- Choire sicha the magicians land review full#
- Choire sicha the magicians land review series#
- Choire sicha the magicians land review tv#
Midway through The Magician’s Land (after an excellent long segment involving a Neuromancer-esque magical heist perpetrated by a bunch of oddballs hired by a mysterious recruiter) Quentin discovers a memoir written by one of the Chatwin boys, the trilogy’s equivalent of Narnia’s Pevensie siblings. The desire for the clarity of your own tale is infantile selfishness. They will make you wistful, falsely pre-nostalgic, soul-sick. Momentousness, epicness, heroism, so common in young adult and fantasy fiction, are poison. As Choire Sicha puts it in a better review than mine over at Slate: Narrative, in all its forms and genres, conditions us to expect life to unfold in certain ways: characters capable of development, significant arrivals or departures, experiences that teach us lessons for better or worse, problems that have solutions. I genuinely thought that because I wanted to be a writer, that made me different from other people: mysterious, self-contained, a lone wolf, Han Solo. On some level I still didn’t believe that I could be lonely, even though it was staring me in the face, all day and all night.
Choire sicha the magicians land review full#
Grossman himself has a great autobiographical essay about a time right out of college when, full of stupid dreams and ideas, he holed himself up in a cabin in Maine to try be a writer and instead almost lost his mind.
Choire sicha the magicians land review tv#
I knew full well, for example, that it was ridiculous to move to a new city and expect my life to be full of wise-cracking early 20s adventures with a tight-knit circle of friends like any number of TV sitcoms, but that didn’t stop me feeling gnawingly disappointed about it, suspicious that everybody else was having a great time and living up to their full potential, unable to relinquish the nagging feeling that my life was not all it could be. I mean every narrative – all of them, in every form. I’m not just talking about Hogwarts and Narnia here nobody actually thinks that’s going to happen. We might all wish to be Harry Potter, but odds are we’re more like Peter Pettigrew.Īnyway, a major part of why this subversive approach works so well is because Grossman, like so many of us, was raised on fantasy stories and has come to recognise the truth not the simple, obvious truth that familiar narrative templates are an unrealistic way to expect your life to turn out, but that so many of us ostensibly acknowledge this while still being disappointed by it. But aren’t we all like Quentin, at least a little bit? This is why it always irks me when readers toss books aside because the characters are “unlikeable”: it displays a lack of honesty, and sympathy, and perhaps reveals fear.
Choire sicha the magicians land review series#
But come on, “unlikeable?” Even reviewers who praise these series can’t help but snipe at Quentin for taking so long to grow up the archetypical man-child of Generation Y. OK, no, there’s no way to write that without coming off as a literary snob. Also with reviewers whingeing, apparently without any self-awareness, that Quentin is “unlikeable” – not to come off as a literary snob, but that’s a sure sign of an immature reader. Goodreads is full of angry reviewers who were promised “Harry Potter for grown-ups” and failed to read anything beyond that. It was a book that well reflected how I felt that year: not unhappy, but listless and discontented.
But only on the surface is The Magicians a book about what Hogwarts and Narnia would be like if they were real more broadly, it’s a novel about failure and loss and ennui, about the quarter-life crisis post graduation, when what you’ve been dreaming about for so long is finally accomplished but turns out to be hollow and unsatisfying. It follows the coming of age of Quentin Coldwater, a sulky nerd from Brooklyn who finds himself recruited into Brakebills, a secret school for magicians, and later discovers that he can visit the unexpectedly-real magical world of Fillory (a Narnia stand-in) that he grew up reading about.
I mention this because it meant I read The Magicians at precisely the right time in my life. It went unexamined, and I was honestly embarrassed when it dawned on me sometime that year, as I was being thoroughly introduced to the Real World, that it was still glimmering away at the back of my mind when I was old enough to know better. Dream is the wrong word, probably it was not something I aspired towards, but something I assumed would just happen. I read it at a time when I’d first moved out of home and moved to a new city, when I was first trying to actually start my career, and when I was gradually realising that the dream I’d been harbouring since I was very young of one day being a successful writer was probably not going to happen. I read The Magicians, the first novel in Lev Grossman’s wildly brilliant fantasy trilogy, in 2012 when I was 23 years old and had been living in Melbourne for about a year.
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman (2014) 401 p.