"The Magicians" by Lev Grossman

If these “books” sound familiar, it’s because they’re shamelessly modeled on The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Actually, Lev Grossman’s filching of this allegorical series is so deliciously faithful that it makes the reader long for an appendix filled with details, chronologies, characters lists, and more. Fillory is a place stuffed with wonder, from the enormous velveteen “Cozy Horse” that can convey all the children at once to a group of talking bunnies who like to take tea. Who wouldn’t want to get lost there?

 

Quentin would, but he’s never found his way. However, as the novel opens, he finds himself in a place even more magical. In the midst of what he thinks to be an alumni interview for Princeton, he is swept away to take entrance exams for a school called “Brakebills” that trains magicians. Of course he’s admitted to this hidden gothic wonderland on the Hudson (“not far from West Point,” just in case you needed architectural referents), where students play a game called “welters” with odd rules. Suddenly, we’re jerked from Lewis to Rowling. Will Quentin be “the boy who lived?”

 

He’ll at least be the boy who takes it all in, as he becomes the reader’s guide to a society as class-ridden as Mumbai and ritual-strewn as an Oxford college. There’s a Dumbledore-like dean named Hogg, eccentric professors named van der Weghe and Mayakovsky, and offbeat uniforms that include striped blazers and pins shaped like bees for prefects. Grossman is not poking fun so much as paying homage; his enjoyment in writing the scenes is palpable.

 

But the book succeeds because he goes beyond homage to something of his own, and that’s much more than just a matter of dreaming up spellbound fountains and clever creatures (his Brakebills graduation rite de passage is something Rowling might kick herself for not inventing). As Grossman takes Quentin and his friends from Brakebills to Manhattan to – yes, Fillory, and that’s no spoiler – it’s clear he is building not a mystery, but an allegory.

 

At first it could almost be an allegory for new media. These brilliant, accomplished, and flawed teenagers are thrown together in a place where they have everything they need and no one can bother them (a bit like the toy-company creatives in PopCo by Scarlett Thomas) to learn everything about their craft. It’s Silicon Valley-meets-Brideshead as spells fail, students learn their particular strengths, and bonds are forged that will test and fail and save them.

 

Suddenly, during their third year, Quentin’s group (including Josh, Eliot, Janet, and Alice) undergo a strenuous test, and Brideshead dissolves into The Razor’s Edge. If Grossman were less of a novelist, here is the point where one might joke that the test is like launching a web site…but by now, the reader is hooked. None of the group is perfect, yet each young adult has some vulnerability that makes the reader care, from Eliot’s hopelessly addictive personality to Janet’s exhibitionist tendencies.

 

After graduation, Quentin and Alice are paired off, but while she devotes herself to her future as a magician (studying, looking into graduate programs, doing research), he applies himself to the nightlife scene: He and the others, funded by a Brakebills trust, binge on everything from liquor to drugs to food – at a “Miscegenation”-themed dinner party, even the cheese course is Morbiere, with two layers from the morning milking and the night milking. In other words, they’re not paying attention.

 

Little Alice (she’s often referred to as such, and we learn at least twice that she has “heavy breasts;” Quentin seems not to have escape the genital stage of his early-childhood development, which is appropriate since this book is definitely about infantilization) is, however. While that fact may be purposely buried as the Brakebills alums venture to Fillory with their lost classmate Penny who suddenly turns up, Alice’s swottiness plays an allegorical role, too. What gets you farther, in the end? True brains, or a true heart? Or is it something completely different?

 

Those questions stand out as starkly as the clockfaces in the tree trunks of Fillory as Grossman raises the stakes for his ragtag band of would-be artistes and elevates his allegory to one for the creative life as a whole. Some people in it seem to find a brass ring, while others just follow a movement, and still others get so far and can’t compete (every time Janet jumps into Fillory, she sickens and gasps for air).

 

Fortunately for readers who aren’t quite ready to be grownups (which is to say, all readers), this fairy tale’s hard truths aren’t all bitter. A scene in which Quentin and crew are transformed into Canada geese is simply gorgeous, and a long recuperation in a hospital run by centaurs is like something out of Forster. Grossman, the longtime literary critic for TIME magazine, is a novelist who also knows his literature (that’s not as common as one might think), so that he can pull bits of it seemingly out of the air as he describes a boy’s growth to manhood and one human’s path to creative truth.