The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Ever get the feeling that you’re singing a discordant note in the choir?  Me too.  My discordance has the pleasure of being both literal and figurative- I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.   But what I’m referring to in this case is the fact that I tend to disagree with book critics on a regular basis. Not always, mind you, but in many cases.  Pardon the stream of conscience divergence from our normally stately book reviews, and bear with me here for a minute whilst I rant.

When I come up dry on reading ideas, my two favorite websites to go to are barnesandnoble.com and npr.org.   B&N has some neat reviews of their bestsellers that you can skim through to try to find out what all the people with disposable income are purchasing, and NPR has an awesome section on books, period.   NPR is my top choice, because it never ceases to bring books to my attention that I would have otherwise never stumbled upon, and pique my interest in genres that I would have decried any interest in.   Some of these I have thoroughly enjoyed! However, the exception that is niggling at my brain tonight is The Magicians by Lev Grossman.  Grossman’s novel is touted as an acceptable stop-gap for those of us struggling with the painful conclusion that we’ve matriculated through seven blissful years of Hogwarts, have been handed our walking papers and are being forced back out to the muggle world, now safe from Voldemort, and a little duller for the safety. 

The Magicians is definitely a grown up novel.  There are friendships and painful coming of age relationships, dysfunctional families, and great loss.  There is magic involved, a dark, elemental magic that incinerates the careless, feeds on personal pain, and is available only to the intellectually elite. (I already feel excluded.)  The novel also corrupts much of what is beloved about our childhood concept of ‘magic’, taking particular aim at bastardizing a whole ream of children’s fiction literature and its creator.  Apparently, the main characters in The Magicians have idolized a set of children’s stories entitled Fillory and Further written by Christopher Plover.  Disclaimer: I have never read Plover’s work.  The Fillory novels focus on a magical world which exists outside of ours, and is inhabited by intelligent, talking animals and magical creatures who desire the help of some British children who routinely get called over to help solve the woes of the world.   Oh, and in The Magicians, Fillory is a real place.  With real problems.  You follow so far?  Said magicians embark on dreamed of magical quest to find nothing but pain, disillusionment and severely misguided philosophy.

Maybe this is my beef with Mr. Grossman:  the entirety of his novel is aimed at destroying the best loved elements of fantastical fiction (i.e. mystery, heroism, the proving of virtues and humans besting their inherently troubled nature).   Additionally, the Fillory novels in question seem to bear remarkable semblance to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, which makes any mudslinging on the kid-lit fiction unacceptable to a book-nerd such as myself.  I feel as if some bored journalist tried to mate the original ingenuity of Harry Potter, with Donna Tartt’s depressing and nihilistic The Secret History.  The unappealing result seems to be The Magicians.