The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, an Actual Review

I don't think I have ever been this conflicted with a book before.  I certainly do not regret reading it, I even enjoyed it, but it did not live up to it's own built in expectations, much less those of it's rather extreme reviews, both good and bad.  It is good, but fails to be great.  It is fantastic, and yet steeped in the mundane.  It is filled with worked over archetypes transformed to the point where they have become familiar again.   

If you are coming to this book in search of well constructed magical theory you will not find it.  Most of the best concepts, such as the Neitherlands are intentionally derivative.  If you are looking for a fun, light read, you will not find it here.  While the prose is friendly, the characters are not, and they do not strive to engage you.  If you are looking for something with a little modern first world catharsis mixed in with your fantasy, you most certainly have found the book you are looking for.  

Like any good fantasy novel the tome is broken into internal books, I though IV.  I'm going to avoid spoilers, but I am going to break them down in general terms.

Book I

Lev Grossman borrows from C.S. Lewis, Bret Easton Ellis, J.K. Rowling, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and T.H. White.  He doesn't hide this; he even comes right out and lists most of them on the Tor website.  The book is filled with little allusions and nods to literature, video games, and even webcomics.  It's not just a matter of a few specific references tossed in there for the fans, the whole book is essentially a deconstruction of the most popular aspects of the fantasy genre and filtered through the most dysfunctional character archetypes modern American literature has to offer.  There are some really original concepts, but these are interspersed among classically constructed plot elements that have the result of being a tad predictable, in a comfortable sort of way.  


One of the books best features is the honesty in which magic is handled.  Magic is barely understood, a powerful crazy force that only the extraordinary can wield.  At the beginning of this tale our protagonist learns what makes him different from the rest of the world, what makes him different from most every other genius and why he has the chance to go to a school that only accepts twenty students a year to study a field the vast majority of humanity does not even know exists.

"The reasons why most people can't do magic? Well." Elliot held up a long thin finger. "One it's very had and they're not smart enough.  Two, it's very hard and they are not miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to do it right. Three, they lack the guidance and mentorship provided by the startlingly charismatic faculty of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, and four the lack the tough starchy moral fiber necessary to wield awesome magical energies calmly and responsibly."And five" - he stuck up his thumb - "some people have all that suff and they still can't do it.  Nobody knows why. they say the words, wave their armsa, and nothing happens. Poor bastards. But that's not us. We're the lucky ones. We have it.  Whatever it is."

"I don't know that I have the moral fiber one."

"I don't either.  I think that one's optional, actually."

Magical theory is rarely discussed in concrete terms.  But we know it is hard.  It's string theory difficult, and ever changing.  It's learning to play the cello while calculating the movement of astral bodies, while reciting Shakespeare backwards in Flemish to the tune of Working man.  You have to be Geddy Lee and Heisenberg at the same time.  There is some stress involved, which is washed away with copious amounts of alcohol and sex.  They may be wizards in the making, but they are still teenage kids with raging hormones and insecurities, and everyone wants what they cannot have.   They commit petty and stupid pranks.  One such stupid prank has unforeseen consequences and as a result something magical and horrible enters their world and eats a child alive.  Our protagonist did this.  His pettiness killed a girl.  No one knows but him.  Eventually, through this tragedy, rigorous academic discipline, and time spent in the Antarctic our little band of mages graduates. Their dean, Professor Fogg has something different to say on the nature of magic, now that they are to be set loose in the world.

"I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may.  What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical question territory now anyway.  He spoke more softly.  "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good?  is it because you're special?
Maybe. Who knows.  But I'll tell you something.  I think you're magicians because you're unhappy.  A magician is strong because he feels pain.  He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what do you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than other.  His wound is his strength.
"Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you have found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth.  You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you."

He could be talking about art, music, writing, or medicine.  Magic, for all the wonder it should offer, is just a metaphor for will,  even in their magical world.  Unfortunately, for all of these characters for many people that metaphor is not enough to live on.

The largest portion of the novel takes place in Brakebills.  Here we get to meet the characters:

Quentin - the protagonist whose story we learn through third person limited omniscient narration that makes no bones about how unlikable he really is.  He is easily one of the most intelligent kids in Brooklyn, born to parents who obviously have money, given the best opportunities and is hung up on the girl he can't have because his best friend has her. So of course he just spends his life sulking because he did not get the girl.  He is our Harry Potter analogue, via Clay from Less than Zero.  It's not a perfect analogue, but you get it. He has the perfect life, but he wants more.

