The Magicians by Lev Grossman: A Review

About a week ago, I first heard about The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and then it seemed to be everywhere. It arrived in our current fiction section at the library, and another librarian brought it to me so I would have the first turn with it. She thought it sounded like my kind of book, but I'm so bogged down in my reading that I waved it away.

Then I read an enthusiastic review of it in a blog that I follow. Then on another blog. Suddenly, I just had to read it. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it--although, of course, it had been checked out by then. So I downloaded the audio version.

I couldn't wait to start listening. I zipped through the first sections and was hooked. I couldn't wait to get further into it.

Somewhere along the line, things changed. I realized I couldn't wait to be done with it and try to forget it. Hopefully I wouldn't need therapy.

So what's the story about that made me so anxious to read it?

Here's what I heard. It's about a young man named Quentin Coldwater who's about to graduate high school and go to college--probably Harvard or somewhere Ivey League, because he's brilliant and competitive. He's also very unhappy and can't seem to find much meaning in life. One of his main joys since childhood has been reading fantasy books, particularly a series about a land called Fillory--which is more or less exactly the same as Narnia. As they say, only the names have been changed, probably to protect the author from a copyright suit. Quentin knows he should be growing up and letting go of such dreams and longings for Fillory and magic, but he can't seem to do it.

Then suddenly, something bizarre happens. Quentin receives an invitation to an exclusive, secret college of magic. Yes, if you're thinking Harry Potter right about now, the author probably expects you to. There are lots of similarities between Brakebills College and Hogwarts--except that Hogwarts is a magical, delightful place that children of all ages dream of going to, and Brakebills is a depressing, difficult, and frankly perverted place that this child, at least, wouldn't be caught dead in.

So. Quentin discovers that magic doesn't make him happy any more than his previous life did. Then he graduates from Brakebills and because of his magic, can pretty much do anything with his life that he wants to. He chooses to drink, carouse, and cheat on his girlfriend. He's not happy, you see.

The book was frankly making me unhappy, too, at this point. Remember Kristi's post about Revolutionary Road? It felt like that, only with magic. But I stuck with it, because I'd heard what was coming in Part 3 of the book, and I thought the payoff would come. I knew that Quentin would discover that the land of Fillory was real, and that through his magic, he could actually get there. There was even mention of the fact that one of the Chatwin children in the Fillory series (like the Pevensies in Narnia) had disappeared at the end of the last book. Because the author died before writing the next book, no one knew what had happened to him. So the logical assumption is that Quentin will go on a quest to find the missing Martin Chatwin.

Finally it happens. Quentin and his friends are off to Fillory. And they do find Martin Chatwin, only they weren't particularly looking for him. As usual with Quentin and his bunch, they don't really have a purpose in going there any more than they have a purpose in the rest of their lives. As the Fillory ram Ember (a disappointing stand-in for the great lion Aslan in Narnia) tells them, Fillory is not a theme park for them to come play dress-up in--because that's the flip way they are treating its struggles and wars, and the possibility of becoming kings and queens there.

The whole Fillory expedition is a disaster. And--I'm sure you'll find this shocking--Quentin is unhappy there.

That could pretty much sum up this whole book: "Quentin is unhappy." He never really gets happier--but my mood had certainly plummeted by the end of this book.

I'm trying to figure out why people I respect are writing that this is such an important book. Maybe it's one of those literary things I don't understand. John Granger, whom I respect and who wrote Looking for God in Harry Potter, goes on about the importance of The Magicians because of its attempt to merge the post-modern novel (like Catcher in the Rye) with fantasy. But then, a lot of what Granger and other literary critics say is over my head.

I understand that Grossman is trying to say that our fantasies, even if they come true to the letter, won't make us happy. That kind of joy has to come from somewhere else, somewhere inside us. I agree on those points. In fact, one of my works that has been in progress for decades has that same general theme.

The trouble is, Grossman points out that fulfillment of our fantasies won't make us happy or give us purpose, but then he doesn't seem to have a clue what will. Quentin is worse off at the end than when he started, because he's tried everything, and everything has failed him. True, at the very end, Quentin is finally ready to use magic again and to go on another magical adventure, but frankly that came out of the blue and seemed tacked on. I couldn't find any evidence of a change of attitude or any particular self-discovery. And if you're looking for anything spiritual, well...forget about it.

We've mentioned on this blog before that C.S. Lewis has identified our yearnings that come from fantasy as a longing for the eternal. Since Grossman doesn't seem to believe that, we're left with a yearning after nothing, as meaningless as Quentin's life. But then, Grossman may not think much of C.S. Lewis and his ideas, anyway. He certainly didn't make the Lewis stand-in character (the writer of the Fillory books) very admirable. The old man stole the Chatwin children's stories for his personal gain and was "diddling" one of them. Apparently, trying to hide from the man's perverted advances was what led to the child's hiding in a cabinet and discovering the passage to Fillory to begin with. Ick!

So what am I missing? Why do people who enjoy fantasy still seem to like this book, when it came perilously close to ruining Harry Potter for me--and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to look at Narnia the same way again.

I was listening to The Magicians audiobook on my iPod, and when it came to the end I couldn't move for a minute. I was stunned. That was a good thing, because the iPod promptly started playing the next audiobook in line. It was a book called Peter and the Starcatchers that I downloaded weeks ago because it was on sale and because it was narrated by Jim Dale, the fabulously talented narrator of the Harry Potter audiobooks. Suddenly, there was Jim Dale's cozy voice starting a story about Peter (destined to become Peter Pan) boarding a ship called the Neverland to start his fantastic adventures. I felt myself starting to smile.

