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incrediblemelk 's review for:
The Magicians: Alice's Story
by Pius Bak, Lev Grossman, Lilah Sturges
I started watching the TV adaptation of this and got through three episodes before realising I should go back and read the novel first. My brother Matt had enthused to me about this novel a couple of years ago – he really enjoyed the way it depicts magic as being both something innate and also a very hard-won skill that requires precision and intensive study. (Matt is a dentist who, after several years' professional practice, decided to go back for a law degree; precision and intensive study are kind of his thing.)
The magical parallel world of Fillory is a Narnia pastiche, and one thing I enjoyed about The Magicians is its commentary on fantasy fiction fandom and how people build meaning in their own lives around their consumption of these texts. (I saw Grossman in conversation with Rainbow Rowell at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival on the subject of novels-within-novels.) There are also a lot of digs in The Magicians at the expense of other beloved fantasy franchises such as Harry Potter and Star Trek.
Quentin, the protagonist of this novel, is an ambivalent portrait of a hero-as-fanboy - sooky, jealous of anyone who threatens his fragile self-image as a prodigy, and always certain a better life awaits him somewhere other than where he is. Yet Grossman ultimately does depict Quentin as special and super-smart – a Chosen One.
Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy is also a familiar fantasy. It's an Anglophilic hybrid of Hogwarts (complete with 'sorting' into specialties, and the intervarsity sport of welters, Brakebills' answer to quidditch); of the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (it's no accident that the flamboyantly queer, dipsomaniac character Eliot has the surname Waugh); and of the preppy but dissolute, coterie-driven Camden/Hampden College of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt.
Obviously I found this intensely enjoyable to read because I love all this world-building shit, and stories about coteries of brilliant weirdos. The Magicians is also edgier than many YA franchises, which never let anything bad happen to their characters. There's plenty of sex, mutilation, and an undertone of adult manipulation that feels quite intertextual, considering the case of JM Barrie and Llewellyn Davies boys. Magicians, it's suggested, get their power from suffering.
While this book sometimes staggers under the weight of its homages, ultimately I gave it four stars because it gave me a similar feeling to Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea cycle – a joy in the uncanniness of magic, and a sense that wielding magic is transformative and melancholy.
The magical parallel world of Fillory is a Narnia pastiche, and one thing I enjoyed about The Magicians is its commentary on fantasy fiction fandom and how people build meaning in their own lives around their consumption of these texts. (I saw Grossman in conversation with Rainbow Rowell at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival on the subject of novels-within-novels.) There are also a lot of digs in The Magicians at the expense of other beloved fantasy franchises such as Harry Potter and Star Trek.
Quentin, the protagonist of this novel, is an ambivalent portrait of a hero-as-fanboy - sooky, jealous of anyone who threatens his fragile self-image as a prodigy, and always certain a better life awaits him somewhere other than where he is. Yet Grossman ultimately does depict Quentin as special and super-smart – a Chosen One.
Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy is also a familiar fantasy. It's an Anglophilic hybrid of Hogwarts (complete with 'sorting' into specialties, and the intervarsity sport of welters, Brakebills' answer to quidditch); of the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (it's no accident that the flamboyantly queer, dipsomaniac character Eliot has the surname Waugh); and of the preppy but dissolute, coterie-driven Camden/Hampden College of Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt.
Obviously I found this intensely enjoyable to read because I love all this world-building shit, and stories about coteries of brilliant weirdos. The Magicians is also edgier than many YA franchises, which never let anything bad happen to their characters. There's plenty of sex, mutilation, and an undertone of adult manipulation that feels quite intertextual, considering the case of JM Barrie and Llewellyn Davies boys. Magicians, it's suggested, get their power from suffering.
While this book sometimes staggers under the weight of its homages, ultimately I gave it four stars because it gave me a similar feeling to Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea cycle – a joy in the uncanniness of magic, and a sense that wielding magic is transformative and melancholy.