Lev Grossman’s The Magician King is coming!!

by Jesse

I am, for the first time since The Deathly Hallows, quite excited about a book. In two days, the too-friendly sales assistant at Dymocks will hand me my copy of Lev Grossman’s new novel The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 fantasy novel The Magicians, which was a bestseller in the U.S. but mostly ignored here in Australia. Many people called The Magicians “Harry Potter for adults”, which was . . . pretty not accurate. Harry Potter is good, while The Magicians is shit. But I still love it. It’s loveable shit. It’s the kind of shit you can rub into your eyes, or squeeze into your mouth, and feel quite sustained.

The Magicians is about Quentin, a young man on his way to Harvard or Yale when he finds himself instead going to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, where he learns to do magic and do the sex and all sorts of adult activities.

I can’t really decide whether I like it. It’s the sort of book you don’t want to put down, which is good, however if you don’t want to put it down it’s for two reasons: because it’s nice to escape into the fantasy world, and because it’s written simply. Which is all fine, but the fantasy world of the novel, to begin with, is not really original. The first half of the novel is basically Harry Potter and then half way through it becomes Narnia. I’m not exaggerating here. It’s pretty much plagiarism. And then, well, the writing isn’t great either. The book is an excellent page-turner, and it has some vivid images, but overall it’s written fairly lazily. Look, I’ll open the book at a random couple of sentences:

That was how Quentin’s first month at Brakebills South went. The spells changed, and the Circumstances were different, but the room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.

There’s a nice little metaphor there, in “wastelands of repetition”, although can repetition really be described as a wasteland? When someone says “wasteland”, I think of the opposite of repetition. I think of a rubbish tip full of needles and stuffed toys and all sorts of objects, but no two of them are alike. It’s not repetition. And furthermore, it isn’t immediately clear what exactly are supposed to be wastelands. I guess it’s the “days” — the “days” are wastelands — but it’s not clear because rather than simply saying “the days were wastelands”, the author has decided to construct his sentence so that the “days” and the “wastelands” are separated by three, needless “always”es, a colon and three long adjectives (“empty, relentless, interminable”), which don’t sound euphonious at all, and which don’t really add that much to the sentence anyway. So the image of the days being wastelands definitely gets lost somewhere, and thus it just becomes a regular sentence. Why, novelist, why? Well, the thing is, it’s not really a good metaphor anyway. The author doesn’t want to realise this fact, so he shoves a bunch of cartilage into the sentence to avoid it from scraping against itself.

Obviously this isn’t a particularly bad sentence, by the book’s standards. Probably it is perfectly average; I opened to it at random.

And yes, it is definitely a valid thing to do to flip to a random sentence and judge a book based on that. For example, I’ll open up to a random sentence in Orwell’s 1984. And this is what I get:

Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room — a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face.

I mean, Jesus. Honestly I chose this sentence at random, but just look at the beauty of it. Firstly it’s shorter, but it says so much more. In the simple, fresh word “threading”, we get an image of a cotton thread, weaving in and out of fabric, just as Parsons weaves in and out of tables and people in the refectory. These is an assonance in “fair hair” and an alliteration in “froglike face” — not to mention a vivid simile. It’s just so much clearer.

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare current fantasy literature to Orwell. But all I’m saying is that, if a book is good, you should be able to open it up to any sentence and prove it. You can’t with The Magicians.

So I guess I will conclude here by saying that The Magicians is lovely, if trashy, fantasy.

However, there is one more thing. Perhaps it is also unfair of me to judge a writer based on his personal life, but I will do it anyway, with great amusement. Because all the characters in The Magicians have such lovely names — Quentin, Alice, Eliot, Josh, Janet — okay, not “lovely”, but simple and elegant. What is not simple and elegant is what the author named his own son: Halcyon. Fucking Halcyon. Apart from its eminent unpronouncability, it’s just a stupid fucking name which clearly only exists because the parents have a need to be constantly recognised as cool and unique and original. Parents, if you want your child to be a unique inividual, then raise him that way. Don’t name him . . . Halcyon. That’s just a kick in his tiny genitals.

And I mean, oh, god, imagine what it’ll be shortenened to.

Hal.

Hal.

As in the dad from Malcolm in the Middle.

Said in the whiny voice of the mother.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal.