2013 read #87: The Magician King by Lev Grossman.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman
400 pages
Published 2011
Read from June 28 to June 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I want a new Harry Potter. Hell, everyone -- publishers especially -- wants a new Harry Potter. It's not often that I feel the need to read more about a particular character or world, a real deep down eagerness to peep behind further curtains and dig into deeper mysteries in the same old place. Let's see, there was Harry Potter; The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion; the first three Song of Ice and Fire books; the Hyperion Cantos; Le Guin's Hainish cycle (though nothing has matched The Left Hand of Darkness); Tad Williams' Otherland series (up until the end, which was kind of a letdown after almost 4000 pages of buildup) and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn; Greg Bear's Way series (which I barely remember now, but certainly enjoyed about fifteen years ago); and (let's be honest) Jurassic Park. Those are the only books that have given me that certain special need, a certain, well, fannishness. I like that feeling, and wish more books would deliver it, but I'm fickle. I can't sustain interest in something just because a familiar name is on the cover: each book has to be good, enjoyable on its own merits. I plowed through four or five books in the Wheel of Time before I gave it up; revisiting The Eye of the World's first few chapters a couple years ago, I realized I had zero interest in getting back into it again. I barely made it two and a half books into the Sword of Truth before throwing it aside as tedious, hackneyed crap. I only managed to digest three entire Pern books to impress a girlfriend.

When I read The Magicians back in April, I was skeptical about the sequel that I knew already existed out there. For one thing, the otherwise mostly excellent Magicians recapitulates, beat for beat, the ending of Neverwhere, which kind of pissed me off, having just read Neverwhere for the first time in January. For another, the whole concept of The Magicians mashed together "dark and gritty Harry Potter" with "dark and gritty Narnia"; I didn't see where Grossman could even go from there, having seemingly exhausted both settings, short of schlepping his upper middle class alcoholic wunderkind wizards off to "dark and gritty Land of Oz" or "dark and gritty Middle-earth." The conceit had been enjoyable, but further storytelling opportunities seemed lacking. The story had been told, the happy ending achieved; what else was left to do with the worlds of Brakebills and Fillory, beyond cashing in?

Some biggish spoilers from here on out.

The Magician King takes the conventional sequel route and expands outward, showing more of its established worlds, Earth and Fillory, and detailing yet more of Quentin's tedious entitlement complex. It does so lazily and almost without direction at first, taking its time building up momentum. Likewise, where The Magicians seemed like a focused dissertation on young adulthood, higher education, privilege, and ambition, The Magician King sprawls out in a messier fashion through broader themes of childhood, growing up, death, loss, acceptance, and redemption. Where The Magicians borrowed the ending of Neverwhere, The Magician King toward the end exhumes and cannibalizes the entire operating theory of American Gods. That's hard not to do when dealing with folklore and magic; I'll go ahead and assume American Gods borrowed freely from some earlier novels I'm just not acquainted with. But The Magicians' ending was kind of glaring, whereas The Magician King makes effective if brutal use of its gods-are-real-and-fucking-creepy cribbings. And what The Magician King lacks in emotional punch and direction, it makes up for by eschewing most of the "entitled rich kids doing drugs in self-destructive urban ennui" crap that bogged down the middle of The Magicians.

I don't think I ever seriously doubted that I would love The Magician King. But so far I'm still on the fence about whether I'm truly a fan of the series. I look forward to a third book, since one appears to be forthcoming, but I'm not quite there, you know? Even though it's the only series I know of that can toss off references to Hofstadter, Teletubbies, and The Venture Bros. without breaking a sweat, it just isn't the next Harry Potter for me. Yet.