Characters: B
Writing: A-
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A
A lot of reviewers have branded Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians as "Harry Potter for adults." It's an obvious selling point, I guess, and I can see how a lot of people would get distracted by the novel's highly referential first half and conclude that that's all this is. A few hundred pages of The Magicians does indeed take place at a secret magical school hidden from normal society, and Grossman goes beyond just glancing similarities — the characters themselves reference Harry Potter on multiple occasions so we don't have to, as well as Tolkien and probably a dozen others. Which is the point: this is meta-fantasy, a novel about the sort of people who read fantasy novels rather than the adventure itself. After all, what is fantasy? The general structure, whether taking place at a magical school or in a far-away mystical land, is that a troubled youth is whisked away to discover how special he is, and finds his place in his world by mastering the art of magic. The idea is that, wherever the character goes, he or she is entering, literally, a fantasy.
The Magicians takes a fairly obvious but nonetheless clever step back from all this, acknowledging that most of us grew up wishing for these very fantasies to take us away. The novel's protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, grew up reading a famous fantasy series called Fillory and Further, novels which are very obviously meant to fill in for The Chronicles of Narnia (though they work as general archetypes as well, if you've never read Lewis' series). The Fillory series mirrors The Chronicles of Narnia in nearly every single way, and goes far beyond mere background reference — without giving too much of the plot away, let's just say it's an extremely integral part of the story. So it's surprising to me that The Magicians is compared to the Harry Potter series so often, when in many ways it serves as a direct rebuttal — almost a re-writing of — The Chronicles of Narnia.
As you can probably tell, Grossman is trying to pull off a lot of tricks for one mostly-self-contained novel. While he never reaches quite the same level as the novels he's referencing, The Magicians is easily one of the most interesting, daring novels I've read in some time, and I found it to be incredibly addicting: even with its substantial 400 pages, I finished the entire novel in four days. It's definitely a page-turner, and a smart one, which I attribute mostly to its unpredictable and fast-moving plot. In retrospect, I have to admit that the plot isn't half of what it could have been, and Grossman plays his cards safer than I was imagining. Yet as I was reading, I truly had no idea what to expect — it's one of those novels that maintains a sense that nearly anything could happen within a chapter or two (even if it doesn't, really). Possibly this is all just a result of the brevity with which Grossman deals out his plot points. The Magicians would have earned its Harry Potter comparisons if the characters had stayed in school for longer, yet these five years of the character's lives only take up the first half of the book. Brakebills College for Magic isn't central to the plot the way that Hogwarts is — it's mostly there to be there, to establish the world that the characters inhabit. Even in the pivotal final third of the book, few plot elements are given much attention, despite most of the sets being interesting enough to carry a novel of their own. Though it would have been rather crass of Grossman to have given this the series treatment, The Magicians could have been at least twice as long with few ill effects. At times, it does feel as if there are chapters missing, or scenes that perhaps got cut down. While the brisk speed at which the narrative moves might patch over the pacing problems Grossman might have faced in a longer novel, some could view this is a pacing problem on its own: too much speed and too little substance. But to be fair, this only really bothered me in the later half, when the plot suddenly opens up and has the potential to go in any number of crazy directions, only to settle for what was probably the safest possible route.
All of this, I suspect, was done in order to make sure that Grossman's thesis wasn't lost amongst all the fantasy tropes he's exploiting. Grossman wasn't really writing a fantasy, after all: he was writing about the sort of people who get sucked into fantasy novels, and why such an obsession can be as dangerous as it is tempting. Though Quentin is sometimes unlikeable and occasionally downright annoying, he's fairly realistic for a main character. The side characters are somewhat weaker, and though Grossman is a good enough writer to provide each with an authentic voice, most of the characters never develop or change, and a few are ultimately irrelevant. But it's the lessons that these characters learn that ultimately resounds, and the reason I can so easily forgive the novel for its disappointments. It isn't easy to write a novel spilling over with genre-tropes and cliches and yet have it seem original and fresh, but that's just what Grossman's done. So it isn't the plot that matters in the end, or even the nature of the fantasy itself, but the very fact that we're being brought back to it, seeing what we've seen before in an entirely new light.
b+ for pacing? no way.
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