by Lev Grossman has written three Magicians books about Quentin Coldwater, Brakebills Academy and the magical land of Narnia Fillory. (By the way you can buy a print of the image above here) The first novel, The Magicians, took familiar tropes from a whole river of fantasy literature and invested in them a seriousness of emotion and consequence that was quite cathartic for me. In particular, the book plays with C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books which was an intense favorite of my childhood. I am almost the same age at Lev and the way the Narnia books fired my imagination and my yearning for escape must have also been a profound influence on him. His notion to revisit them in the guise of a novel grounded in… well at least emotional realism if not actual realism, is nothing short of brilliant.
The second book, The Magician King, was also quite good and took up sorting out what it would mean to be the Kings and Queens of Narnia Fillory. I just finished the third book, The Magician’s Land, which has an amazing beginning section which is almost Ocean’s Eleven-like in it’s depiction of a magically-powered heist. Neither sequel quite hit the punch of the first novel for me but they both were very good and I really did enjoy the conclusion of the third novel which I think captured the right moment to exit the stage on. (I am not writing a review here — just another one of my bookmark posts to myself. There are whole sections of the three novels that are complicated and on which I have read eagerly others’ criticisms and analysis. In particular, there are some pretty solid and serious essays on how women are depicted in the novels vis a vis Quentin that absolutely are worth reading. Needless to say like all works of art, these are imperfect — no matter how much I found them worth reading.)
The author put together a collage of famous (to me anyhow) people reading part of the first chapter as a trailer for The Magician’s Land:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wegjCSqWN4]
This interview where Lev talks about his influences is pretty interesting. I’m glad he acknowledges the titanic impact Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell had on him. Susanna Clarke’s novel of magicians in England at the dawn of the nineteenth century is an incredibly realistic depiction of magic, fairies and fantasy. Which is not the contradiction it sounds like — Clarke invests her characters with a full range of emotions, crafts legends and rules for her magical version of Earth that make magic darker, deeper and terrifying.
I also liked this article in Slate about the trilogy with it’s argument that the books are actually about Julia and her painful story (it’s also about how hard it is to successfully write trilogies).
