The Magicians

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Published a decade ago, The Magicians is an adult fantasy novel simultaneously so clever and so derivative that it has spawned a passionate fandom, a TV show, and--the route through which I arrived at the story-- a graphic novel told from the perspective of Alice. The novel draws from the tropes and traditions of fantasy literature, including Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Arthurian novels of T.H.White. Sometimes these tropes are imaginatively reworked to poke fun at or make commentary on Grossman’s fantasy forbears-- pointing out the often annoyingly ponderous quality of wise rulers in fantasy lands, for instance, or declaring that carrying a wand is, in this iteration of magic-making, “considered slightly embarrassing, like training wheels, or a marital aid” (316). At other points, however, scenes of The Magicians felt starkly derivative, as if they’d been lifted whole-cloth from Harry Potter with the relevant characters swapped out. As protagonist Quentin, for instance, suffers grief while he talks to the mysterious Watcherwoman, the parallels to the scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Harry grieves the loss of Sirius before Dumbledore felt aggravatingly present, and these moments of irritating echo flit throughout the entire book.

Unlike in Harry Potter, however, where Harry’s grief for Sirius feels tender and endless, supported by the character and relationship development done previous to Sirius’ death, Quentin’s grief in The Magicians feels like gold spun out of the straw that is the book’s scant and misogynistic character development. The novel’s central women characters, Alice and Janet, are mostly used as tools to play off one another, sexual objects, and foils who conveniently grow more and less powerful relative to Quentin’s emotional state. This blithely misogynistic attitude should probably come as no surprise in a book which also tosses around racist phrases like “off the reservation,” describes a white character as looking “less like a lone Iroquois warrior and more like an overfed white suburban gangsta” (240), and is ultimately about elite white men and their whining attempts to find happiness and meaning in a world where they have everything.

Subjects this book includes which some readers may be sensitive to: murder, graphic violence, brief mention of child sexual abuse.