For Grossman to check in on what's happening in the magical land of Fillory, he necessarily has to leave Quentin behind for large sections of time.īut a lot of it is just a function of the main character growing up. Some of this is very much a function of how the second book left the characters scattered across multiple worlds. If a character was an important one in the series, it's almost guaranteed that there will be a section of the book dedicated to seeing events through their eyes. See, in The Magician's Land, Grossman dips into many, many points of view. Julia was a single-handed "check your privilege!" banner for the whole series, and she tipped off where Grossman was ultimately going. It's just that someone like Julia has endured so much that she becomes a much-needed foil for anyone who feared the books were just going to be a bunch of white guy sniveling. His emotional life may be shallow in places (particularly early in the series), but he always has the right to be depressed or rage-filled. What's interesting is that in this process, Grossman never judges Quentin for feeling as he does. Julia, Grossman seemed to be saying, was someone whose life had truly been difficult. The Julia chapters too easily turned to outright horror for some readers, but they were a necessary corrective to Quentin's angst.
In the second, The Magician King, Grossman steps outside of Quentin's point of view for a handful of chapters told from the perspective of Julia, a childhood friend of Quentin's who was rejected from Brakebills but found her own way to magic. The Magicians, the first book in the series, is only told from Quentin's perspective. What's remarkable is how completely the series' structure reflects this. See, the story of the Magicians trilogy is that of Quentin moving from that whiny boy into a man who is capable of understanding that the world wasn't built solely to cater to him.
#The magicians land by lev grossman book cover series
But even those who haven't liked the series (often because they haven't enjoyed viewing the world through the perspective of Quentin, who began the series as a whiny boy unaware of his own privilege) will hopefully be impressed by what Grossman has managed here. Maturity and catharsisįans of the series will find Magician's Land's final quarter or so - when Grossman brings several plot points to effective, cathartic ends - riveting and moving. And it's cathartic and moving and strangely peaceful. These books have always been episodic, only tipping their hands at the very end (in often thrilling ways), but there are places early in Magician's Land when it seems as if Grossman can never pull everything together.Īnd then he does. There are moments in Magician's Land that bump the reader slightly, as Grossman occasionally tries too hard to make the subtext into text, or rushes through emotional reactions to get to his climax. It attempts to say something about what it is to live through trauma, what it is to survive the horrors of the world and the horrors of your own head. This continues in the concluding book, which comes out on Tuesday. It was a fantasy trilogy, sure, but it was also a story about coming of age after the characters were supposed to have come of age.
What's more, the people around him were similarly dealing with rage or shame or guilt, all intensely heightened by the quick burn of their magical abilities. From the first book, which took the petulant, disaffected Quentin Coldwater from his normal adolescence to a magical education at the school Brakebills, on through the second and third, which have depicted his 20s as shot through with despair and anomie, the series has always forced readers to see the world through the perspective of someone who was seriously depressed.