The Magicians & The Magician King

AUTHOR: Les Grossman
PUBLISHED: 2010 and 2011.  Dang, dude works fast.
GENRE: Fantasy

I have something embarrassing to admit: I read these books in the wrong order.  What’s worse, I was 380 pages into The Magician King before I realized that it was a sequel, and even then it took a quick book jacket check to confirm it.  It is a testament to the quality of the writing that the second book stood pretty soundly on its own.  A skipping timeline helped too.*  But we’ll get to that later. 

The Magicians begins with Quentin Coldwater, a rather depressed young man.  This teenaged Brooklynite spends a good portion of his time trailing his best friend James and thinking about how much he loves James’s girlfriend Julia and how really, really unhappy he is.  About the only thing that brings him any joy is his magic – making coins disappear and cards shuffle on their own.  Then, quite suddenly, he’s in upstate New York at a very strange place taking a very strange test with some very strange professors.**  This strange place is Brakebills.  It’s a magical college, and Quentin’s about to make it home. 

To keep going would give away too much plot line of either book.  It’s too finely interwoven to try and tease out anything else.  It’s a hardcore mixture of reality and fantasy – and not just the plotline, but the language.  Grossman uses a familiar tone and slang even in the most fantastical of conversations and yet, somehow, it doesn’t sound weird.  This is reality for these kids.  It involves spells and incantations and the Beast breaking into the middle of calculus class and eating a student, but it also involves malaise and difficulties at home and the eternal question of the graduating college student: what the hell am I going to do now.  Quentin and his friends just end up with an answer that’s a little different.

The first book seemed to drag at the end, but that might have had more to do with the fact that I already knew who lived and who died.  (Whoops!  Spoiler.  Someone dies eventually.)  The second book moves back and forth through the narrative much more than the first, filling in the alternate back story for one of the characters who didn’t really feature in the first book.  After all that back story, I couldn’t help but spend the first book wondering where she was***.  In a way, I’m somewhat unqualified to review these books, given my backward reading of them.  I can’t say that any of my complaints carry any weight if one, you know, reads the first one first.  What I do know if that I’m quite happy I starting reading them after both were published.  If I had had to wait to see what happened, I would have been pissed.  So I guess I should be pleased with how I stumbled on them after all.

LENGTH: 416 pages and… 416 pages!  Impressive.

MAINSTREAM OR NOT: No.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes.  The writing shouldn’t work – it plays so fast and loose between high fantasy and street slang – but somehow it does.  Just read it in the right order, would ya?

*The truth is, with the skipping timeline, I just kept assuming that all those vague references to lost characters would be explained at the end.  Then the end was there and it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.  That’s when I looked at the inside front book cover and thought, Oh.  Damn.  I have to go back to the library.

**This seems to be the view of many a New York Borough resident.  The five boroughs? Reality.  Upstate New York? A strange, strange land! Everyone else? The neitherworld.    

***If I was smart I would have known that they wouldn’t have needed all the back story in the second book if she was discussed in the first, but sometimes you just get an idea stuck in your head, you know?