The Magicians by Lev Grossman

When I was young, I used to step into our hall closet, the one where my parents hung up winter coats and which was, therefore, as close to a wardrobe as I could get, and press my way to the back and wish very hard that someday when I tried this it would actually open up into Narnia, or somewhere fantastical. I think I was old enough to know that children’s fantasy novels were only that—fantasy—but I also think I was young enough to hope that I might still be wrong. It’s the same kind of hope that made me decide to briefly believe in Santa Claus again even after I’d figured out that he wasn’t real. That was a step of logic that doesn’t make sense to me as an adult, but the logic of childhood is not really the same as the logic of adulthood.

The Magicians is an interesting book because it plays on the childhood wish so many of us had that the fantastic could turn out to be real, whether it was Narnia or Harry Potter or our own made-up world, and brings that wish crashing into the adult world. The story begins when Quentin, a teenager mostly concerned with deciding which Ivy League school to attend the next year, learns that magic really does exist, and that he has the opportunity to enroll in a college for magicians. Still later (and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but one that you’d probably guess anyway if you read the first chapter of the book) he also learns that the magical land of his own childhood reading, Fillory, also exists, and eventually he finds himself there.

And yet, as you might expect from a book written solely for adults, the magic and the magical worlds that Quentin stumbles into are far darker and far more ambiguous than anything J.K. Rowling or C.S. Lewis or E. Nesbit ever dreamed up.

That right there is what I both liked and disliked about the book. I thought that Grossman did a brilliant job of creating, describing, and letting his characters run loose in a world that seemed to maintain so many elements we recognize and understand from our childhood reading, while simultaneously making this world appear real and almost unfantastical in its reality. I think what makes this book so interesting and so different is that Grossman is not trying to construct a fantasy novel for adults, he’s constructing a fantasy novel for adults who were once children who read fantasy novels for children. That’s a very different task, and I thought he was quite successful.

But like I said, that’s also what I didn’t like about the book. In some ways it was almost too adult, of the most depressing kind of adult. There was a lot of drinking and swearing and sex of the sort that one probably does find among certain groups of young adults, and I find this all sort of unfamiliar and depressing. It wasn’t really explicit or graphic, it was just kind of present in the background of the characters’ lives, and there was a corresponding sense of futility and deep unhappiness among the characters. They just weren’t really pleasant people to spend 400 pages with. The narrative and the writing were enough to draw me in—there was only a brief period somewhere in the middle when I lost the motivation to keep reading, and it only lasted a short time. But it wasn’t a book that could leave me feeling satisfied.

So that’s my mixed review. I wouldn’t not recommend this book. Like I said, I found it a really engaging read, and it was a fascinating novel. If I had disliked it, I wouldn’t have finished it. But I also have a hard time straight up recommending it. Just be forewarned.