The Magicians
"It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view." - that, not at any of what Brakebills or Fillory hold of magic and adventure, but at something Alice says shedding light on Janet's motivations and her entanglement with Eliot.
The wonder of their flight, geese-transmuted, to Antarctica. The immensity of Quentin's journey to the pole; the bathos of the discovery that he and Alice were the only two who even attempted it.
The melancholy stone-paved piazzas, fountains and sealed, book-filled buildings of the Neitherlands. Like something straight out of de Chirico.
The way that magic functions variously as metaphor, symbol, intertext, synecdoche and metonym for language, literature, happiness and The Magicians itself without this ever becoming too overt or over-determined.
Quentin and Alice, Eliot and Janet, and, at the outskirts, Julia.
The Magician King
Julia's own journey, filled in, through magic's fringes and demi-monde. A raising of the stakes to encompass magic itself, along with a revealing of the structures and nature of said magic. The true nature of the heroism forced upon Quentin: to pay the price rather than receive the reward, and to be denied the thing that represents - and, in this case, ipso facto is - what he most wants (no further leap, adventure, to the Far Side of the World; not even to remain king in Fillory - each both standing for, and embodying, that which fills the lack which otherwise ensures his discontentment...which is, maybe, the central metaphor and idea at the heart of these books after all).
The Magician's Land
I re-read the first two because I wanted to - as much for the characters as for the everything else - but also as a run-up to this, the third and presumably final in the series. And yes, it finishes strong - full, like the two preceding it, of sequences and scenes that stick in the mind.
Does it squib on the themes of the first two books in the way that it has Quentin emerge finally as a fully sympathetic character, and in the final happy ending? I don't think so; rather, it's the culmination of an arc through which Quentin has been developing and maturing into an adult, just like the others, and the climactic re-creation of Fillory works, consistently with that. Also nice is to see Janet emerge more as a fully fledged character - both rendering her more understandable, and casting retrospective doubt on the reliability of Quentin's after-the-fact take on her motivations for sleeping with him back in book one - plus Mayakovsky's reappearance, again at once forbidding and oddly sympathetic, and the pleasure of Asmodeus' extended, explosive cameo.
(Against all of this, Plum doesn't make an enormous impression, but more or less holds her own, and knits neatly into the Chatwin back story.)
Also, like all of them, littered with little throwaway bits of wonder - like the bits about the whales and what they're up to...
Anyway, altogether, terrifically good reading.
"It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view." - that, not at any of what Brakebills or Fillory hold of magic and adventure, but at something Alice says shedding light on Janet's motivations and her entanglement with Eliot.
The wonder of their flight, geese-transmuted, to Antarctica. The immensity of Quentin's journey to the pole; the bathos of the discovery that he and Alice were the only two who even attempted it.
The melancholy stone-paved piazzas, fountains and sealed, book-filled buildings of the Neitherlands. Like something straight out of de Chirico.
The way that magic functions variously as metaphor, symbol, intertext, synecdoche and metonym for language, literature, happiness and The Magicians itself without this ever becoming too overt or over-determined.
Quentin and Alice, Eliot and Janet, and, at the outskirts, Julia.
The Magician King
Julia's own journey, filled in, through magic's fringes and demi-monde. A raising of the stakes to encompass magic itself, along with a revealing of the structures and nature of said magic. The true nature of the heroism forced upon Quentin: to pay the price rather than receive the reward, and to be denied the thing that represents - and, in this case, ipso facto is - what he most wants (no further leap, adventure, to the Far Side of the World; not even to remain king in Fillory - each both standing for, and embodying, that which fills the lack which otherwise ensures his discontentment...which is, maybe, the central metaphor and idea at the heart of these books after all).
The Magician's Land
I re-read the first two because I wanted to - as much for the characters as for the everything else - but also as a run-up to this, the third and presumably final in the series. And yes, it finishes strong - full, like the two preceding it, of sequences and scenes that stick in the mind.
Does it squib on the themes of the first two books in the way that it has Quentin emerge finally as a fully sympathetic character, and in the final happy ending? I don't think so; rather, it's the culmination of an arc through which Quentin has been developing and maturing into an adult, just like the others, and the climactic re-creation of Fillory works, consistently with that. Also nice is to see Janet emerge more as a fully fledged character - both rendering her more understandable, and casting retrospective doubt on the reliability of Quentin's after-the-fact take on her motivations for sleeping with him back in book one - plus Mayakovsky's reappearance, again at once forbidding and oddly sympathetic, and the pleasure of Asmodeus' extended, explosive cameo.
(Against all of this, Plum doesn't make an enormous impression, but more or less holds her own, and knits neatly into the Chatwin back story.)
Also, like all of them, littered with little throwaway bits of wonder - like the bits about the whales and what they're up to...
Anyway, altogether, terrifically good reading.
