Bottom Line

While I didn’t mind the first novel in the trilogy, The Magicians, the final book feels like its plowing similar territory.  Consequently, as a critique or commentary about the fantasy genre I’m not sure this book, or the trilogy as a whole, is saying anything that’s particularly profound or insightful.

Representative Paragraph

The strongest section of the novel is Rupert Chatwin’s memoir about Narnia Fillory.  Here’s an excerpt…

One thing we did not argue about was why, among all the children in the world, we had been given the gift of Fillory. Why us and no others? Why did Ember and Umber and all the rest of the Fillorians show us such special favor, when in our own world we were just ordinary people? I believe that I alone among us five was troubled by this. To the extent that I, at the age of ten, had a soul, the question gnawed at it. A mistake had been made, I was sure, a real blunder, because I knew that I was not strong or clever or even particularly good. I knew I didn’t deserve Fillory. And when the truth finally came out, and the hoax collapsed, the punishment would be terrible indeed, and our suffering would be hot and sharp, in proportion to the blessings that had been showered on us.

Commentary

The Magician’s Land is the final book in the Magician’s trilogy which started back in 2009 with the publication of the aptly named, The Magicians.  I read the first novel when it came out and have a vague memory of enjoying the book at the story level but feeling less convinced that the novel was saying anything profound about the fantasy genre. The books on the nose allusions to Rowling, Tolkien and CS Lewis kept me at a distance from the characters. But then, given how the novel was packaged and how it was embraced by the literary community, it’s possible The Magicians wasn’t aimed at me.  It’s why I didn’t bother with the second book, thinking it was going to be much of the same.

Now having read The Magician’s Land I don’t regret my original decision.

Too Grossman’s credit, you don’t need to have read either the first or second book to understand the plot of The Magician’s Land.  Grossman unobtrusively slips in enough backstory to fill out who Quentin is and why a place called Fillory is such an important touchstone for everyone in the novel.

Because this is the final book of a trilogy, the stakes are set reasonably high with Fillory facing an impending apocalypse.  Quentin, in the meantime, has been expelled from Fillory and is trying to make his way in the world as a freelance magic-user while also investigating a magical means of bringing his one true love, Alice, back to life.  His involvement with a bunch of shady magic-users and a planned heist to steal an important satchel leads Quentin back to Fillory and where it all began.

Like the first novel, Grossman draws a great deal of inspiration from the Narnia novels — especially The Last Battle. And there’s nothing wrong with that.  In fact, the strongest part of the book is when Quentin discovers a lost journal written by one of the Chatwin children who first visited Fillory. Now an adult, Rupert Chatwin focuses on how the adventure and shenanigans of Fillory that occupied their childhood became an addictive drug for one of the family members as they all grew older. This darker edge to the innocence of secondary world fantasies was a feature of the first book in the series, The Magicians. But through the eyes of Rupert Chatwin the experience of seeing a new world only to discover that it will eventually reject you as you reach adulthood is powerful and sad. (The only sour note in the journal are the hints that Mr Plover, the man who lived near the Chatwin children and would eventually turn their adventures into stories, was a pedophile).

Unfortunately, Quentin’s story and the story of his friends still living as Kings and Queens in Fillory pale in comparison. It made me wish that Grossman had taken the bold move of leaving Quentin and his pals behind and focusing entirely on the Chatwins for the third book.  The Magician’s Land is also not helped by Quentin’s ongoing angst to be a white knight and save the life of his dead girlfriend.  I won’t spoil the last third, but the amount of male wish fulfillment on display ruined what might have been a very powerful climax.

Ultimately I just don’t see the point to the trilogy. It’s not saying anything particularly profound or insightful about the genre – other than the fact that if you did spend time in a fantasy world as a child then there’s a good chance the experience will fuck you up as an adult.  And I never cared enough about Quentin or his mates to wonder what happened to them next.