These days, I’m often too busy to do all of the things that I love. Between hanging with the wife, writing, watching awesome TV shows, reading and playing video games, one of these items will unfortunately be forgotten. Since ignoring one of those could end in divorce, right now that particular neglected past time is reading. However, every now and then I do get to read something so I try to make it count. In recent months, I’ve read the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, and I’m currently working through Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, which is book one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
While those books have made their own impressions and are great reads in their own right, one title that I got to read around the end of last year really stuck with me: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I suppose I’ve been thinking about this one a lot since I recently heard that Grossman is working on a sequel.
I first heard about this book over on Jon Scalzi’s blog as part of his “The Big Idea” series, where authors talk about the big idea that inspired the books they eventually wrote. Lev Grossman’s basis for writing The Magicians is something that really spoke to me. I can’t do it justice by describing it so I’ll simply quote part of it for you.
Here’s the idea: what if Narnia and Harry Potter were real.
Yeah, on the face of it this doesn’t sound like an especially big idea. It more sounds like the idea I had every day for about 10 years, between the ages of 7 and 17, before I gave up on my prospects of ever getting to Narnia. (It was all about Narnia for me, since I am massively old and Hogwarts didn’t exist yet when I was a kid.) But bear with me.
What if, as a high school senior, you discovered that there was a secret college for magic, serving only the most brilliant kids in North America? This is in the real world, our world, the one with cell phones and the Internet and Dancing with the Stars and all the rest of it. A lot of things would be different. There would be an intense, exhaustively competitive entrance examination. (But you would get in.) There would be beer. There would be sex. Actual sex, not just snogging. People would do stupid, dangerous things with their newfound powers. They would hurt each other. They would hurt themselves.
Really, the only way I know how to describe this fascinating story is to call it Catcher in the Rye with Harry Potter using some Polyjuice Potion to occupy Holden Caulfield’s spot on the roster. It’s a complete deconstruction of what we expect from the fantasy genre in the sense that it’s people just like you and I that have their own presuppositions about magic and the way it works. These aren’t just characters, they are true blue young adults who struggle with emptiness, lust, drug abuse and every other thing you can think of that could assault a magically gifted college-aged youngster. The most interesting thing about Quentin as a main character isn’t that he’s The Chosen One or The Hero, or any of those normal tropes that we read day in and day out, but that he comes from a place of total apathy and complete dissatisfaction, still managing not to find the wonder in the world around him, even one that is made up of many wonderful things to behold. That hits oddly much closer to home in this generation than many might care to admit.
And oddly enough, it transforms over the course of the story from being very Harry Potter-esque to something more akin to what you’d see in an independent movie about young 20-somethings who just don’t care, dammit, to Narnia, and then D&D. It’s simultaneously funny, thought provoking, entertaining and scary as hell. And to be honest, you don’t get that from many stories these days. Especially not from one that is so smart in its meta-narrative, the commentary that is able to place upon fantasy while being a great fantasy story in and of itself.
The thing is, it wasn’t even the best book I read last year, but it’s the one that’s stuck with me the most, and gave me plenty of pause for how I pursue my own writing. When I really think about it, the book drags at several places, and the last section felt a bit disconnected, but that didn’t stop me from staying up every night to turn page after page. There are some parts of the book that actually bugged me quite a bit, but when it was good, it knocked every word out of the park.
Anyway, I suppose I’m rambling in vague terms about it now, but you should definitely do yourself a favor and read it, especially if you have any interest in stretching the boundaries of what you typically consider a fantasy novel.
So who out there’s been reading some good books lately, and feels like making some recommendations?
1 Comment