[Updated with valuable comment] The Magicians is a literary novel about a boy who discovers that he's a wizard and goes off to an exclusive magical academy instead of college. Capfox gets at what's best about the book (read the whole thing):
If you've heard about this book, you've probably heard that it's like Harry Potter or Narnia but more grown-up, where grown-up is generally taken to mean it has more drinking and sex. And to a certain extent, that's true: our hero, Quentin Coldwater, finds his way out of a normal, humdrum life he's unsatisfied by, and into Brakebills, a magical university where he makes new friends, masters a lot of magic through lots of discipline and hard work, and has a variety of adventures. And yes, there is drinking and sex. You can see where the comparisons came from…
The writing is fluid and evocative, and there are definite deconstructions and take-offs from Narnia and the Harry Potter books. The characters are well-sketched, for the main ones, and are complex enough to feel both likable and not likable at the same time. The choice of themes and the building of the relationships really resonated with me. It took a bit for me to get set up in the story and feel attached to everyone, but I ripped through it afterwards. The very end part of it was a bit odd, as it didn't feel as earned as the rest of the story, feeling more like a sequel hook, but I'm very much looking forward to reading the sequel, so I can't punish it too much. In fact, I think I will go start that now.
For me, the end of the novel was actually an anti-sequel hook. The main character, Quentin, was often pretty unsympathetic and while that turned around some during the finale the last chapter settled my opinion that he was an entitled prig and the chapter before that wasn't so much better. That said, I do agree on the writing; I found the characters plausible and the world well-thought through, although your mileage may vary there as it left a writer friend of mine cold.
In any event, my big problem with dear Quentin is that he wasn't ambitious enough to be a failure. Life keeps handing him prize after prize and he makes no real effort at contentment nor chasing a greater good. Alyssa Rosenberg points to the lack of career counseling, and I suppose that's true enough, but it seems to me that by the time you get to college you should have picked up that once your subsistence and higher needs are covered you should make some effort to help people or otherwise make the world a better place even if it doesn't get you the crown of a magician king. I know lots of bright people that I see parts of in the book, including myself, but they all managed to at least make a good faith attempt at enjoying their circumstances and/or pursuing a vocation. As for Quentin, I feel like those ridiculous schools that try to ban the Potter books should instead substitute The Magicians; it might be a far better way of convincing children that magic is a tool of an entitled elite that's everything that's wrong with America.
I'm somewhat curious about The Magician King. I liked some of the ensemble - admittedly most of all those who came to bad ends [with one notable exception] - and I found the portrayals empathetic and the language alluring. But unless the proletariat of the Narnia-analogue have a chance at revolution against these privileged bright young things, I will come away most dissatisfied.
[Comment from Mai-Anh on my Google Plus feed: "In the end, I liked it better once I reframed it to look at Quentin not as a hero or even a protagonist, but as the "representative symptom", almost." I completely agree. I'm not sure to what extent that was what Grossman intended but he did reveal just how entitled Quentin was in a variety of ways, most notably the reappearance of a character who wasn't so lucky/skilled as to make it into Brakebills.]
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