The Magician King by Lev Grossman
I have mixed feelings about this book. In some ways it’s a stupendous literary achievement. In other ways, it’s a thought problem of what would happen in real life if you min-maxed to get intelligence modifiers by using charisma as a dump stat. Or, to clarify for those of you who aren’t D&D players, it could be titled “why being smart and powerful doesn’t make people likeable or happy.”
To start with what’s good about this novel, the writing is brilliant. I realize that this is subjective: for many people “good writing” means “People will think I’m smart if I tell them I like this author” and “bad writing” means “teenage girls like it” or “it’s in a genre that doesn’t have mainstream respect.” Here’s what I mean by “good writing”: this novel was exceptionally clever on a sentence-by-sentence level. Grossman is generous with the bon mots and witty metaphors. For example, in one scene, Quentin notices that the bricks in the wall at the end of the world are the same bricks on the wall in hell, and he says “must have used the same contractor.” I find this brilliantly hilarious. In another scene, they’re following a young boy as he plays tour guide in his home, and Grossman describes one character bringing the other character gin and tonics as resembling a race organizer handing water or gatorade to a marathon runner. Also, a comment about teletubbies made me laugh for hours.
The worldbuilding also impressed me. In Fillory, a magical world, Grossman dispenses with logic and the laws of physics and goes for pure wonder. For example, clock trees start out as saplings with pocket watches in their trunks and end up as huge behemoths with giant clock-tower faces. How cool is that? Islands float, keys open invisible doors in mid-air, sloths are psychopomps. On Earth, the story travels from Venetian palazzos to Bed-Stuy flop houses. The wild adventures are all told with Grossman’s cunning wit and extensively researched details. Sometimes the bon mots and snarky quirks were ladled on a bit thick, but for the most part, they left me pleased and impressed. This is a rich world, darkly complex.
But it’s not a flawless book, and its flaw is glaring. I like to play a mental exercise where I try to figure out what a novel’s polar opposite novel is, and I came up with THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS. In THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS, (a twee outdated children’s book), the Pepper children are desperately poor, but they manage to eke out happiness out of nothing because of their humility, gratitude, and love for one another. In THE MAGICIAN KING, all the characters are overprivileged assholes who have entire worlds handed to them, but they’re miserably sunk in their own sarcastic ennui and appreciate nothing. Even the deepest debauchery leaves them hollow and world-weary.
Most of the characters were introduced in the previous novel, THE MAGICIANS, as was the land of Fillory. Fillory is to Narnia what Avenue Q is to Sesame Street. Fillory is dirtier and more dangerous, but the parallels are overwhelmingly obvious if you (like me) adored C.S.Lewis’ world as a child. As the novel starts out, the kings and queens of Fillory (two of each) are chasing a magical hare that sees the future. They’re doing this because they have nothing better to do. Someone dies, and the hare predicts grave danger ahead, and Quentin decides to take a trip to the edge of the Fillorian empire to gather some taxes from Outer Island. Everyone agrees it’s pointless, but he’s bored and has nothing better to do. They call it a quest to solve the murder, but the murder is never solved. Quentin, like this reader, just doesn’t care. The voyage goes uneventfully, but he decides while he’s there to look for a magic key. The key is reputed to be on an island called After Island. He does this just for the heck of it, because he’s bored.
The other half of the story involves Julia, the tormented Witch Queen goth chick who didn’t get into Brakebills in the first novel. We know she’s a magician, a “hedge witch” and that she’s learned her magic outside of Brakebills, but we don’t know the how of it. Her story was the most fascinating. She has a depth that Quentin lacked. She’s horribly unlikeable, but she lacks the smug entitled arrogance of the rest of them. She knows what she wants and she fights and suffers to get it. Her story kept me listening even when the other story (that of the quest for the keys) dragged on and on.
Quentin lamented the loss of his friend from the first novel, but I didn’t empathize with his pathos. Later on, a young man Quentin befriends dies tragically, and my response was utter indifference. Keep in mind that Hallmark commercials can make me cry. When this person died, I felt nothing but apathy. Nothing. These people meant nothing to me. I could not engage with any character at all, with the possible exception of Julia, for whom I felt pity.
Perhaps because of the excellent narration (I got the audiobook) the characters differed from each other more strikingly than they did for me in the first novel, but it also highlighted their collective lack of charisma. When even the Big Lebowski-esque Bro Josh seems to have more depth than the main character, that’s not a good sign. Actually, none of these people struck me as the sort I’d like to have as friends. Penny is depicted as an insufferable git, but on a scale of unpleasantness, he’s maybe a 9.7 as compared to the others’ 9.2-9.9. Quentin makes scandalized comments about how horrible the Outer Island agent is, because she ignores and neglects her (perfectly happy) daughter, and yet he also makes a joke about how it’s acceptable to kill a child who is helping him. Jokes about killing children to not serve to make main characters more appealing.
But what bothered me most was the pure entitlement of these people. They all take it for granted that they are due a life of majestic luxury and leisure and that material concerns are beneath them. At one point Julia is doing “temp work” to support herself, and she blows off her job more often than not but still manages to make ends meet. For many people, even brilliant people, making ends meet as a teen is challenging, especially if you’re an antisocial freak who doesn’t bathe. How does Julia manage it? Grossman glosses over mundane challenges like this, as if paying the rent is far beneath someone as brilliant as these people.
With the exception of one or two scenes, magic seems about as useful to these magicians as an art history degree. They either can’t do magic in their location, don’t need it, or it’s too weak because of who they’re up against. Kind of defeats the purpose of being a magician if you can’t even magic up a sweater when you’re freezing to death, in my opinion, but maybe it’s not magic for the sake of magic, but magic for the sake of feeling superior to ordinary people.
As I mentioned earlier, the most fascinating story was Julia’s sin and redemption, but it would have had more emotional impact if we’d found out her nadir before we were shown her eventual reward. And even though I liked her story and found it interesting, I still put her in the “interesting specimen” category rather than “someone I’d like to be friends with.”
I gave this four stars because if I totaled up the downsides(the horrid characters) and the upsides(the excellent writing) my enjoyment ledger came out in the black. If I hadn’t hated every character, it might have been the best book of the year for me. If the characters were as nice as Connie Willis’ characters, this book could be the book of the decade.
