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The Magician's Land: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy)
The Magician's Land: A Novel (Magicians Trilogy)
Lev Grossman
Viking, 2014
416 pp., 27.95

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Carissa Turner Smith


The Magician's Land

Lev Grossman concludes his trilogy.

"At the heart of many man-made stories of the elves lies, open or concealed, pure or alloyed, the desire for a living, realized sub-creative art, which … is inwardly wholly different from the greed for self-centered power which is the mark of the mere Magician." —J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"

Plentiful have been the reviews and marketing blurbs that have described Lev Grossman's now-complete Magicians trilogy as a mash-up of Harry Potter and Narnia, but for grown-ups. In the first book, The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater finds himself summoned to Brakebills College, which is indeed something like an American Hogwarts for a slightly older set. After graduation, Quentin and his Brakebills buddies discover that the Narnia-esque land of Fillory—which they had believed was only the fictional creation of children's author Christopher Plover—is real, and they journey thence. The true struggles they have to face in Fillory, however, are heartbreak, ennui, depressive brain chemicals, and the usual narcissistic mistakes of young adulthood.

In The Magician's Land, the concluding volume in the trilogy, Quentin is thirty and still trying to find his way. After a brief return to Brakebills to teach (every smart student's dream, especially since he doesn't even have to get a postgraduate degree to do so), he attempts magical heists and, ultimately, world-making before getting drawn into Fillory's apocalyptic drama (and since the book's epigraph is The Last Battle's "Further up and further in!", that's hardly a spoiler). Quentin's bumbling journey to maturity has been the focus of the series from the beginning, but in The Magician King, the trilogy's second volume, Grossman had branched out from Quentin's narrative perspective, giving half of the book to a female character, and with gut-wrenching impact. Here he tries to multiply that success by splitting the novel into four (or five, depending on how you count it) different narrative perspectives, which doesn't allow any of them to be developed in depth. Still, this volume was engrossing enough that I confess to having paid a babysitter so that I could finish reading it.

To a greater extent than the previous installments, The Magician's Land gives the impression that Quentin's story has more than a touch of autobiography. (Am I reading too much into the fact that Quentin's first attempt at making a world is a soundless, sterile, mirror version of the house in which he is living when he casts the spell, and Grossman's first, unsuccessful novel was realistic literary fiction?) From the outset, Grossman's own fantasy world has been hyper-referential and openly engaged with the question of originality. He began writing The Magicians, he has said, to amuse himself during the long wait between books five and six of the Harry Potter series, and this desire to continue dwelling in a more grown-up version of Rowling's universe persists in The Magician's Land.

Take, for example, the library at Brakebills: "a few books in the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act." The "resulting offspring had been either predictably derivative (in fiction) or stunningly boring (non-fiction); hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the most vital. The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren't breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock." Sentient, unruly books? Check. Amusing attempts to administer magic? Check. That chuckle of pure delight over a throwaway detail? All elements of Rowling's best moments. But then there's that deliberate call-out to "derivative" fiction—an element of pointing back at himself that never occurs in Lewis and seldom in Rowling.

Grossman's books may indeed be derivative, but that's one of their strengths rather than a weakness. If fantasies, post-Tolkien, involve the creation of a whole world with its own mythology and language, then the Magicians trilogy isn't intended to be a fantasy. It's more like realistic literary fiction set in someone else's fantasy universe, a borrowed universe that's distorted as if in a funhouse mirror that somehow actually enables you to see the original more clearly. As such, the Magicians trilogy deals more poignantly than most conventionally realistic novels with the challenges of extremely bright young people who have gone to just the right educational institutions (Grossman went to Harvard and Yale, for the record) and still can't figure out what on earth (or in Fillory) to do with their lives. In The Magician's Land, however, Grossman seems to be struggling more with the need to establish himself as a world-creator rather than a world-borrower. Just as the character Quentin is dealing with multiple daddy issues, Grossman himself is contending rather oedipally with the legacy of C. S. Lewis.

