At first glance, much is familiar. A young boy is enlisted into a secret school for wizards, where he discovers his own latent aptitude for magic. He finds friends and foes in this new setting, and also learns that dangerous dark forces can strike out even in the apparently safe confines of classroom and dormitory. Eventually he heads out on an exciting quest, aided by helpful schoolmates and lots of spells and magical objects.
Yes, if you judge The Magicians after the first fifty or so pages, you may be tempted to dismiss it as one more knock-off of the successful Harry Potter series—albeit it with some R rated elements tossed in. Unlike their counterparts at Hogwarts, characters in The Magicians use swearwords, smoke cigarettes, show up in class with a hangover, engage in recreational drug use and hook up for one-night stands. And though you may be alarmed at some of the risky behavior—the magical talking tree that lights up a cigarette will probably self-ignite long before he gets emphysema—you will probably find the goings-on here more attuned to the current day youth culture than the world according to Rowling.
But even more marked differences with other books about young wizards emerge as you dig deeper into Lev Grossman’s 2009 novel. The Magicians is both a work of fantasy, and a probing critique of what can go wrong when we seek escape in the phantasmagorical. A clever postmodern tone frequently emerges in the book, offering us surprises you won't find in Narnia or Hogwarts or Middle-earth . A few pages into The Magicians , the protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, lays his hands on an intriguing manuscript called…yes, you guessed it, "The Magicians," and at times the various characters in Grossman's work seem vaguely ware that they are mere actors in someone else's novel. No, it's not quite Paul Auster or Gilbert Sorrentino , but Grossman takes chances, and is not afraid to deconstruct the very same genre devices he employs with such gusto.
Quentin is an honors student at a high school in Brooklyn with a promising future ahead of him, but his dreams and ambitions are caught up in escapist fiction—especially a series of Narnia-esque books about a magical world called Fillory. When he arrives for his Princeton interview, the youngster finds that events have taken an unexpected turn. The man who was supposed to conduct the interview suffers a fatal attack, and the gorgeous paramedic gives Quentin a mysterious envelope—which includes the manuscript called "The Magicians" and a piece of loose note paper. The wind blows the note out of Quentin's hand, and in following it through a scraggly Brooklyn garden, the youngster ends up at Brakebills College of Magic.
Like Alice traveling through the looking-glass or the Pevensie children crawling thought the back of the wardrobe to Narnia , Quentin has left behind the familiar, mostly predictable everyday world for a realm of magic and fantasy. His dream of escaping to a more enchanted life has now come true. But first he needs to pass a rigorous admissions procedure—imagine the SAT for aspiring wizards—and acclimate himself to the different rules by which magicians live and learn.
When J.K. Rowling first tried to interest publishers in her Harry Potter books, she received numerous rejections—a familiar response was that youngsters don't want to read books about school, teachers and homework. We've now grown familiar with these school-based fantasy works, but Grossman reveals some new angles and creative alternatives. I especially enjoy his account of the magical equivalent of the "junior year abroad"; this whole section could stand alone as a first-rate novella. And other interludes are just as smartly done—his account of a graduation initiation ceremony inflicted by the zealous headmaster advances the plot and enhances the ambiance, but also shakes up the genre conventions with some heady admonitions on the dangers of fantasy and escapism.
What happens when wizards grow up and leave magic school behind? Unlike Ms. Rowling, Grossman doesn't shy away from this question, and even takes some delight in seeing whether twenty-something spellcasters can reintegrate themselves into day-to-day life after graduation. Again, this novel is not afraid of questioning its own foundations, raising issues of whether fantasy impedes a coming to maturity and acceptance of responsibility. Even while sending his characters on a fanciful adventure and vision quest, Grossman forces them to adopt a degree of self-reflection that is rare for books of this sort.
The Magicians works as a straight adventure narrative, but I especially like the text-within-a-text elements at play here. When Grossman wants to present a gateway into alternative universes, he depicts it in a form reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges' " Library of Babel." The implication is that our access to a different plane of existence is akin to our immersion into a book. The characters in The Magicians sometimes even talk about familiar fictions, referring to Harry Potter or quidditch or Tolkien; at one point Quentin boards a ship called the Skywalker. The reader senses that the pathway to other universes presented here may simply be a way of entering inside a pre-existing narrative.
I’m reminded of a wry Woody Allen short story,in which a devotee of Flaubert actually manages to enter into the novel Madame Bovary. But a wrong turn leaves him inserted instead into a textbook of remedial Spanish, where he is forever condemned to run away from the verb tenir . The characters in The Magicians also find that inserting themselves into a fantasy comes at a very high price. One might even envision our protagonist Quentin putting aside magic forever and embracing a boring desk job. And I suspect that would have actually happened, if Mr. Grossman had not seen a better setup for a sequel—namely his The Magician King , published in 2011.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture. His newest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .