Brakebills Magic

Since the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series, there have been many other books featuring youngsters discovering they are magically talented and attending a magical school, hidden from the eyes of non-magical folks. One of these magical colleges is Brakebills, located in the Hudson Valley; and the protagonist is one high-school misfit named Quentin Coldwater. Brakebills is the fictional creation of Lev Grossman in his Magicians trilogy. As a regular reader of Time magazine, I recognized Grossman’s name because he wrote many of the tech articles. The first book in his trilogy is aptly titled The Magicians. Although it was written back in 2009, I’ve only just gotten around to reading it this winter break.

I typically read mostly non-fiction, but after starting this blog and musing about the theory of magic, I’ve started to explore several other books that might provide interesting insights in addition to fodder for my blog. Most recently this has been the Dresden Files, but I’ve also covered the Kingkiller Chronicles, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter,  and of course re-reading the Harry Potter series. I also watched Once Upon a Time, the TV series. So here’s what I’ve learned so far from the first half of The Magicians.

The overall picture is articulated by Professor March in Quentin’s first lecture class at Brakebills: “The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic… we rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skillt o make a specific change to the world. This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do… In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has. With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

As Quentin starts to learn magic in his first year he discovers that it is very tedious, very finicky, and that “much of spellcasting… consisted of very precise hand gestures accompanied by incantations to be spoken or chanted or whispered or yelled or sung. Any slight error in the movement or in the incantation would weaken, or negate, or pervert the spell.” Worse, one had to learn all manner of variations because the environment influenced how a spell worked. “Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.” He also studies history of magic and learns that “magic-users had always lived in mainstream society, but apart from it and largely unknown to it.” Sounds similar to the Statute of Secrecy in the Harry Potter books. The ones that are known to the world-at-large turn out not to be “the towering figures” but rather only have “modest ability”. Da Vinci, Bacon, Newton, Nostradamus and John Dee are name-checked. However, “by the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their sh*t to themselves.”

There are occasional references to the Harry Potter books as fictional stories that Quentin and some of his classmates have read, although Quentin’s true love is another fictional series named the Fillory novels. They sound Narnia-ish, but I suspect their importance will increase later in The Magicians since constant reference is made to them and I can see how some of the story threads are gathering. I’ve only finished the first half where Quentin makes it through Brakebills, has just had his graduation ceremony, and is about to move to Manhattan.

Sad to say that I haven’t encountered much interesting theory that has made me ponder the nature of magic. (Maybe more will be revealed later.) Like Hogwarts, electronic devices do not work well at Brakebills because of all the magic. There is mention of a professor who specializes in quantum theory and presumably its intersection with magic, but there is no elaboration. (Too bad, because I would have found the connection very interesting.) There is a part where Quentin learns that becoming a proficient and powerful magician is not just learning the words, hand movements, theory, but somehow opening oneself up to imbibe it as a second nature or second skin. How exactly this happens is vague, although there is a clear experiential component and requires pushing oneself to extremes.

One tantalizing tidbit does come from a professor musing about the connection between language and the material world. “Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic… If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart – reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. … Little children don’t know that. 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. But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one follows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.”

The Magicians rushes through Quentin’s five-year education in half the book, unlike the one book per year in the Harry Potter series. Magic is punctuated with college antics: drinking, sex, and teenage angst. I found the pace choppy and the story so far is not all that compelling or interesting. That being said, the book is divided into two parts and I’ve only just finished Part 1. For now, I’m planning on reading the rest of the book to give it a fair shake, and then we’ll see whether I read the next book in the trilogy. Apparently there’s also a TV series, but I’m not sure if that’s worth watching yet.