Book Review: The Magician King

I believe I decided to read The Magicians by Lev Grossman when I saw it described as Harry Potter for adults.  Call me a sucker, but that's enough to reel me in.  What I discovered was a book that was more like Harry Potter meets The Corrections.  I enjoyed The Corrections, but I think I might have disliked it in equal measure.  That was about my take on The Magicians as well.  There were parts that were exciting and scary and clever, but it was not always fun to keep company with Lev Grossman's main character, Quentin Coldwater.  Quentin is immature and selfish, prone to terrible life-decisions, but with the self-awareness to recognize how terrible those decisions are later.  It's all the more frustrating that he then continues to make terrible decisions.

Grossman is not the first person to write about an unlikeable main character.  Literature is filled with unsavory types who are nonetheless so compelling that you can't tear yourself away.  Quentin occupies some middle ground.  He's far from heroic, but, and this is damning with faint praise, he's not the worst person in the world either.  I couldn't quite decide if this made him more realistic or just aggravating.

I must have come down on the side of compelling, because I found I was excited when I learned that the sequel, The Magician King, was coming out.  I picked it up the day it came out and went to a reading by Lev Grossman later in the week.  My capsule review of that is that Lev Grossman is clever and funny and only sometimes a little pretentious.  The question and answer session was interesting.  One person asked why the magicians in Grossman's books aren't doing anything more noble with their time, to which he answered that there are magicians who are noble in his world, but they're not the ones he's writing about.  The question that I found most interesting in retrospect was the one with the simplest answer.  A girl asked how long it had taken him to write the book and he said two years.  It took him five years to write the first one. Having finished the book, I think this shortened writing period shows.

Without giving too much away, the book is split between Quentin's story and the story of his high school crush Julia, who had the chance to get into his fancy magician college in the first book, but was rejected.  I don't want to sound hopelessly plot-driven as a reader, but I felt like I was halfway through the book and nothing had happened yet.  Both of their stories are interesting, but a little underdeveloped.  Years of Julia's story are skimmed through and Quentin's quest is resolved so quickly that I found the eventual stakes of it less meaningful and occasionally confusing.  The climax of the book, when it comes, is underwhelming, and the grand denouement of Julia's section (which takes place at an earlier time) is noticeably similar to the big fight at the end of The Magicians.

There's also the fact that by the end of The Magicians, I thought Quentin had finally grown up a bit.  By trial and error and having his heart broken, he's no longer solely a hedonist.  However, at the beginning of The Magician King, he seems remarkably similar.  I suppose we could say he regressed, but to me it came across as some retrofitting.

Pluses?  Grossman is a good writer and it's generally worth following him through to the end.  He has a firm sense of the ridiculous and when characters question the world around them, anyone who's read a fantasy book will feel the pangs once again of wondering why in the world Susan doesn't get to go to Narnia.  For a book with awfully sad sections, it's often quite funny and Grossman is nothing if not inventive when creating the various magical spells and worlds.

My final take is that if you liked The Magicians, you'll like The Magician King.  You'll see some old friends and meet some new ones.  You'll want to strangle Quentin, but you'll stick by him.  And if you're me, you will probably begrudgingly pick up the planned third book at some future date. 

One last note: I've seen mostly positive reviews for this book, so I'm curious to see what other people think of it.  If you're a fan of the first, are you a fan of the second?  If you were frustrated by the first one, did you find this one to be an improvement?  If you haven't read either one, this review has probably left you wondering whether or not these books are worth reading.  Go for it!  Take risks in life.  Eat ice cream for dinner once, just because you can, and read books that provoke discussion.

Fear not, fair maiden. A cliché has come to save you.

Recently, I traveled to Edinburgh with a friend.  We'd just done the obligatory Edinburgh Castle tour and were more or less wandering the city on our way to a radical feminist bookstore my friend had read about in my Lonely Planet.  For anyone still reading after that bit about the radical feminist bookstore, there is a lot to see in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival, which is when we were there.  I think there were more people juggling at any given time than there were people just walking about with no dangerous objects hurtling through the air in front of them.  In some areas you couldn't go ten feet without being handed a flyer by an earnest youth asking you to come see a free comedy show.  Somehow in the midst of all the excitement, my friend spotted another bookstore.  Upon closer inspection, it was a very particular kind of bookstore.  No, not THAT kind of bookstore.  It was all fantasy and scifi books.

