Modern Meh

[mtvessel]

Sep-Nov 2016
The Magicians Trilogy – Lev Grossman - Penguin, 2016
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This is a highly-lauded urban fantasy that has been described as Harry Potter for grown-ups. Which it is, in part - it starts with the recruitment of the series protagonist, a clever but socially inept young man called Quentin Coldwater, to Brakebills, an elite hidden college for aspiring magicians. However, Quentin is obsessed with a series of fantasy books about a magical land called Fillory, which unsurprisingly turns out to be a real place that is darker than its chronicler has made out. It is clear what Grossman is about - like many other post-postmodern fantasy authors, he wants to write about two series that he clearly loves while simultaneously critiquing them. But while one pastiche is largely successful, the other is less so.

Both worlds that Grossman builds have heavy parallels with their antecedents. Brakebills is located on the banks of the Hudson in New York state but is magically screened from ordinary folk. It has a bunch of eccentric teachers headed by Dean Fogg, classes in different schools of magic, some peculiar geography (a maze populated by living topiary) and a quidditch analogue called Welters that is played on a giant chessboard. However, upgrading from a school to a college allows for the students to be more mature and hence more nuanced characters than those found in J.K. Rowling's books - Quentin's rival Penny, for example, is far more than a pantomime villain, having, one senses, a tragic back-story (and Quentin is so annoying that the reader ends up rather siding with him). So it is something of a shame that Grossman completes the education of his hero so quickly, although I liked the implied satire of the bloated and overblown nature of the later books in the Harry Potter series.

With Fillory, the parallels with the source material are even closer. There are talking animals (including Umber and Ember, the resident creators of the world), cutesy scenery (trees with clock faces in them), elaborate portals to get to and from the real world (a grandfather clock in an old house), four kings and queens at Whitespire, and in the second book, a long sea voyage on a ship that might as well have been called The Dawn Treader. But whereas Brakebills feels like an upgrade of Hogwarts, Fillory gives the impression of being a version of Narnia designed specifically to avoid copyright infringement. True, there is some consideration of the brutal effects of whimsical magical rules on real people, and the gods are far more capricious and less Christ-like than Aslan, but neither of these is exactly a new concept in fantasy literature.

The plots of the three books are perfectly fine, albeit deriving from whimsies rather than from the structure of the world. So are the characters. Quentin's friends Elliot, Josh, Janet and Alice, and later Julia and Plum, are witty and interesting. But somehow the series failed to invoke any sense of wonder or other strong emotion, and a year after reading it I hardly recall it at all. Part of the problem is the lack of a memorable antagonist - Grossman eschews any White Witch or Voldemort analogues - but more significant is the authorial tone, which is knowing and, for me at least, off-putting. It's all very well pointing out the naiveties of childrens' fantasy series, but in trying to write something more sophisticated, Grossman has forgotten that a lot of their emotional power comes from those very simplicities.