we despair, we are the dead dreams

[freckles_and_doubt]

Children's fantasy has a very specific flavour to it: it's fundamentally innocent, prone to sharp edges and clear-cut dilemmas even when it's thoughtful and slightly gritty. Narnia and Hogwarts and even Earthsea are very deliberately unreal worlds even if some of the issues faced by their protagonists are not. This is possibly one of the reasons why so many adults who read fantasy also read children's fantasy, out of nostalgia for a milieu which is simple and innocent even in the middle of battle, injury and death. When done well, this is enormously consoling and surprisingly relevant, giving us things like The Dark is Rising and A Wizard of Earthsea. When it's done badly, it's trite and twee and really rather dreadful, giving us things like the more hamfisted bits of Narnia and Harry Potter. Regardless of whether it's done well or badly, it's not real, and that's why we have Lev Grossman.

It's taken me weeks to work up to reading this book, it's been squatting in my bookshelf glowering slightly, and filling me with a profound unease about whether or not I possess the mental energy necessary to tackle a self-consciously subversive attack on the familiar unrealities. I am, however, very glad I did summon up the gumption. The Magicians constitutes a savage, intelligent and extremely precise attack on the tropes of kiddielit, which takes as its basis the following: (a) magic is real, (b) schools of magic are real, (c) magicians are real, and as fundamentally fucked-up as you'd have to be to mess with the world like that, and (d) Narnia is real, or something very like it, and it's really not as easy as you think. This is a deliberate kick in the teeth to Hogwarts, Earthsea, old uncle CS Lewis and all, and it's way overdue - not because the kiddielit innocence is inadmissible, it's a hugely legitimate pleasure in its own right, but because it's only one side of the coin.

What I really liked about the book was the way it energised the huge gaping holes at the heart of Hogwarts, twisting them to rather nastily believable ends. Magic is incomprehensible? Yeah, it would be. Not because the writer is incompetent, but because magic is incomprehensible, dangerous and alienating and very, very difficult. It has rules. You have to learn them, by sheer hard grind, and they blow up in your face more often than not. Your professors are not weird and distant and incomprehensible to serve the writer's loopy narrative ends, they're weird and distant and incomprehensible because that's what magic does to you, and you can see it happening to yourself. I also really liked the way Grossman characterises the magicians themselves - these kids are geeks, of the high-performing, motivated, scarily intelligent kind, which is necessary to surmount the discipline, but which also makes them socially maladjusted like whoa and dammit, very realistically so.

More than half of the book is the school story where, if you like, he psychologises the student magician. There's an important omission here, though: this story has no Voldemort, so you're left with a schoolful of highly-trained, highly intelligent teen magicians who lack the great, evil-defeating purpose their fantasy literature has led them to expect. Magic is a skill, and you'll use it to trick your way into a high-paying job, or to do weird research, or to join in giant magical wargames for the sheer hell of it. There is no destiny; magic doesn't add meaning to your life. That's why the pseudo-Narnia bits are absolutely necessary. In a way Grossman is doing what Stephen Donaldson tried to do with Thomas Covenant, only he's doing it well rather than badly: if magic is real but you're not a hero, what's left?

Where it gets really interesting is the point where he raises things a step from the psychological ("aargh I'm not a hero I'm a dick") to the narrative - aargh, not only am I not a hero, but this is not a quest. There's no quest. You're not destined to save the world. There is no meaningful goal because you can't think of one. There are events, which the young magicians don't understand. They do things for the wrong reasons, mostly selfish; they end up as pawns in a much larger and still essentially arbitrary game they can't see or understand until it's too late. They screw up. People die, or are gruesomely hurt. The survivors don't even learn much from it all, or change in any fundamental ways. Life goes on, in its usual messy, undefined way, and you have still not been given the secret of it, because, surprise! there is no secret. There's just life.

I loved many aspects of this book: the arbitrary waywardness of magic and the steel-boned logic of its construction; the incredibly off-the-wall charm of Fillory, the Narnia-analog; the cynical deconstruction of the twee creature tropes; the way the story continually denies Meaning and Significance in any innocent kiddielit sense. But it was also a difficult, challenging, rather alienating read, which goes out of its way to rub your nose in the fact that you subliminally want and expect to identify with a hero, and you can't have one.

This was in some ways an angry, despairing and rather bitter book: I admire it tremendously and think it did good and necessary and extremely intelligent things, but I can't really say I enjoyed it. I'll read it again, someday, when I've summoned the gumption all over again. But I'm very glad it exists. Somebody had to do it, and they did it well.