It's in his capacity as a careful and engaged reader of Lewis that I appreciate Grossman most, even when I disagree with his interpretation. (For an extra-Magicians example, see his recent Atlantic tribute, in which he gives credit to Lewis for being the Hemingway of fantasy.) Besides working as realistic college and post-college fiction, the Magicians trilogy succeeds as literary criticism in fictional form. Grossman demonstrates both his understanding and appreciation of Lewis repeatedly. When Quentin first read the Fillory books as an eight-year-old, he felt "awe and joy and longing all at once"—a feeling Lewis devotees will recognize as Sehnsucht. (I would be remiss were I not to mention that, in The Magician's Land, these readerly feelings are externalized in a plant that withers and grows again as successive readers experience them. That's right—there is a Sehnsucht plant!). Grossman knows Sehnsucht, but he also continues asking what to do with this emotion when you grow up. He presses on unstable points in the Chronicles of Narnia. What is it that really leads to the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve being barred from Narnia after they reach a certain age? Is it mere age? Innocence? And what is innocence, anyway? How about a child who has been a victim of sexual abuse? Would Aslan expel such a child? Grossman raises these questions in a far more interesting way than those obsessed with the "problem of Susan," yet he gets at some of the same dilemmas regarding innocence and sexuality in Lewis. Grossman is a master reader: it's a shame that, within The Magician's Land, he demeans the very art that sets him apart from many a lesser magician.

In this novel, Grossman asserts a little too loudly and clumsily that true maturity is achieved in the move from reader to writer, a claim even he doesn't seem to believe entirely. He ends up implying that reading-induced Sehnsucht is proper only to childhood—that an adult can look back on it with nostalgia, but should move on to more mature things, like god-killing and world-creating.

Killing a god, in Grossman, lacks the vitriol of a similar plot device in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass. Regrettable and messy as it is, it's just something that has to be done to revivify a dying world. As a side effect, it also frees you from the anxiety of influence. You can fix the world that the old gods (read: authors) neglected, restoring it so it can function without gods at all, and then finally go on to successfully create (that is, author) your own new world. Harold Bloom would approve.

J. R. R. Tolkien would not, of course. Tolkien's view of "sub-creation"—the glory of the Creator's power refracted through those bearing his image—takes the edge off the drive to move from reader to author, for one never becomes The Author. Writing is always, in a way, re-reading of the original creation: it is "derivative" in the noblest sense of the word. As Tolkien writes, "we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker." Tolkien never portrays reading as a childish thing that must be put away. The child's appetite for fairy-stories, he writes, "does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate." Reading well can be every bit as creative as writing, and as difficult as the most intricate magical spell. It can take a lifetime to achieve.

Obviously, no reader who shares Tolkien's Christian view of writing as sub-creation will find The Magician's Land entirely satisfying in its account of what it means to make art. Knowing that Grossman isn't writing from any religious allegiance, I wasn't expecting to be satisfied with that aspect of his trilogy. But I am nonetheless disappointed that the treatment of art in this concluding volume as the "power to enchant the world" doesn't seem to square with Grossman's previous depiction of the grave consequences of overreaching human limitation. In The Magicians and The Magician King, an act of magical hubris usually leads to catastrophic unleashing of chthonic powers. Not so in the last installment. Shakespeare's Prospero gets name-checked in The Magician's Land, as you might expect in a novel largely concerned with the parallels between magic and art: since The Tempest is thought to be Shakespeare's last play, readers have long associated Prospero's final abdication of his magical power with Shakespeare's renunciation of writing. Grossman used Prospero's words—"I'll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, /And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book"—as the epigraph to The Magicians, but in The Magician's Land Prospero is hailed not for his relinquishment of power but for his ability to rule over his own land. There are moments in the novel when characters set aside power that they might inappropriately cling to, but there's no accompanying sense of loss. Every time a character in Grossman's world renounces something, he ends up getting it back one way or another. Without real loss, though, without real death—especially the death to self—there can be no true eucatastrophe.

The eucatastrophe, that "sudden, joyous turn" that Tolkien says is most fully embodied in Christ's resurrection, "does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure," but it does deny "(in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat." The Magician's Land has a happy ending, all right, but it leaves you asking, "Is that all?" To his credit, Grossman understands, as Tolkien does, that neither fantasy nor happy endings are inherently escapist. But an ending in which everything sad comes untrue, in this life, is cheap.

Quentin finally matures in The Magician's Land, a welcome turn for readers who have followed his Bildungsroman. He moves away from self-centered magic (at least to the extent that he can by his own effort), and both he and his author recognize that there are limits to the magic humans can properly exercise. I think it's fair to say that Grossman's man-made story reveals the desire for sub-creation—a magic that can enrich the world without transgressing human limitation—but lacks the worldview to make it a reality.

Carissa Turner Smith is associate professor of English at Charleston Southern University. She has published articles in the journals African American Review, Literature and Belief, and Renascence, as well as in a couple of collections of academic essays on children's and young adult fantasy literature. She's also written for Christ and Pop Culture.

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