Alice - sullen, shy, beautiful Alice.  She is smarter than everyone, from a magical family, studious, brilliant, heavy breasted (this comes up several times) and so much more than her mousy exterior shows. She is Hermione of course, but reworked to be a sort of goth fantasy.

Elliot - the urbane homosexual who escaped his tawdry existence in Oregon to find himself to be a fabulous magician.  I mean, fabulous.  He loathes himself, loves himself, destroys himself and pampers himself.  Elliot is all about himself, until of course it comes to sexual satisfaction, then he is a total bottom.  He is an alcoholic, a sensate, a epicurean nihilist.  He is pretty much every Robert Downy Jr. character before Tony Stark.

Janet - the self possessed A-Lister who deigns to lead her lessers to greater heights.  She is pretty, smart, cool, and of course in love with the gay guy.  She has to control everything around her and she does it through willpower and personality.  She has to have everything and she does this through sex and guilt.  She is a vampire.

Josh - In any other world Josh might have been brilliant.  In this world he just gets by.  He's overweight, obsessed with sex. He constantly exudes prepubescent obsene humor and exuberance, and just insn't that great a wizard.  He is a simple guy.  He wants to get laid, have a beer, and have a good time.  He is every chubby frat boy you ever saw in a movie.

These are your heroes, such as they are.  This is no complaint.  These archetypes work.  We've met them all before, we know them.  They are familiar to us because on some level we have met them in our real lives.  We have been them.

Book II

New York, New York.  Post college.  Thanks to the magical community they have all the money they could ever want.  They could do nearly anything.  Magicians insert themselves into politics, medicine, and business.  They do great, secret works to protect humanity.  They explore the grand mysteriess of science with tools no scientist ever could.  Not our heroes though.  No.  They have better plans.  More self indulgent, indolent plans.  Despite the magical communities best wishes otherwise, the wielders of magic are still very much human, weak, broken, damaged and hurt.  They are petty, lustful, vain and utterly, irredeemably human. Magic does not allow them to transcend their natures, it just gives them different tools to play with.  The same old human vices hold true.  The same old betrayals.    Nothing lasts forever, least of all happiness.  On the morning after a deep betrayal, after the callous breaking of a heart something amazing happens.  They learn that the fairy tale is real.  Fillory, this world's literary equivalent of Narnia, is real.  It's real and they have the tool to go there.

Book III

http://www.emberstomb.com/

Fillory.  It is Narnia in so many ways.  Grossman doesn't conceal this fact at any point.  It is filled with fauns, talking trees, dainty bears drinking peach schnapps, and sword wielding bunnies.  It's a more brutal Narnia than those first books, but it is recognizable.  Grossman also slips in a few Dungeons and Dragons references in here, obviously and without irony.  Prismatic Spray, Magic Missile, an intellect devourer, and even the brand name itself, in distinct font to let us all know he really does mean, Dungeons and Dragons.   They are, quite literally, living the dream.  Of course, it is tainted by their petty carnal betrayals.  They are given the gift of experiencing something very few, even among the rarefied strata of magical society they exist in, have seen. In devolves quickly into their usual backbiting, orgiastic displays of sniping and pettiness.  There is a real hero among them.  The evil is vanquished.  The quest is completed.  None of it matters.  Really, to them, none of it matters.

Book IV 
There and Back Again. I'm not going to talk about this section of the novel, except to say that is one of the longest denouements that I have read, and just as important to this work as the Scouring of the Shire from "The Lord of the Rings".  Quentin is no Bilbo, certainly no Frodo, but his story is worthwhile nonetheless.

Chronicle of the Raven, or Jennifer's Shadow

IMDB Entry for Chronicle of the Raven, or Jennifer’s Shadow

Production Blog for the Movie

I can’t even tell you why I chose this movie, mostly I think it had Gina Phillips in it, and since Jeepers Creepers I have been hoping she would make a fantastic movie.  Still hasn’t happened, and I guess at this point she probably won’t.  I actually thought it was just called “The Raven” until it started, had I realized it had the word “chronicle” in the title I would never have willingly watched it.  I’ll refrain from a rant on just how overexposed that word is in all the various fantasy / sci-fi subgenres.  I have to assume that Chronicle of the Raven was deemed more likely to gather attention than the non descript Jennifer’s Shadow.