Thank goodness for Jim Dale!

Joy: Sampling the Eternal

Hey everybody. It's me again, Kristi. I thought I would share with you all today something I wrote a little over a year ago, while I was in school. It was for a Senior Seminar class, and we had been working all semester on figuring out where we as "artist/scholars" were at that present time, and where we wanted to go in our artistic endeavors. The term "artist/scholar" was big in our Theatre and Performance Studies department. We were pushed to strive for both.


This theme, though, is one I have been thinking a lot about lately, as I plan to move West very soon. It helps me to remember why I am going, and what my goals will hopefully always be- what they should be, I believe.


I focus on C.S. Lewis in this piece, because through his writing and discoveries, more than any other author's, I have made amazing realizations about who I am as an artist, and what I believe art is. I plan to write a lot about this on our blog, because it really is what we are trying to relate through Dimensions. (I think Robin would agree- I hope so, anyway!) I believe God led me to Lewis' writings, and enabled me to make these incredibly important connections. Maybe you can make some connections as well. They have truly been life-changing for me. For now, though, I hope you enjoy this post!


“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country… even now I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence. The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly longing for it. And we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of the name, “Heaven.”

C.S. Lewis


The students from Dead Poets Society who stood on the tops of their desks, quoting Walt Whitman in a show of support for their teacher, understood the concept of yearning, of the “inconsolable secret”- what the artist/scholar C.S. Lewis called “Joy” (with a capital J)- specifically brought about by encounters with art. Lewis had experienced this Joy in art, and his efforts to find its true source, to understand this Joy, eventually led to his conversion from Atheism to Theism, and finally to Christianity. These experiences of what he calls that “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” were the central story of Lewis’ life. In his autobiographical work Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes:


I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf: fond of it in

a casual, shallow way for its story and its vigorous rhythms. But then,

and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far

more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the

pages of the book and found…

‘I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the Beautiful,
Is dead, is dead’

…instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described…and then…found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.”

For Lewis, there was no doubt that Joy was a desire, but a desire for what? Did he really long to be inside of the poem, at the moment when Balder fell? Did he long for the things, people, and places he found there? Did he long for Joy itself? After many years of searching, he wrote that “the form of the desired is in the desire”, and that “it is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, ‘high’ or ‘low’… Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want- I myself am your want of- something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’”


My own run-ins with Joy after certain artistic events have led me on a similar search. I have lived through powerful, emotional days, sometimes weeks, of bittersweet agony after some of these moments. I wondered, “What is this I am feeling? What is it that I want?” Though I was already approaching the question as a Christian, I did not immediately make the connection. I began at basically the same place as Lewis. If I have one such experience while watching Out of Africa, it must be for Africa I long. But then when I remember that I do not even like camping that much, and that I greatly enjoy the comforts of an air-conditioned room, I must conclude that African safari is not the desired object. Then what is?


Certainly, we as humans relate to the beauty of love between dear old friends, and the great loss experienced when one dies. We long for the kinship that exists among unlikely comrades, and we ache at the mere existence of a so-called impossible bond. But there is more than simply relating. These instances of Joy go beyond empathy, beyond understanding. These moments are, as Lewis describes them, “something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something… ‘in another dimension.’” Though this “broken and exalted” Joy has come to me at moments in various art forms-animation, children’s literature, epic films, paintings, music- I list heavily toward the genre of science-fiction/ fantasy. The connection between this artistic realm and the heavenly realm is there. Considering Lewis’ search for the Source of Joy, it is natural that he would have made that connection. In his book Of Other Worlds, Lewis writes about the brilliance of the author David Lindsay and his book Voyage to Arcturus:


"His Tormance is a region of the spirit. He is the first writer to discover what ‘other planets’ are really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit."


Here we find the call to destiny on a greater scale. Though we may relate to this call, the imagined world is larger than life- a world apart. And when the enemy must be faced there- and the enemy must always be faced there, the stakes of the battle take on epic importance. The hero comes to the edge of defeat, but here the risk of loss knows only the limits of the imagination. And finally, after an otherworldly quest has been undertaken and the heightened battle fought, victory is that much more rewarding- to have fought against all odds and returned from the edge victorious, he is able to share in camaraderie with those who have struggled by his side. We have participated in something known and relatable, yet somehow totally foreign. Lewis himself loved this genre so much that he created his own imaginary world, in The Chronicles of Narnia.


Then, there are those episodes of Joy sparked by that occasional piece which brings together all of the elements in one grand synthesis. Why am I an artist? So that perhaps one day I can create something as wonderful as Michael Mann’s film Last of the Mohicans- a piece in which all of the elements speak to the spirit, and all of the technical elements come together to create a whole which is greater than its parts- something which may spark in someone else that which has been sparked in me- something by which I could whisper a hint of that “inconsolable secret” into the ear of another.


The artistic realm is the only place I have ever experienced these moments, these “road signs” which point “to something other and outer.” The artist has been given a unique gift- the gift of creation, a sampling of the eternal. Perhaps as a creator, the artist represents one meaning in the Truth that man is created in God’s Image. My hope is to point others, through my creations, to Him Who is greater than me, Who is Other, Outside of, and Higher than me- the Master Artist, the Great Creator. To show others the Joy which has been shown to me- this is my goal as an artist.