In the second book in the Magicians series (?), Lev Grossman takes us on two versions of a hero's journey, the mythological genre that includes Gilgamesh, Jesus, Prometheus, and Osiris. Joseph Campbell called it the monomyth, and it's one of the most frequent themes in mythological literature. The monomyth is divided into stages. Campbell had 17. This interesting one is shortened to 12 to work in a 3-act play format. As with his previous novel, The Magicians, Grossman is not content to work within the rules of the genre. His intent always seems to be to subvert the genre, as he did so effectively in his first novel, a masterful takedown of Narnia and Middle Earth.
In the first novel, Grossman highlights the impossibility of fucked up people not fucking up an "ideal world." In The Magician King he deconstructs the hero's journey, with C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a backdrop. If you aren't familiar with the book, it's the third in Lewis's odious Chronicles of Narnia, a collection of theocratic, racist, sexist fantasy allegories for children. There's a good idea. That might be a bit strong, but as I revisit them more than 25 years after my first read of them, and 15 years since I read them in an undergrad lit class, I'm struck by how simplistic, formulaic, and offensive they really are. When I lived in the evangelical world, the offensive parts were merely the assumptions we lived with, and so not offensive to our sensibilities.
Voyage was the most adult of the Narnia stories. All one had to do was reflect for a few minutes on The Island Where Dreams Come True to know how horrific, pornographic, hedonistic, and torturous such a place could be. It was truly Lewis channeling his own fascination with BDSM into a book for kids. Of course, he relied on them being afraid of the monster under the bed or the Nazis, not the sadistic monster inside us. The grandest fiction of Voyage was the method by which the Pevensie children and King Caspian came upon the necessary swords. Whichever island they landed on, well, there just happened to be a sword there. The plot hole is filled with a neat etiological tactic: the navigators "miraculously" know which island the seven lords must have visited. Grossman has great fun with this device in The Magician King. Quests are seen as simply questing and expecting to come upon what's necessary to complete the quest.
The primary character development in Voyage is worked on Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a boy so thoroughly annoying that his character flaws can only be explained by his attachment to science and materialism. (Insert sincere theistic tsks tsks here.) If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, here's the spoiler (it came out in 1952, so this hardly qualifies as a spoiler): Eustace is turned into a dragon and then converted and transformed by Aslan to be one of the heros of the book. Oddly enough, the transformation in King is worked on Julia.
Julia is a minor character in the first novel. She fails the exam to get into Brakebills, the magician school, and so becomes a hedge witch. We never know the full extent of her story until this novel, and Grossman is to be praised for the Julia narrative of the second novel. It's brutal, unflinching, and utterly compelling. This is the antihero's journey told in the story. Much of the novel feels fragmented and underdeveloped; it literally could have gone another hundred pages if he'd developed Quentin's or Eliot's storyline more effectively. That's a minor complaint, though. The story is worth the price when we get to Julia and her friends summoning the old gods. There is a spoiler here that I'll avoid. Suffice it to say that Julia endures much, and much darkness and violence, to earn her withcraft bona fides, and Grossman never flinches. The Julia narrative helps keep the novel sufficiently dark, as most of Quentin's story (he's the real hero of both novels) is too light and thin.
The denouement is where Grossman really deconstructs the hero's journey. In Narnia, the kids needed seven swords. In Fillory, the magical world of Quentin and Eliot, the characters need seven keys. (There's a metaphor hiding there too, but I'll let you read the book.) When their task is complete, the remaining characters receive their reward. The hero's journey in mythology is always about the transformation of an individual to a different kind of person. This is accomplished through facing fears and limitations, overcoming obstacles, and entering (and exiting) the land of the dead. At the end of the journey, there is transformation and reward. Grossman prefers to talk about transformation and cost, though. It's a nice move. The Jesus story, for example, is brutal for a chapter, but the reward is massive. So for the Buddha. Only Prometheus bears the cost for his heroic success: he has his liver eaten by an eagle every day. Quentin becomes Prometheus. Without giving too much away, he takes from the old gods and gives to humanity. His "reward" isn't Promethean, but it's not what he'd hoped. Julia is tranformed too, but she loses her humanity in the process.
Grossman does an excellent job of constantly reminding readers that mythology is, well, mythology. Introduce a human to the narrative, and you get the problems of humanity: weakness, selfishness, greed, etc. Julia behaves like most of us would behave if we desperately wanted something. We'd exchange money, sex, and lies for the promise of something better. We'd literally sell our souls to gain power. We'd compromise our deepest beliefs, and ultimately, become enslaved to a god or goddess and think of it as blessing. Ugh. He also does a great job of lampooning the idea of an ideal world. What do kings and queens do when the earth is at peace? Most of the task of ruling has to do with judging between parties, keeping the peace domestically, fighting off foreign enemies, and producing civil ordinances to make life harmonious. What would we do when all is already done for us? Die of boredom, I suspect. The novel leaves off with a hint of what's to come, and although I first hoped Grossman wouldn't write a sequel to the first, I now look forward to a third, because that would hopefully mean a takedown of the third novel in Tolkien's series: The Return of the King. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you that Quentin is left...
