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What are we to make of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy? Its final installment, The Magician’s Land, came out in August, and reviews glowed bright, almost embarrassingly so: They’re calling it the perfect conclusion to one of the great fantasy series of our time. (Don’t ask me who “they” is. They! The ancient beings who live underground and make these sorts of proclamations.) That first part is hard to dispute—it is a pretty perfect conclusion. But a conclusion to what, exactly? Is the saga a truly great, timeless classic, worthy of shelf space alongside the masters?
Not exactly.
Grossman, who works by day as the book critic for Time magazine, is enormously talented. He can weave more swords and sorcery into a few pages than some writers can into a whole goddamn thousand-page book. (Contemporaries, observe: All three Magicians books tap out at around 400 pages. So you see, it is possible.) There’s a scene in the first half of The Magician’s Land where a senior at the Brakebills school for magic goes down a wrong corridor and travels to other times and dimensions, encounters a demon in a mirror, trips multiple alarms, and gets herself expelled—all in a dozen pages. Much later, another character rebuilds a dying land in eight paragraphs. Compare this to, say, Tolkien, who once devoted a whole chapter to finding mushrooms. It was literally called “A Short Cut to Mushrooms.” Silly hobbits.
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A comparison to Tolkien is inevitable for any fantasy writer—as is a comparison to C. S. Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and just about every other fantasist who ever was (T. H. White, Le Guin, Feist, Pratchett, Pullman, Alan Moore, and so on, as well as some notable non-fantasists, like the great Evelyn Waugh). But with Grossman, the comparison is even more unavoidable than usual. If the references to a school for magic and a mystical land didn’t already tip you off, Grossman’s trilogy plays as an epic riff on the entire genre. And just in case you still don’t get it, he drops allusions to these works throughout, from specific (Rowling’s “muggles,” for instance) to structural (boy-wizard trope, Lewis’s Narnia). The goal, it seems, is to be so derivative, so plagiaristic in its parts, that their sum somehow circles back in an Ouroboros of meta-magic and achieves a kind of renewed originality. The entirety of protagonist Quentin Coldwater’s journey is supposed to transcend the familiarity of its particulars.
You should read these books. Really. They’re very good. But are they significant? Do we want future generations to consider this series a masterpiece of ours?
The answer, at least to me, is no. Fantasy is ultimately about invention—pushing the imagination so far it threatens to snap. And those littler fissures, those breaks with reality, is where magic is born. Not enough of the Magicians trilogy lives and grows in those weird cracks; too little of it is truly inventive. In the end, it basically amounts to a redrawing of Narnia in crazy colors.
Yes, one can allude to and riff on what’s come before. When it’s done well, and respectfully, it’s called satire. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is one such example: a flat disc rotating on the backs of four elephants balancing on the shell of a giant turtle god. Pratchett didn’t invent the World Turtle myth, but he exploited it for his (at the time, alarmingly original) satirical aims, subverting the conventions and norms of fantasy by setting them in a ridiculous place. Grossman’s Fillory, we’re not surprised to learn, is also flat, and sits atop a stack of—wait for it—giant turtles. Whether that’s Pratchett’s influence or Dr. Seuss’s, it almost feels like satirizing satire, and that’s so meta it’s not even funny. In that way, Magicians really is a perfect series for our time, since postmodernism is defined by that kind of pastiche and self-reflexivity. But it’s a bit depressing if that’s the best we can contribute to the fantasy canon.
Of course, it isn’t—and not just because writers like Patrick Rothfuss (c’mon, book three!) and George R. R. Martin (c’mon, book umpteen!) are redefining the genre every day. Lev Grossman himself is certainly capable of greatness. A Magician’s Land sequence in which two magicians transform themselves into whales is exactly that: rich, imaginative fantasy that makes us consider our own world in a different way. “Here was a great secret: whales were spellcasters,” Grossman writes. “Jesus, the entire ocean was crisscrossed with a whole lattice of submarine magic. Most of the spells took multiple whales to cast, and were designed to bend and herd large clouds of krill, and occasionally to reinforce the integrity of large ice shelves. He wondered if he’d remember all this when he was human again. He wondered, but he didn’t really care.” It’s good stuff. But to earn a spot next to a Lewis or a Tolkien, you need to do that everywhere.
Some will argue this misses the point, that Grossman, by being so obvious with his references, isn’t trying to write a great, original work. But of course he is. You feel it in certain passages: a huge, whale-size ambition. And the trilogy, especially this final book, does occasionally reach it. But let’s not declare it significant, because it’s not. There’s always the distracting knowledge that it stands on the shoulders of the old masters—like a fantasy world wobbling precariously on a stack of giant turtles.
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