Response to Lev Grossman's "The Magicians"

When I initially read the brief synopsis for "The Magicians" I was excited, and entirely ready for a 'mature Harry Potter' tale of a magical world within our real world. From page one, it becomes entirely clear that this is a story on an entirely different wavelength than Harry Potter. The Potter series is a coming of age tale, a boy who becomes a hero and conquers his antithesis. It is about all of the positive and negative experiences that one encounters on the path of maturation within the context of the "wizarding world". Harry is a bright hero that we can easily sympathize with and admire. But in "The Magicians" the main hero, Quentin Coldwater, is wholly different than Harry Potter, and not exactly in a positive way. Quentin is the classic, estranged, lonely genius of his high school. He has made all the right moves in terms of getting his life in order, but he still feels out of place. There is a part of him that is fixated on a series of fantasy books he read as a child, and he holds within his deepest desires that the imaginary world Fillory of these novels could in fact be real.

And so the basic premise is established of a main character who dreams of escaping to a fantasy world. As the novel progresses, Quentin takes an unexpected turn away from Princeton towards "Breakbills", a so-called magic academy. There he discovers that the magic of his yearning is indeed real, but it is not in the form and brightness that he imagined. Quentin's classmates are mostly cynical, disengaged from the real world and take their magical gifts for granted. For me, this development was an immediate disappointment in the events of a novel. The whole reason Harry Potter 'works' is because there is a contrast between the gloominess of Harry's life with the Dursley's in the real world and the extreme brightness and adventure of Hogwarts. Not to mention J.K. Rowling picked FAR superior names for her fictional elements. On this note I'd like to take a detour: One thing many writers and readers underestimate is the vast importance of the names they bestow upon their creations. Appropriate and exciting names can do so very much for the entertainment value of a novel. Lets take for example, the names of the schools in each of the novels we are discussing. Hogwarts. Breakbills. Both are actually quite similar, two syllable words. Both call imagery to mind that is unpleasant, unlikely. However, "Breakbills" calls to mind to many different unpleasant things that we get stuck up upon the differing, conflicting imagery within it. We imagine birds crashing their beaks into stone surfaces, breaks screeching on a car, a bill getting torn in half, etcetera etcetera. There are too many different things conjured up by this name, and the experience of reading it more frequently than not is unpleasant. So then why does Hogwarts work? The simplicity of it, and the specificity of it. None of us can agree that hog-warts themselves are of a pleasant, inviting nature. However, we overlook that matter because of the beautiful contrast between hog-warts and a grand magical castle. Rowling picked a word for something small and unpleasant to describe something grand, magical and inviting. Again, contrast works, which Lev Grossman does not employ to make his novel "pop" for lack of a more appropriate word. Just as contrast makes artwork "pop out" so does it imbue the same effects upon works of literature. "Hogwarts" works additionally on a visual level in terms of the letter forms that we see. Some people will say this is of no importance and that I am over-analyzing. But everything is important, every square inch of a painting and every letter in a word is important to how an audience experiences it. The first letter, H, is grand, and out of the 26 roman characters in our alphabet, it is the letter most akin to two adjacent turrets on...yes...a castle. Fitting right? The appeal of the word continues in that there is good, fun, variation in the letterforms themselves, and unlikely variation at that. It's a fun word, and the 'fun-ness' of it lightens the gravity of the events in the story.

Returning to the point of our departure, Breakbills fails to be a fun word to read over and over, whereas Hogwarts is light, exciting, fun, and inventive all at once.