*Content Warning: This blog discusses scenes of sexual violence which may be triggering for some readers. Spoilers ahead!
I'm gonna just go ahead and say it: Lev Grossman has some sort of weird fetish about fox sex. In the first book of this series, the characters shapeshift into foxes and then have sex with each other. In The Magician King, there is an incredibly graphic scene in which a Fox God rapes Julia, one of the main characters. I'm still finding it difficult to determine whether or not this rape scene was torture porn or if it was handled in a way that respected the arc of the character. I will definitely get into this scene in more detail, but first I want to recap the overall story of the book.
At the end of the first book, Quentin has established himself as the King of Fillory and at the beginning of The Magician King feels like he is where he belongs--sort of. It turns out that Quentin has started to become bored with the day to day in Fillory, and not much seems to peak his interests anymore. That is, of course, until he decides he wants a real adventure and in order to find it, he will travel to the outermost limits of Fillory, to a place called Outer Island. And what is the point of this breathtaking adventure? King Quentin needs to collect back taxes. That's right--a real heroic journey.
Quentin finds a ship that he deems worthy of the few days at sea, and also decides that he will need a personal bodyguard, just in case of really adamant tax evaders. He holds a Fillory-wide tournament to find the best fighter in the land. Bingle, whose name I still can't take seriously, turns out to be the most skilled of all the swordsman in Fillory. Quentin invites him onto the Muntjac, they're sturdy old ship, and they all (including Julia and a mapmaker named Benedict) sail off for Outer Island.
For me, the first third of this book was very uneventful and honestly a bit difficult to get through. I kept putting it down and coming back and would frequently stop reading mid-chapter, something I almost never do. It seemed like the story wasn't progressing for a good 100 pages, so this book didn't keep me as engaged as the first.
What I did enjoy, however, was the character development and backstory of Julia. The book goes back and forth between Quentin narrating his journey to Outer Island, and a third-person limited narrator detailing with what happened to Julia in the aftermath of her Brakebills rejection. What we realize is that Julia went through a terrible mental breakdown before discovering that magic was real, and she was capable of performing it. Julia breaks into the magic scene by busting her ass, learning new languages, new spells, and committing herself to a life as a hedge witch. Eventually, she finds a whole series of connected safe houses for magicians, and levels her way up through them quickly.
As we are learning about Julia's pre-Fillory journey, the crew stumbles upon a unique discovery. They find a golden key which possesses a ton of "old magic" and upon feeling around in the air a bit, Quentin discovers an invisible key hole. When he turns the key, both he and Julia are sent plunging into another world. Specifically, they a thrown into their old world. Much to their dismay, they end up landing back on Earth, literally in Quentin's front yard. So it turns out that Quentin gets his adventure, it just involves trying to get the hell out of his hometown and back to Fillory.
When they eventually return to Fillory, a year has passed and Elliot has discovered that Fillory is in danger of being wiped off the magical world map. In order to save it, they need to find another six golden keys in addition to the one Quentin discovered on Outer Island.
Spoiler alert: they find all the keys and save magic.
Now, I want to write about the rape scene, because it was really the only problematic part of the book in my opinion. The language and imagery used to describe Julia's rape seemed almost pornographic at points.
"Then He pushed Himself inside her. She had wondered if He would be too big, if He would tear her open and leave her gutted and flopping like a fish."
While reading this, it was hard for me to imagine that a woman being raped would really have this thought process. When being assaulted, the fear is overwhelming. Not all women react the same, but to have such disgusting thoughts at probably the worst point of your life doesn't seem realistic to me. The tone of the writing was extremely uncomfortable because it almost felt like Grossman got some twisted pleasure out of it. He mentions Julia feeling pleasure for a moment during the rape:
"At one point a couple of rebel nerve endings attempted to send pleasure signals to her brain, whereupon her brain burned them out with a pulse of neurochemical electricity, never to feel again."
I haven't been raped. So I can't speak from a personal experience of my own. But it seems really gross to me to suggest that someone under that distress could possibly feel pleasure. It almost seems to me like torture porn, an attempt at making the reader feel so uncomfortable, that perhaps it tricks them into believing the experience had any semblance of reality to it. It also made me wonder what the point was of creating such an awful creature. I would almost understand if this were a human, because then it would be truly terrifying. But a half fox, half-human God from a magical realm? There's not much more you need to do to make that creature horrible.
Overall, the rape scene really ruined the book for me. The plot line was shaky to begin with, but having such a superfluously revolting act as the inciting incident of a woman's character development was in a word, gross.