The film starts in an obviously haunted house with a woman in a night shirt trying her best to escape her raven stalkers.  This predictably moves out to show the house again with her screams in the background.  This leads us to a pretty decent title sequence of Gina Phillips in an old fashioned taxi rolling down an obviously foreign boulevard, one that feels like Spain, but turns out is somewhere in South America.  It is shot in a close up style reminiscent of the late seventies, interspersing black title cards with close ups of the wheels, Gina Phillps’ lips, the car, etc.  This is about as good as the movie gets.  It feels like the whole thing is shot on video, using dated equipment, possibly with the intention of capturing the feel of the seventies.  I’m really not sue if this choice is nostalgia, artistic vision, or merely budget.  The Netflix version is also in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and I didn’t see anything that led me to believe it was adapted to pan and scan, it actually looks like it was shot in that format.

We get a tour of the house and the main cast in the first couple of minutes.  We meet the pretty boy friend of the family, who seems to be a lawyer or in some way attached in a business capacity.  He tells us that the sister died of the same mysterious illness as her parents.  We meet her Aunt Emma, nearly unable to speak or walk, and bound to a wheelchair.  We see a lovely painting of Mary Ellen, the grandmother, a depiction Faye Dunaway in her prime.  When we finally meet the woman herself she is in the mausoleum incanting some prayer over the casket of the dead sister.  The most enlightening part of the scene:

            Mary Ellen:     How did you know?

            Jennifer:          The lawyers contacted me.

            Mary Ellen:     Lawyers, I have no use for them.

So, her beloved grandmother did not even bother to tell her that her sister died, and acted like a bitch that she ever found out.  Gina Phillips character Jennifer has come to claim her inheritance from her sister, recently deceased from some unknown wasting disease. Mary Ellen will hear nothing of it.  She just cannot bear to discuss selling the house.  She feigns illness and retires to her chambers.  This leaves Jennifer to wander the house, eventually finding some pretty disturbing Conte crayon paintings of ravens and blood.  The most disturbing of which shows blood pouring out from the female form’s thighs with ravens supping on the discharge. 

Mary Ellen is obviously insane; enough to lock Jennifer in her room that night where she has nightmares of being eaten by a raven.

  

The next morning there is some family drama because Gina, who lives in the States and is apparently an actress, wants to sell the house.  Her grandmother, who as I said is insane, demands that nothing change.  This all comes across rather flatly, with Faye Dunaway relying on her crazy eyes and Gina Phillips just looking pouty.    

The coolest character is introduced as a potential buyer of the house, an older Spanish speaking gentleman who only comes as a ruse to tell Jennifer that she is in great danger.  We eventually learn he was once a doctor, but has chosen “a more gratifying profession”.   He asks her about the birds and eventually her dreams, she treats him like a madman, and kicks him out.  Undeterred he offers to help her anyway, inviting her to find him at the cemetery, the only place “they cannot hear (them)”.   

The dreams continue to see her eaten alive by ravens and suddenly Jennifer is rushed off to the hospital, where she is diagnosed with the same mysterious, unexplained disease as her sister, one that apparently means she is losing her organs, as if they were being eaten from within.  Like the birds.  Woooo big stretch there guys.

Eventually she has to seek out the old doctor, and we get some glimpses into a pretty decent little mythology called the Malam Rites, where in  old forgotten gods, called the Malam can be used to grant power and immortality, at a cost of course. We learn that the victims are never allowed to die.  They lay, unmoving, even after death, an eternal meal for the Malam.  This is what happened to Jennifer’s sister, and her parents.  It is what turned the good doctor to some kind of South American Van Helsing.  This eventually leads us to a sort of showdown between the old man, Jennifer and the malam itself, which is a bird.  That’s right, just a bird.  No crazy half bird half man thing.  No demon bird., just a little black raven.  Faye Dunaway is significantly scarier than the monster behind it all.  This is done by sanctifying the house and declaring it a cemetery.  This is enough to turn the malam aside, it seems. 

Of course, now we have to go confront the real villain, Mary Ellen., the kindly old psychotic that has been feeding her bird gods to stay eternally creepy looking.  The acting in this scene, especially from Dunaway, is really melodramatic.  Jennifer actually locks her grandmother into a coffin and tosses the bitch into the furnace, where Mary Ellen proclaims that Jennifer will never be free of her.  The denounment leaves us watching Jennifer lock the place up, saying a prayer to her dead sister and leaving with her Spanish boy toy, whose name is apparently Roberto.  The single worst line of the movie comes now.  “Nevermore,” whispered just before she drives off to get laid.  Seriously, nevermore? 

The sex scene is incredibly tame, by the way.  Lots of sheets rustling and tender kisses.  Of course she dreams again, of birds and them eating their way out of her this time.  She dies, blood pouring out between her thighs, just like in the art earlier in the movie. 

So, here we are seeing through Jennifer’s eyes, looking up, unmoving, supposedly dead as that bitch Mary Ellen says the same damn prayer from when we first met her.  Fuck!  Bitch won!

