The Magicians; The Magician King; The Magician's Land
Paperback, 1280 pages
Published June 9, 2015 by Penguin Books.
I'm sad to say that this third novel in the series was not nearly as entertaining or well-written as the first two. The plot was much slower and the conclusion of the trilogy was entirely predictable not very interesting and not awfully interesting.
2/23/2020: after a million recommendations from my sister along with an assurance that it gets GREAT in season 2, I gave the show another try. The first few episodes are not good. The show starts to get decent about halfway through season 1, and quite good about 3/4 of the way through season 1, and then does become actually great in season 2, and it's now one of my favorites. I like it so much I went back to read the books again. And whoa the show is so very different --not so much an adaptation as "inspired by", and it gets better as it moves along and deviates more and more from the books. The books are enjoyable though the first feels aimless and all quentin all the time is a lot to take--i don't think I'd rate it 4 stars today--but 2 and 3 are quite good. Re: …
2/23/2020: after a million recommendations from my sister along with an assurance that it gets GREAT in season 2, I gave the show another try. The first few episodes are not good. The show starts to get decent about halfway through season 1, and quite good about 3/4 of the way through season 1, and then does become actually great in season 2, and it's now one of my favorites. I like it so much I went back to read the books again. And whoa the show is so very different --not so much an adaptation as "inspired by", and it gets better as it moves along and deviates more and more from the books. The books are enjoyable though the first feels aimless and all quentin all the time is a lot to take--i don't think I'd rate it 4 stars today--but 2 and 3 are quite good. Re: 3, everything I wrote below, when I first read the book, still holds.
DON'T avoid the show. Push through the first few episodes. It really does get good. It is better than the books. Blasphemy for a book lover, but true nonetheless.
2016: listened to the audiobook. Mark Bramhall is my favorite reader I've come across, and he deserves his Audie and all his other audiobook awards. His voice is gorgeous, thrumming, electric. He could read a list of square roots and I'd be entranced.
Some unstructured thoughts:
1. This is one of my favorite series I've read as an adult.
2. The central theme of book 3 is what it means to be an adult. Piece-of-shit, not-as-special-as-we're-supposed-to-think-he-is, "poor me poor me" Quentin finally does something for someone other than himself, which was a pleasant surprise.
3. There's never enough Janet, but she did get a pretty good "what I did while you were all off galavanting at sea" story.
4. There's definitely not enough Julia, and learning about Asmodeus's fox hunting in a couple sentences at the tail end of the book was disappointing.
5. Alice is back. Her fury at Quentin is, frankly, wondrous and beautiful.
6. I am consistently frustrated that Quentin gets so much more than he deserves. Here, he gets to be a god, he gets to make a new magical land, he gets pardoned by Fillory, he gets to fuck Alice, he gets forgiven by Alice, whose life he ruined not once but twice.
7. Thoroughly average Quentin gets everything handed to him on a plate. But the women suffer SO MUCH just to get at scraps that Quentin rejects. And they often suffer directly because of Quentin. I think I'd need another read through of the series to decide whether it is completely aware of that, and if so whether it's critical of that.
I watched the first episode of the Syfy adaptation, which was profoundly disappointing. Avoid.
I really enjoyed the conclusion to the trilogy. Fillory is facing a cataclysm, and Quentin Coldwater and his friends must come to the rescue one last time. It was a fun read that tied up many of the loose ends from earlier in the series.
This was a very enjoyable series, and I was satisfied with the open-ended way the author left it. Though I found Grossman's writing style pleasing, I found that I never got attached to any of the characters. I liked them all well enough, but in a more detached way than usual, especially considering that I'd just followed some of them through three books.
And just a side question: After Quentin was kicked out of Fillory by Ember, why did he never spend any time in Venice? That beautiful Palazzo was never mentioned again...not to be overly materialistic...
Anyway, these books were fun, and I'm glad I read them.
So, it's a book about a heist and also it's an end-of-the-world story. The characters are finally not completely hateworthy. Normally, I'd give a better score, but I'm still jaded against how the series started. Suck it, Coldwater.
A perfectly fine end to a one-of-a-kind series...but...
I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking this – read it yourself and let me know – but for a series of that based itself on the premise of life in a dark, difficult world (where not even magic can buy happiness), this series ended a little too neatly. Several times near the end, I began to realize that everyone was going to get what they wanted. It felt Twilight-y: ignore all the difficulties and open threads, kids, because it will all work out in the end!
There's nothing wrong with that kind of sweetness, of course – not in principle, anyway. But in this other-Earth, where the real world ends up being more difficult than childhood dreams, it gets in the way.
Interestingly, however, the "homage-to-real-life" themes of this book create their own problem. Chief of these: if we assume that Quentin …
A perfectly fine end to a one-of-a-kind series...but...
I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking this – read it yourself and let me know – but for a series of that based itself on the premise of life in a dark, difficult world (where not even magic can buy happiness), this series ended a little too neatly. Several times near the end, I began to realize that everyone was going to get what they wanted. It felt Twilight-y: ignore all the difficulties and open threads, kids, because it will all work out in the end!
There's nothing wrong with that kind of sweetness, of course – not in principle, anyway. But in this other-Earth, where the real world ends up being more difficult than childhood dreams, it gets in the way.
Interestingly, however, the "homage-to-real-life" themes of this book create their own problem. Chief of these: if we assume that Quentin and his friends are the good guys, who is the villain? In the first book, it was clear that Martin Chatwin played the role. After that? Not sure. Was it Ember and Umber? Reynard the Fox? The mysterious couple who possessed Rupert Chatwin's relics? Other miscellaneous old gods? None of them are set up to be the true enemy. Mayble life just isn't that simple.
Still, satisfying to see this story to its conclusion.