So, no beating around the bush: I am totally unable to resist fantasy books.  I started reading them in junior high and even though these days I mostly read what we might call non-genre fiction, if someone hands me a fantasy book, I can't put it down.  I try not to read them too frequently, because honestly it's not very healthy for me.  I will hold off on eating and sleeping in favor of reading and for those not in the know, that is like Sarah Palin being all, I would rather  do that than talk in a folksy way about the liberal elite while an eagle stands next to me.

Knowing I had an exciting night to spend in the airport on the way home from Edinburgh, I figured my best option was a fantasy book to gorge on.  I managed not to buy out the whole store and picked out a nice thick book to read obsessively for a few hours.

I picked it out for two reasons.  One, it clearly had a female lead character, which is always something I like.  Two, it was written by a female author.  While I don't only read books by women, I figured I'd rather support a random female author than a random male author.  Women only make 75 cents to every dollar men make, or something like that.

I read the entire book in one giant gulp.  To be fair, I had hours free, I wasn't that tired, and the book was fun.  Fun enough, anyway, that I may or may not have gobbled up the two sequels as soon as I got home.  But we're nearing my point now.

Much as I enjoyed the book, there was one aspect of it that made me angry.  The story took place in a world in which women were subordinate to men and had traditional, old-fashioned gender roles.  For anyone who is a frequent reader of fantasy books, this is a pretty common situation.  Most of them take place in worlds where medieval society is the norm.  You get swords and sorcery instead of guns and cell phones.  Despite the addition of dragons, fabled swords, and magic, a lot of these books retain the gender roles that were common in medieval society in Europe.  I've been a reader of this kind of books for years and after reading this latest entry, I've come to an important verdict.

Creating a fantasy world where the women are subordinate to the men is complete crap.  It is clichéd and annoying and completely unnecessary.  You are creating an entire world.  Anything is possible in a fantasy book.  Time travel?  Sure.  Using your mind to throw a lightning bolt at your enemy?  That's also fine.  So why do so many of these books insist on using that old trope?  I can't even say that kind of thing is always written by men, because obviously that isn't true.

I know there are plenty of fantasy books out there that don't fall victim to this problem.  But I'm throwing down the gauntlet now for all the fantasy writers out there.

Any book that takes place in a world where the women are subordinate to the men, where the good women tend to be virginal, where the women who break out of those preconceived roles are unusual, is automatically clichéd hackwork.  Usually I'm not one for sweeping generalizations, but here's one I feel pretty firm on: there is nothing new to be said about a fantasy medieval society where the women are supposed to stay at home.  For anyone finishing off a series, fine, go for it.  But any new series that you're contemplating, stop and do some rewriting if you've automatically assumed the women will be second class citizens.

I'm not saying this is the only cliche afflicting fantasy writing.  Frankly, there are quite a lot of them, which I also find frustrating, since, as I said before, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  Anything.  Literally, anything.

What's the big idea, you killjoy, you say?  To that, I have to admit that I'm just a little disturbed that so many authors, when given the choice, create their new world by putting women in their place.  In your invented world, the women shouldn't still be stuck in the kitchen or the bedroom.  You can still have a delicate flower of womanhood as your female lead, if you have to (even though that is totally lame).  Just give her all of the same opportunities as your male characters.  And while we're at it, let's employ the fantasy novel version of the Bechdel rule here.  Don't let your male characters outnumber your female characters by so much.  There should be women besides the love interest and the mother.  Creating that middle-aged bachelor wizard?  Have it be a woman.  Salt of the earth soldiers to keep your main character grounded?  Throw in a few women.  There is nothing to be lost by letting women play these roles.  This kind of old-fashioned attitude is not helping a genre that often suffers from neglect and condescension from more mainstream readers.  We may not have equality in the real world yet, but if we can't even have it in our fantasy worlds, I'm not sure how much longer I can hold onto my favorite form of comfort food.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I"ll keep reading the damn things.  But some real ingenuity would make those long nights at the airport a lot more enjoyable.