This book was a Christmas gift from my boyfriend last year (as well as the other two in the trilogy) and although it started off a little stale for me, it ended in a way that I cannot erase from my memory. It was like stepping into a Thoreau novel with excessive mounds of exposition and then suddenly and very quickly being swept into Stephen King's IT.
As I mentioned in my previous post My Year in Books, my boyfriend described The Magicians to me as being like Harry Potter but with sex and drugs. Naturally, I was immediately sold. The beginning of the novel seemed to drag, however. But I understand the reason behind so much exposition when you think of the novel in the context of a trilogy.
Our protagonist is a young man named Quentin who is terribly unsatisfied with almost every aspect of his life. The girl he loves is in love with someone else, he isn't sure what he wants to do in college, and nothing seems to fulfill him in the way it should. The only part of Quentin's life that he can take solace in is an imaginary world created by his favorite author which explores a magical world called Fillory, where a family of magicians have fantastic adventures. The series of books Quentin loves, confusedly, is called The Magicians. It was peculiar to read about a book within a book by the same name as the book within the book. Nevertheless, the magical fantasy world that Quentin loves turns out to be not only real, but within his reach.
Quentin steps into a magical and invisible bubble which encases Brakebills, a renowned school of magic for high school graduates. As it turns out, Quentin is invited to take the entrance examination into the school, upon which he discovers that he has magical abilities of his own. Soon, Quentin is matriculated into a world of academically rigorous work. Despite the challenges, he seems to thrive in this new world in a way he never could in his old one.
Quentin eventually develops a close circle of friends (students at Brakebills are divided into subcategories of magic, depending on their speciality) called the Physical kids or the ones who do physical magic. There are also the Naturalists, the Illusionists and a few other subgroups of magicians, however, the Physical group is the smallest as this subcategory is the rarest.
The Physical kids break through their final years at the Brakebills institution, but not without some incredibly strange tests, including being turned into geese and made to fly all the way to Antarctica for a semester of magic with a Russian recluse.
What comes from these experiences was at times mind boggling. At one point, Quentin and the others are ordered to become foxes for a day and in doing so, Quentin ends up having sex with one of his classmates while he is in the form of a fox. I don't know about anyone else who has read this book, but I really didn't need to hear about fox vagina hormones or any of the other strange details of sex through the eyes of a fox. The weird becomes weirder as the students continue their Antarctic studies and they eventually begin to have orgies. Why? Because they're in college and what happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica, I guess.
After they graduate, students are provided with a living stipend until they figure out what they want to do as career magicians. This "stipend" is actually enough money to rent a large apartment in NYC (the most amazing magical trick in the book) as it turns out Brakebills is extremely well-funded. It isn't long after living in NY that one of the Brakebills kids stumbles upon a tremendous discovery.
It turns out that the magical world they all grew up reading about, Fillory, is actually real. And one of them has figured out how to reach it. The group decides that this could be their purpose in the magical world after all, and decide to journey to Fillory.
This is where the book got super enticing for me. Fillory is a world filled with all kinds of mythical creatures: slutty river nymphs; gigantic, human-sized praying mantises; murderous (and also fairly large) bunnies and ferrets; and even a flatulent brown bear named Humbledrum who wears vests and sits at a bar drinking beer.
Like all great stories, however, there eventually emerges an evil villain that threatens to kill all of Brakebills kids. With a series of character reveals which reminded me of James Bond pulling of the mask to reveal who he truly was, the antagonist arrives.
This is where images were branded into my brain forever, because it turns out that although Fillory has some beautiful and majestic creatures, it also has one of the deadliest and creepiest magicians ever. He is known in the story as The Beast, and later revealed to be someone else (I won't give it away). He traps the Brakebills kids and demands that they give him a magic button which they found with the power to bring them in and out of Fillory at will. Of course, these are all magicians so they attempt to beat The Beast at his own game, only to discover that not only does he disregard the rules, he most likely devoured the referee at some point.
One of the magicians tries to cast a spell but before he can The Beast rips his own jaw open and bites the hands off of the poor kid. He then savours the hands, crunching and smacking his lips, as the rest of the Brakebills magicians watch in horror.
I don't think it is much of a spoiler to say that eventually, the magicians are able to defeat The Beast (after all, there are two more books in this series) and the story ends on just enough of a cliffhanger to keep us moving on into the second book.
I'm looking forward to The Magician King because I'm curious to know how the magicians deal with their PTSD symptoms after having met Pennywise the clown on crack.
Comentarios