It’s not his lightning scar or his
circular glasses. It's not even the fact that he is the "chosen one". In todays books, even “chosen ones” are not in short supply. Then what is it? Well, as far as I know, he has never read a single book. Not one. If I'd
been him, I wouldn’t have survived without them in that stuffy broom closet of his. I mean, come-on, what does he do all
day, stare at the ceiling? And maybe not Harry, but at least Hermione must have. But no, apparently Hogwarts exists in a world in which children don't read stories, or if they do they are suspiciously quiet about it.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, however, is different from J.K Rowling's Harry Potter. The Magicians is a trilogy in which the
characters are just like us: they spent long hours as kids wishing to fall into
the magical worlds trapped in paper and ink. In The Magicians, that place is Fillory, and every kid with even the
slightest hint of nerdiness devoured Cristopher Plover’s Fillory and Further. Just as we have all hoped that just this once,
instead of meeting the solid wood that the back of that mysterious closet we
might fall into another world, they have too. Well, at least most of us have. I
think. Eventually however, we resign ourselves to the fact that what we see is
what we get, that there is nothing deeper than the surface. In The Magicians, however, Quentin Coldwater never loses that
obsession. In a way, he never grows up. When I was first introduced to Quentin,
I was looking at what seemed to be my near reflection. Here was someone who
truly understood my longing for the fictional. However, there was a big
difference between me and him: he is invited to Brakebills, a collage for magic. Of course he is. I mean, come on, how could
we have been surprised by that, what with a book titled The Magicians? Though, in Brakebills it’s not enough to wave the
wand and say the words. Magic at Brakebills is more like grinding the hardest
subject ever taken. In other words, it’s magic as it would I imagine it would be
in real life. Distinctly unmagical. At least for Quentin it is. But for me, the
world of The Magicians is just as
interesting as any other book I have read. That’s when I realized that when I
read a book about a Hero’s Journey, I feel as though I am also on a one. That
is why we love those books so much. But then I began thinking: if the grim,
arduous, and academic magic of Brakebills still seemed to be magical to me, what
if I looked at my school in the same way? That’s when I realized that if I
squint a bit, Calculus is almost magical. And so is Chemistry, and Biology, Physics and
for that matter even Literature. Electrons teleporting from one state to another? Dinosaurs slowly but surely evolving into roosters? Dark matter that fights the forces of gravity, causing the universe to expand at an ever accelerating rate? Maybe not history though.
If you need a
fantasy book unlike anything you have read before, or if you have made it through this long post, I encourage you to check out
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. There
is too much bad fantasy out there, but don’t get me wrong, I’ve read and enjoyed my fair share of it. But The Magicians is
at least a brief respite, a book that straddles the worlds of literature and
fantasy. It is perfect for a teenager who expects themselves to be an adult,
but isn’t quite there yet. That, I think, is almost all of us.
