Maybe 3.5 stars.
As my order of "Mistborn: Hero of Ages" has been delayed, I decided to pick up Grossman and give it a try to tide me over for a couple days.
I have mixed feelings about "The Magicians". On the surface, it seems like something I would like: a meditation on children's fantasy like Harry Potter and Narnia. And the book has been, as far as I can tell, well received.
Well, I don't think it's really worth the hype. It's not a bad book, but it doesn't live up the expectations and doesn't seem equipped to handle the task it sets out for itself. That being said, it handles some parts better than others: I thought the first half (aka the Hogwarts half) was mediocre, but the second half (the Narnia part) was pretty good. The goal Grossman sets out with in the first part is a reimagining of what a magical education would look like with brilliant college age students (and every student is super-brilliant - there are constant reminders about how smart everyone is and how difficult their studies are) in the modern era. It feels like a mash-up of a pressure cooker New England private school and Hogwarts ... except everyone is an asshole. While trying to make the setting "adult" and "realistic", Grossman succeeded in making it edgy and cynical. The teachers and students are mostly assholes - even the main character, Quentin, is largely a bag of dicks. Magic is super-duper complicated, but there is little explanation of the system (I'll return to this in a more general critique of style) beyond telling us how hard and complicated it is. Moreover, because Grossman crams Quentin's entire education into the first half of the book, it all feels very rushed. College is generally a formative experience, too short for most, but a time of budding maturity and (one hopes) character growth. None of that shit here: the entire Brakebills experience is popped open in the first 30 pages and shotgunned in about 200 pages. The story would have been stronger had Grossman simply started the book at graduation and skipped to the interesting part.
--There are some actual spoilers down below, proceed as you will--
Thankfully, the second part of the book is much better, and the improvement is apparent as soon as the action shifts away from the school. While the characters remain listless post-grads, their problems take a greater focus. Relationships suddenly have problems, young people with essentially limitless powers need to figure out what to do with their lives, and boom - Fillory, the Narnia stand in, is suddenly real. Of course there are some problems in Fillory and everything goes to shit eventually, but this second part of the book felt much better to me. It was as if Grossman got over a bit of his Harry Potter faux-college cynicism and started engaging on his own terms with the material instead of merely pushing it from PG-13 to R. How do erstwhile wizards and witches find fulfillment faced with instant gratification and literal magic powers? While this question is limited to only a few chapters, it's a far more interesting critique of genre fantasy than asking what wizard college is like. It's a similar question that drives the Fillory arc: although the Narnian tropes of talking animals and evil witches are all present (overt and appropriately silly - Aslan is a pair of rams now), the direction of the narrative concerns itself more with the human children who first came there. Given this magical world of quests and castles and magic, what kid would want to leave? And what happens when they try to stay? Well, shit goes bad, but it's an interesting line of thinking. Of course, Grossman can't leave it be in Fillory and wastes another 30ish pages at the end, but I can excuse the weak wrap up.
I said I would have a more general critique of style. I should preface the rest of my comments by saying I don't think Grossman is a bad writer but just an okay one. For one, his prose, while rich, borders on purple. It's not that I don't appreciate a well crafted sentence, but the syntax just lacks a ... poetic sensibility. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem (I did just write a great review of Mistborn explicitly stating that the prose wasn't that great), except that it seems like he's trying so hard to crank up the reading level at the expense of readability. Similarly, the scenes just aren't laid out all that well: a particularly egregious example is Quentin's first encounter with the Beast. Grossman jumps from the present, into a flashback, then to the aftermath, then back to the traumatic event in an attempt to build suspense, but it leaves a garbled mess of a narrative.
However, these aforementioned problems are less important than what I consider the more serious stylistic problem with the book as a whole: Grossman, even writing in a genre that traditionally leans heavily on exposition, tells buckets and shows very little. Even comparing to Sanderson, who has characters lay out whole histories in Mistborn, at least gives us Vin's perspective on magic and a visceral sensation of what allomancy is like. Grossman's magic by contrast is completely opaque: he drills into us how difficult it is, what obscure and ancient languages its spells are cast in, how many cramp inducing hand motions are involved, but never actually shows anything. We're told that its difficult and complex, but all of that complexity is elided over in favor of whispering "some words" (never any actual phrases), drawing "some glyphs" (vague hand waving), and shooting a fire ball. Perhaps the simplicity of the magical system is in itself a critique of overly complex fantasy, but on taken on its own it's decidedly lacking.
I think that last line sums up many of my feelings on this book. It's trying to be something of a "Cabin of the Woods" for young adult fantasy, but leaves its critiques underdeveloped and delivers only a half-hearted fantasy story to tie it together. I would pick up the sequels to see where the story goes, but I'm not in any particular rush. I'll see if they're available at the library.
As an aside, I really liked the cover. That's a beautiful tree.
