The Magician King (Grossman)

4/5. julianyap got me to read The Magician King, and I'm glad I did. It was... an interesting experience, however. I almost felt like Grossman had read my review of The Magicians and was all "I'll show her! I'll write another book and this one will have all the things she complained about in the last one! It will have a reasonable fascimile of a fantasy world, complete with a Quest for Plot Coupons and some random archetypes thrown in, and a redemption arc, and Characters Realizing that the Real World is Cool Like the Fantasy World, and magician scientists who actually care about the way the world works, no, I'll throw in TWO groups of those!"

...So I shouldn't complain, right? Except I am going to, a little. Had I not first read The Magicians, I might have been convinced by it. As it was, it rang a little... hollow to me; the technical execution is quite good (even if every so often one of the characters thinks she knows more science than she does) but I'm not sure I'm convinced by the emotional core of most of it (the exception is below)... the whole thing with Benedict seems sort of shoehorned in, for example. Whereas the ending of Magicians had this savage emotional core of personal responsibility and lack of same that did convince me. That is to say, I think the ending of Magicians was what Grossman really thinks, and I think the (first) ending of Magician King was Grossman saying, "Look, you didn't think I could do the sort of fantasy where there is an inevitable but sweet confrontation between Our Hero and His Baser Impulses, and usually aided by some sort of Wise Talking Animal, in which Our Hero Grows Up and Does the Right Thing and Reaps The Quest Reward thereby -- but I totally can, watch me."

...But I think that was on purpose, and it made me appreciate the first book a lot more. There are a lot of choices Grossman made in the first book that enraged me, a lot, because I thought they were unconscious and made out of a disdain and misunderstanding of fantasy and fantasy readers. This book made me realize that Grossman really does understand fantasy and fantasy readers, and what he did in the first book are all conscious choices, which retroactively makes me more willing to accept his criticisms of fantasy in the first book.

And I did very much like the (second half of the) ending. The thing I really, really liked, actually, was this passage (which comes before the first half of the ending but informs Quentin's response to the second half of the ending and informs my response to his response):

By now [Quentin] had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn't doing it.

This is the real climax of the book. The whole quest thing, the whole Doing the Right Thing, the whole Talking Animal Wisdom, is, I think, Grossman adding intentionally cliched fantasy fluff to it. Because I think what he wants to say, what his actual belief is, is that the fantasy is just window dressing. The characters like to quote the Narnian maxim (adapted for Fillory) of "Once a king in Fillory, always a king in Fillory," but Quentin points out eventually, "That's bullshit and you know it," and I think what Grossman would say is rather different: maturity is something internal and not dependent on whether you're in Fillory or not, and not dependent on whether you have talking animals to help you out with it. No one helps Quentin with this realization. No one even realizes this is the particular realization he needs to have (as opposed to the Real World Rocks Almost As Much As Fantasy So You Should Enjoy It realization, which he is sort of beaten over the head with). None of his adventures really speak directly to that particular realization. It's simply something that comes to him as an integrated response to life -- the way a lot of these kinds of realizations come to most of us.

My conclusion is that this book is much more subtle than the first in its approach to The Problem of Fantasy: the first book just flat-out said, "Hey, have you noticed, fantasy sux!" and this one says, "Look closely and you may see that the heart of fantasy can be hollow and echoing." And I agree with that. I might, at this juncture, prefer the first book, but I think what he did with the second is more interesting.

(Now for some random responses I had: it is totally weird to me that Harry Potter exists in this book and not (to the best of my remembrance?) in the first book. Although wouldn't it be cool if there were some sort of meta-meta where the same kind of amnesia/alternate-universe Julia is subjected to is actually the fate of all of them, where one universe has Harry and the other doesn't?)

(Another random response for those of you who have read it: when I talked to julianyap about this book, he mentioned that he was interested in what a feminist reading would have to say about the spoilery thing that happens to Julia at the climax of her arc that you can totally guess if you have read this far because it is totally the thing that would happen in a grimdark fantasy. My personal reaction was something along the lines of rolling my eyes at the book and saying "okay, Grossman, we get that you are flinging all the cliches in the world at us, thanks.")

I also was very, very pleased to find Eliot stayed redeemed in this book. I don't even remember Eliot from the previous book, just that I remember he had a nice arc and I'm glad Grossman stuck to it.