I don't often recommend books, although I review many around here. I just finished Lev Grossman's new novel, The Magicians, and I have to tell you it's one of the most unique, readable, fascinating pieces of work I've seen in a while. Grossman draws on themes common to fantasy literature, especially the works of Tolkien (Middle Earth), Lewis (Narnia), and Rowling (Hogwarts), but rather than write something in a similar vein as an homage to these works, Grossman uses the conventions to subvert the genre and ask much better questions with cutting honesty than the previous writers managed. To be fair, Rowling wasn't trying to write serious, religious allegories; Lewis and Tolkien most certainly were, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding. The Magicians is one of those books that draws you back every time you have a few minutes to spare, which is to say it's a serious book with a real story. I'm so weary of literary fiction these days because writers in the genre seem not to know how to write a damn story; their books are all about psychologizing moments or finding meaning in an experience, the more mundane the better. Grossman tells a story that is both a page-turner and an arresting meditation on imagination, growing up, faith, and magic (imagination and magic being almost synonymous).
The best place to start is with the one book of Narnia in which Lewis almost manages to write adult fantasy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In the book, the kids, along with Reepicheep and the other Narnians, arrive at an island where "dreams come true." Lewis attempts to create some tension by pointing out that all dreams aren't good dreams. Nice, but Grossman one-ups him. In The Magicians we're allowed to wonder what would happen if we lived out one of our good childhood dreams with all our pathologies and selfishness in tact. In spite of his inability to resist making the point plain in a couple semi-sermons near the end, Grossman manages to let the characters' actions reveal the theme before we get to the preaching. (It's the only flaw in an amazing novel.) Unlike Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling, who, while not naive about the three-dimensionality of humanity, couldn't manage to make their characters truly complex (except perhaps Severus Snape), Grossman creates young magicians who drink, do drugs, have sex, come from shitty homes, and prey on each other, and those are the heroes. For anyone who ever believed getting what we want—childhood fantasies of escape and love—would bring us happiness, Grossman introduces us to ourselves.
Grossman is also effective in portraying the horror and vacuousness of violence for "glory", that sad, stupid trope from Middle Earth. The violence is detailed, graphic, and necessary. The heroes, pulled as they are from suburban and urban Americana, can't quite stomach the cost of their quest; they are inexorably changed, of course, and some find they can grow to love violence, while others must admit to their own cowardice. Are we all heroes who are just missing out on the chance to demonstrate it? Eh, probably not.
Without giving away too much, the ending allows for some ambiguity. What happens after? If you can answer the question with the same naive lens we all read childhood fantasy through, you might have missed the point. Is there a happily ever after? Not if we're involved. Grossman allows the theist and nontheist both to wonder what the limit of imagination can bring us. Imagination isn't evil. Magic isn't evil. The problem with both is that we can imagine things being better than they are, but it's far harder to imagine and realize ourselves as better than we are.
