(Note: This post quotes heavily from the book. It was the only way I could process through it. And it's rather long. I have some opinions about the narrative being so inner-thought heavy that the reader doesn't have to infer, but those are neither here nor there for the purposes of this post.)
Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted. Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in...He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn't going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher (304).
The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a coming of age story that begins when Quentin Coldwater, brilliant and bored, is a senior in high school in Brooklyn. He has never left behind his Fillory books--a series Grossman made up, very similar to Narnia, and deeply believes without irony that if only he could find his way into a land like Fillory that life would make sense. "He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world--he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the evidence that it in fact was, " (37). His existence is defined by his longing for Fillory and all that it represents: wholeness, beauty, peace, fulfillment, adventure. One day, though, Quentin unexpectedly finds himself walking through a garden and onto the campus of Brakebills, a college in the Hudson River Valley for magical training, and not visible to the non magical eye.
When Quentin arrives at this school that does indeed exist on Earth and not in Fillory, a professor tells him: "Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it. They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they're alive (88). For Quentin, this makes sense, because they haven't been able to step through to the magic. The twist of expectation here, though, is that Quentin's experiences with the magical realm are disappointing, and he finds himself struggling with the same kinds of things: "This was the kind of disaster Quentin thought he'd left behind the day he walked into that garden in Brooklyn. Things like this didn't happen in Fillory: there was conflict, and even violence, but it was always heroic and ennobling, and anybody really good and important who bought it along way came back to life at the end of the book. Now there was a rip in the corner of his perfect world, and fear and sadness were pouring in like freezing filthy water through a busted dam," (148).
As it would turn out, one of his magical friends finds that not only does Fillory actually exist (even among the magicians, they see Fillory as a children's story), but he's found a way to get in. Quentin remained convinced that life would finally become ok: "He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now. And now that he was here it would finally be all right," (288). And I suppose that this is how it goes for most adventures: the initial thrill and newness of a move, a new job, a new relationship can make one think that life will be different. And, of course in the book there is a feeling of true adventure for a while, but ultimately Quentin has to face the same existentialism that has plagued him all along: "Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? He thought he left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills. How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him," (311).
The Magicians could be described as a grown up's Narnia or Harry Potter--it turned the magical into the ordinary and made the concept of fighting evil much more postmodern, and in turn, depressing. The characters at the end just settle for a different brand of discontent. There is not one clear foe or one clean answer in which to rest and find peace.
I don't want to be so jaded or realistic that there isn't room for magic--or at least hope. Reading Quentin's story, I was surprised how much I related to parts of his mental journey. At this point in the story, one would think that something would happen to re-instill Quentin's hope in magic, but it takes a turn for pretty stark realism: He should have stayed in Brooklyn, in the real world. He should have nursed his depression and his grudge against the world from the relative safety of mundane reality...Sure you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead...The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to live anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered (382-383).
One of the professors at Brakebills seemed to be describe coming of age: "Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded," (216).
And yet, C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series, pressed into the longing: "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing--to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from...Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back." Readers and thinkers have to wonder if there is a space in the world for magic--and could the longing point to something real? Lewis, in his non-fiction writings on his Christian faith, explained that the longing was for Heaven and that life once again became magical for him when he realized that the longing was not in vain, but that it as was made him alive. Grossman's book seems to be a critique of the Narnia-like longings. I can't decide if Grossman himself would find Quentin a pathetic character in the hopes he had for magical lands. The bleakness of who Quentin becomes at the near-end of the story suggests that intellectual, passionless realism is the best way to cope with the disappointments of the world.
And yet. There are some universal truths woven into the story: love, sacrifice, human fallenness and the pain of longing.
So.
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