Review: The Magician King

by Jesse

Hey guys. Hey, you know I was joking, right, when my review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was so unconstructively negative that I ended up just taking the piss out of the author’s baby? Good. I thought so. Actually I loved The Magicians. I loved it so much that I wagged school today because the sequel, which is called The Magician King, “came out” — although I later learned that in fact today is the American release date, and the Australian one is in like two months. When I found this out I was scared, angry, and confused. When you lose a loved one, it’s the little things that get you: realising you’ve set a place for them at the dinner table; picking up the phone to call them only to realise that you can’t. I keep picking up my pen and notebook to write a review of The Magician King, and always I collapse, immediately, into tears, thinking, “I just have to write this review.”

Except the only part of The Magician King that I’ve read is the first paragraph, online. Oh well, it’s somewhere to start. The novel begins with this promising sentence:

Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless.

With white socks named Dauntless.

Wait, what? The white socks are named Dauntless? Why are the horse’s socks named anything at all? Who gives names to their socks, let alone to their horse’s socks? And if you are going to name your horse’s socks, and you love your horse’s socks enough to name them Dauntless, then why would you name them all Dauntless, collectively? That’s what the author is saying, right?

Oh, I’m sorry, the horse is named Dauntless, you say. Oh, yes, of course, I was being silly. Some sentences don’t need unambiguous grammar, because the sentence can only mean one thing logically. Like, if I say, “Walking down the street, the library came into view,” it is clear that I am walking down the street, and not the library (even though that’s what the sentence says), because the alternative is ridiculous. But in the case of the first sentence in The Magician King, even that flimsy argument doesn’t hold up, because, if you didn’t notice, this is a book in which horses wear socks. Have you ever seen a horse wear socks? Because I haven’t. Horses have no need for socks. If we’re just supposed to accept, in the space of a single sentence, that horses wear socks, but also we’re supposed to rule out the possibility that socks could have names, then I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this book will SURELY BE THE DEATH OF US ALL.

The first sentence is probably the most important one in a book. If, in the whole two years of writing The Magician King and poring, as all authors do, over the first paragraph, the author didn’t spot an obvious dangling modifier, then he is a terrible writer who will SURELY BE THE DEATH OF US ALL. But it’s worse than that. Nobody cares about grammar when the writing is boring to begin with, and the author can’t even come up with a better verb than rode. Reader, when I say, “Quentin rode a horse,” what image do you get? Almost no image at all, except for the fact that the man is on top of, rather than below, the horse. What if I say that Quentin “leaned back on the reigns of his horse,” that he “bobbed lightly on his horse,” that he “streamlined his body against his horse’s”? One specific word is worth a dozen vague, sissy sentences like Quentin rode a horse. So a good start!

The book continues:

He wore black leather boots up to his knees, different-colored stockings, and a long navy-blue topcoat that was richly embroidered with seed pearls and silver thread.

Apart from the clichéd phrase “richly embroidered” (a quick Google of the two words in quotation marks gives 430 000 results), there is something very wrong with this sentence. Can you guess? It’s the word “different-coloured”. How fucking vague can you get? Would you be satisfied if I told you that I had a number of ‘different-sounding’ opinions on this novel, and left the matter at that? Different-coloured could mean anything from “brown and a slightly different shade of brown” to “red and blue”. And even that’s assuming that he means “different-coloured from each other”, but he could well mean “different-coloured from black”, since he says that the “boots” were “black” and the “stockings” were “different-coloured”. I don’t like how much this author leaves to our imagination — everything. As a rule, the only time the word different-coloured, or different-sounding or different-smelling for that matter, would be of any use whatsoever would be to clarify an already ambiguous sentence in which it is unclear whether a group of things are different from each other or the same as each other. What an awfully mangled sentence that would have to be, though. In fact, I can only think of one example, in all the history of writing, where that would be the case, and that comes, of course, from The Magician King itself:

Quentin rode a gray horse with different-named white socks called Dauntless.

Etc.

Advertisement