Believable characters form the foundation for flights of fantasy.
There’s the punk, the aesthete, the party girl, the fat slacker, the soon-to-be-hot nerd, the shy, angry, yet inexplicably irresistible narrator. Though the plot turns new tricks by the chapter, the characters have a fixed, “Not Another Teen Movie” quality. It’s the original magic - storytelling - that occasionally trips Grossman up. When everyone is back in human form, they all make honking jokes. There’s an amusing interlude where - spoiler alert! - half the class gets turned into geese and they fly to the Arctic. Grossman, the book critic for Time magazine, is also very good at imagining what magic might feel like when trying it for the first time. “Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?” he asks, not unreasonably. The school has a cantankerous dean whom I particularly liked. Grossman’s story is most entertaining when documenting life at Brakebills. Does it surprise you that Grossman’s bio states that he “holds degrees in comparative literature from Harvard and Yale”? There are even hints that Fillory might exist.
Even though Quentin discovers that magic is eminently real and that he’s got talent for it, he still pines for the imaginary land of Fillory. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is a Brooklyn teenager obsessed with “Fillory and Further,” a Narnia-like pentalogy “published in England in the 1930s.” One day, after his alumni interview for Princeton is aborted, he’s mysteriously conveyed to Brakebills College, which is kind of like the M.I.T. Lev Grossman’s third novel is a homage to that early wonderment. Yet we carry the memory of the reading that first transported us, and no book ever quite has that flashlight-under-the-bedsheets urgency.
They affect us most powerfully as teenagers, but then most of us move on to sterner, staider stuff. To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions. Fantasy novels involve magic and are a little bit like magic themselves.
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