET IT? NONE, ZERO, NADA, WHY? BECAUSE I SAID SO!)
This is a classic case of a pretentious navel-gazer, completely self-indulgent which smacks the reader in the face with its hopelesness and whining again and again and again. This emperor is naked as jay, and offers cliched insights masquerading as deeper truths covered by ideas of other (and better) authors. These insights are explored as superficially as possible, and in an adult way - with lots of booze, sex and swearing - so I sense some BIG PRIZE lurking around the corner, waiting for this very novel. After all, adults give these awards.
Kids know better.