The Magicians: Alice's Story

I think it's safe to say that the phenomenon that is Harry Potter is practically inescapable, especially for people coming from a certain generation. I remember the first time I encountered the series: I was around fourteen or so, and an uncle had brought home the first three books for me to read. At the time, no one in the Philippines knew what Harry Potter was, and though I fell in love with Harry and Hogwarts and all the rest, there wasn't anyone I could really talk to about it - until finally, the phenomenon reached our shores, and soon, pretty much everyone was talking about it, too.

Harry Potter did much to revitalize the reading habit, especially amongst young adults - and as a result, threw wide open the floodgates that would pave the way for things like Twilight and, in essence the enormous industry of young-adult fiction. All of a sudden what was once a tiny section of a bookstore suddenly became a marketing goldmine, and pretty much everybody has cashed in.

They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and I suppose in some ways the fact that a large number of Harry Potter-type variants that emerged in the few years after it became a huge hit (but before Twilight) certainly testify to that. But the problem with a lot of literature is that, while it's all right to follow in the footsteps of a trailblazer by taking elements from that trailblazer and using it in one's own work, total and utter imitation does not get one very far at all. After all, there are only so many ways one can take the idea of a secret wizarding school without having other readers look at it askance as a Harry Potter ripoff.

These were my fears when I was recommended Lev Grossman's The Magicians by a colleague at the department. It had been about a good year or so since I last finished rereading the series, and I really was rather convinced that no writer could take the wizarding school concept without me thinking of Harry Potter right from the get-go. But the one recommending The Magicians to me also happens to be a notable Harry Potter scholar, and (naturally) a fan, so I thought, well, if she thinks it's not so bad, I suppose I could do worse than read it.

I am now rather glad I took the time to read it, even if I didn't pick it up at the precise moment it was recommended to me. In fact, the delay was a good thing, as it allowed me to cleanse my mind of all possible Harry Potter prejudice and see the novel for what it is. After all, the novel starts in more or less the same way as Harry Potter: Quentin Coldwater has special powers, and he is selected to attend a secret magic school hidden somewhere in upstate New York. There he makes friends, enemies, and meets a villain he must defeat.

Now, when this was recommended to me, I was told that it was a “Harry Potter on vodka and crack,” and I will admit that I was rather leery of this. I felt that any attempts to give Harry Potter an “edge” was something better left to fan fiction. Fortunately, Grossman is a good-enough writer that, while it's true that my colleague's comparison point to Rowling's series, with the addition of drugs and alcohol, was appropriate, I think she also referenced, in that one statement, the “realness” of the story.

Now, there is no denying that there is a rather fairytale-ish quality to Harry Potter: I think many readers will admit (some freely) that they have wished they could escape to Hogwarts, escape into this parallel universe because the real world is just too boring or too dangerous or just makes them plain unhappy. In the magical world, the reader might, just as Harry Potter did, find acceptance and purpose. Sure, he nearly gets killed on his first year, and it's certainly no fun having a Dark Lord on one's tail, but those are just the attendant hazards of entering a magical world. Everything else - spellcasting and Quidditch and friends and magic - makes up for it.

In many ways, these same sentiments are mirrored by the main character of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater. He wishes to escape his mundane, boring, complicated world, initially by desiring to go to the land of Fillory (a land described in a series of Narnia-esque novels he read as a child), and then later on by going to Brakebills (the magic school hidden in upstate New York) and learning magic. For a while, everything seems to go well for him: he learns a lot of magic at the school, and gets rather good at quite a bit of it. He even manages to get himself a girlfriend. But then he realizes that what he has is really actually rather hollow, that he is unhappy with what he has. But a discovery by an old school friend (of a sort) then leads him to his wildest dreams: to enter Fillory, and there go on an adventure like none other.

At this point, the reader expects Quentin and his friends to go a-questing to save Fillory, and they do - just not in the way Lewis or even Tolkien portrayed it. In fact, a lot of what's portrayed in the book, particularly when referenced to Narnia and Harry Potter, just doesn't seem quite right. And that “something wrong” can be summarized in one word: reality.

What Grossman has accomplished here is take all the idealism of the Narnia books and Harry Potter books and rip it out of the fabric of the stories. The magical world, then, is no longer a place where one goes to escape, because it's pretty much like the real world, except maybe far, far more dangerous precisely because it is magical. While there are indeed penalties for doing dark magic or being involved with evil, both in Narnia and Harry Potter, in The Magicians magic is neither good nor bad - it's about how you use it. And sometimes, even when one thinks one uses it for good, it often turns out that, no matter what one's intentions might be, someone, somewhere, suffers for that casting. It's simple physics: action, equal reaction. But since magic is well beyond normal physics, the application of that specific Newtonian law tends to end in strange, dangerous - and often heartbreaking - results.

No wrong deed goes unpunished, and more often than not, no good deed does, either.

Quentin is a classic example of this result. He just wants to go to Fillory and escape his dreary, mundane existence - what could be so wrong with that? Everyone wants to escape. But in doing so, Quentin realizes - too late, unfortunately, for his lady-love, Alice (who sacrifices herself at the end to save him and the rest of their friends) - that he can really never escape himself, and if he's ever going to be truly happy, then he must learn to live with himself. Only then will he be able to find his place in the world - regardless of where that world might be. But his actions before that realization create a large mess of his life. There is some good in it, true, but there's a lot that's bad, too.

If any of this is beginning to sound depressingly familiar, that should come as no surprise. This is what happens when one takes away that veil of idealism over the magical world (whatever it might be: Middle-Earth or Narnia or Hogwarts) and applies the cold, hard eye of reality to it - as it probably should be, anyway. Just because there is magic in a world does not mean that the world will be any happier or less complicated than a world without magic. Likely magic will just complicate matters.

So where does the vodka and crack come in? Well, the characters do seem to consume a lot of it, both within the school and later on outside of it. To be fair, the lush of Quentin's group of friends, Eliot, has very fine tastes and is a bit of a wine connoisseur, but still. The characters are not shown actually using drugs, but the narration says they do so, off-screen, as it were. And this, I think, makes sense, given that the magical school of the novel is more like a university than a high school, with the first-years being around seventeen or so.

While I'm sure all of the above sounds depressing, if not outright objectionable, I will say that they are the primary reasons why I enjoyed the novel in the first place. While I really, truly appreciate the idealism of Rowling and Lewis's works, I also appreciate Grossman's attempt to throw a cold bucket of water into his readers' collective faces - most of whom would have walked into this novel expecting it to have the same idealism as Rowling and Lewis - to remind them that there is such a thing was reality, and while good things, like miracles, happen in reality, a lot more happens that isn't quite so nice, either. It's rather like reading the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales after seeing their Disney versions first: a bit of a shock, but for the right person, a reasonably enjoyable one.

While I found this novel enjoyable enough to read, for the reasons I mentioned above, I do advise caution. The Magicians can be rather depressing because of the absence of idealism (in fact, it's about the destruction of idealism), but if the reader is in the right frame of mind, it's really a rather good read. Just be prepared to look at the world with a cynical eye for a few hours or days; it seems rather unavoidable.