They fill in some blanks about what really happened to the Chatwins in Fillory and provide clues that will help Quentin’s old comrades Eliot and Janet, still ruling over Fillory, who have been warned by the ram-god Ember that the land is slowly dying. This involves stealing a suitcase that once belonged to Plum’s great-grandfather Rupert, one of the five Chatwin siblings whose adventures in Fillory were the subject of best-selling books Plum thinks are fictional-until she opens the suitcase to find Rupert’s memoirs. But when his student Plum stumbles across the school’s resident malevolent demon, which Quentin refuses to kill because it was once his lover Alice, they’re both thrown out and forced to take a risky freelance magic job. 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.Deeply satisfying finale to the best-selling fantasy trilogy ( The Magicians, 2009 The Magician King, 2011).Īfter being dethroned and exiled from the magical kingdom of Fillory for helping his friend Julia become a demigoddess, Quentin returns to Earth to teach at his alma mater, Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. But let’s not declare it significant, because it’s not.
And the trilogy, especially this final book, does occasionally reach it. You feel it in certain passages: a huge, whale-size ambition. 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 to earn a spot next to a Lewis or a Tolkien, you need to do that everywhere. He wondered, but he didn’t really care." It’s good stuff. He wondered if he’d remember all this when he was human again. 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. "Jesus, the entire ocean was crisscrossed with a whole lattice of submarine magic. "Here was a great secret: whales were spellcasters," Grossman writes. 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. Lev Grossman himself is certainly capable of greatness. Martin (c’mon, book umpteen!) are redefining the genre every day. Of course, it isn’t-and not just because writers like Patrick Rothfuss (c’mon, book three!) and George R. The entirety of protagonist Quentin Coldwater’s journey is supposed to transcend the familiarity of its particulars. 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. 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). 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. But with Grossman, the comparison is even more unavoidable than usual. White, Le Guin, Feist, Pratchett, Pullman, Alan Moore, and so on, as well as some notable non-fantasists, like the great Evelyn Waugh). Rowling, and just about every other fantasist who ever was (T.
It was literally called "A Short Cut to Mushrooms." Silly hobbits.Ī comparison to Tolkien is inevitable for any fantasy writer-as is a comparison to C. Compare this to, say, Tolkien, who once devoted a whole chapter to finding mushrooms. Much later, another character rebuilds a dying land in eight paragraphs. 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. (Contemporaries, observe: All three Magicians books tap out at around 400 pages. He can weave more swords and sorcery into a few pages than some writers can into a whole goddamn thousand-page book. Grossman, who works by day as the book critic for Time magazine, is enormously talented. But a conclusion to what, exactly? Is the saga a truly great, timeless classic, worthy of shelf space alongside the masters?
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.
WILL THE MAGICIANS SHOW MIRROR THE MAGICIANS LAND SERIES
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.