This movie never quite found it's way.  The acting is lame all around.  The sets are basic and predictable.  The mythology could have been cool, but instead feels half conceived and badly executed.  The hero is unsympathetic, the villain dialed in, and the Van Helsing analog just never quite works.  Despite their simplicity the effects are probably one of the better features.  They do not go overboard, instead focussed on giving the viewer an impression rather than concrete details.  Camera work is solid, actually all around.  The music is well executed, but again predictable, a slow sonorous violin and cello theme that drones on.  It is a decidedly two star movie.  Not bad enough to really entertain, and not good enough to entertain either.    

Critiquing the Critique, The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I first heard of "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman on a video trailer for the new Sword and Laser show and bookclub hosted by Veronica Belmont. I've never done the bookclub thing and thought this might be amusing. 

My first step is to check Amazon and see if it is worthwhile to buy it for the Kindle.  I'm currently umemployed, so I am hoping there is a sale.  No luck.  Half Priced Books it shall be, but while on Amazon's site I decide to look over some reviews.  While the ratings are high I find the reviews troubling, and get the impression I won't actually care for the book.  Still, I love to hate sometimes, so I commit myself to finishing the book even though the positive reviews are turning me off.  

Let's examine one of these reviews.  

The reviewer in question, the fantastically named Theoden Humphries starts out with a premise that I find limiting.  “Stop thinking this is a fantasy book,” he commands, and proceeds to tell us why this book is literature not fantasy.  Literature is a definite, defineable, and concrete thing it seems and is not interdependent of genre.  Personally, I think most written works do not rise to any great level that must be lauded for particular literary worth, and this applies to general fiction, fantasy, horror, science fiction, mysteries, romances, and non fiction.  The rarity of a work really stretching beyond the diverting or educational is rare.  Mr. Humphries seems to believe that being fantasy makes this potential even less likely. 

“I won't say that this is a great book, on par with "Of Mice and Men" and "Catcher in the Rye" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," but I will say that it is closer to those than it is to "The Hobbit" or the Xanth books. If you are a fan of literature, of thinking about your reading, then you must get this book, especially if you enjoy fantasy. If you are just looking for an escape, look elsewhere -- because this is not a fantasy. Or at least, it isn't only a fantasy. It's a wonder.”

Mr. Humphries conclusion left me biased against the book, through no fault of Lev Grossman's.  I love each of the books that the author calls great, but he contrasts their qualities to the Xanth series and "The Hobbit"; one of which was a self parodying pun filled diversion, and the other which was written for children and was the basis of modern fantasy. "Of Mice and Men" dealt with the cruelty of the human condition in stark powerful terms, set against the desolation and misery of the great depression.  "Catcher in the Rye" examined the wild, crazy journey of adolescence, rebellion, sex and angst in a new and fresh way.  It told the story of growing up honestly with eyes wide open.  “To Kill A Mockingbird” is a story of social injustice, racism, honor and hope.  These three books are very different, told in completely different styles, with their authors employing varying techniques, language and plot devices.  They are not similar works, but Mr. Humphries basically implies that they are inherently superior works.  I do not disagree, but by contrasting them with the Xanth novels and the Hobbit he has categorically stated that these two works are inherently inferior.   With respect to Piers Anthony, I agree in the case of Xanth but they were amusing and beloved by many, and so succeeded in their goals.  "The Hobbit", however, is not by most opinions, inherently inferior.  Indeed, it is one of the most influential and important works of the 20^th century.  Influence alone is not enough to warrant any great respect, one may look at all the supernatural themed young adult fantasy Twilight clones as proof of that.  No, "The Hobbit" is a coming of age story, or rather the telling of a man becoming a man finally.  It deals with honor and friendship, the comforts of home and the dangers of adventure.  It is about self actualization, told for children.  It was written for children but helped adults find their way, as well.  It was written for a more innocent time, but it has spoken to every generation since.  Mr. Humphries compares oranges, rye whiskey, sweet tea, bad jokes and hearty biscuits and claims that the first three are all brilliant, and the last two are terrible.  These things are not alike, not quantifiably better or worse and I just don't buy into his assertions.  Literature is a goal to achieve and a concept to explore, and if it must be used as a label I cannot agree that fantasy is intrinsically less worthy of the appellation.   As a result, I came to this novel with a bit of a bias.

So far, it has exceeded my expectations.  I hope the trend continues, but this comic gives me cause for concern.  Still, keeping an open mind.  There are some really good elements in these first chapters.  

Lev Grossman's Page

Amazon Page