book review: The Magician King

[psocoptera]

The Magician King was a hard book to read, in the sense that I kept picking it up and then putting it down and thinking maybe I'd rather do something else. Honestly if it hadn't been a two-week library loan with Josh waiting to read it after me, I'm sure I'd be nowhere close to done.

First of all, Quentin is unappealing, and uncomfortable to read about, in that I felt like Grossman was inviting me to consider whether I the reader might be like Quentin. Okay, I'm not, great, on to the next problem, the overhanging sense of doom lingering from The Magicians, and reinforced by a page-seventeen prophecy of "death, destruction, disappointment, and despair", that at any moment random horrible things might happen and nothing is going to end well. Wait, why am I reading this again?

It's well-written; there's an occasional perfect turn of phrase, or striking image, although nothing quite like the most breathtaking bits of the first one. It's interesting as a further exploration of naturalistic characters in a fantasy setting. Someone more thoughtful than me is probably going to say something really clever and interesting about it so you might as well be able to join in that conversation.

What *I* am going to do is complain. Because Grossman does two things in the climax and conclusion that really pissed me off.

Firstly: the rape. I can't find a link right now, but I've read some very good feminist criticism about the use of rape as the overused, poorly-thought-through Worst Thing that can happen to female characters, and, yes, this, that, what more is there to say? Except maybe you haven't read any of those essays and so I will actually try to make the argument instead of just pointing at it.

So the Worst Thing of Julia's traumatic past turns out to be that she was raped. (By a god, who stole her humanity; we'll come back to that.) And it's not that Grossman does a bad job with how he handles this; it's not played for titillation, she doesn't get healed by anyone's magical cock, it's a fine portrayal of alienation and survival etc. It's just that, in fiction in general, when female characters need a big trauma, they get raped. Male characters get all kinds of other big traumas, loss, torture, failure, betrayal, but female characters are first and foremost their sexuality; female characters get raped. I'm not saying that no one should ever write about rape, I'm saying that when someone is writing a novel like this one that is so intensely and entirely a commentary on other novels and on a genre, they need to think about their overused tropes.

Because, why rape Julia? What makes sexual violation particularly germane to her story arc? Wouldn't it be enough to have grief and survivor's guilt, having seen all of the rest of her found family hideously murdered? What makes it right (er, literarily right, not, like, morally ok) that the god rips her humanity out through her vagina, an orifice that has honestly not seemed tremendously important to her character heretofore, instead of the many other fine locations from which one could lose such a thing? (Mouth, eyes, navel...) Penny, obsessed only with magic, loses his (casting) hands; Quentin, who struggles with human connection, loses Alice, but Julia, defined by her hungry brain, gets... raped.

I suppose for book-structural reasons she can't lose her magic, or her memory, or her sight, or her hands, or her voice, or anything else that would have been long since apparent in Quentin's POV. But, what if, having just realized that what she cares about most is not magic but her new family at Murs, she'd been forced to kill Pouncy or Asmo to dismiss the Fox before it could do more harm? What if it recognized that she'd been searching for a maternal figure and reached out halfway around the world and grabbed her mother, her poor, heartbroken mother, and killed her in front of Julia's eyes? What if the Fox had demanded one sacrifice and everyone had said "do it to Julia!" and she'd realized that as much as she loved them, she was *still and always* the newcomer and outsider to them, and then, because she wasn't willing, it had killed everyone else instead? What if it had judged her as simply not important enough to bother with? Lots of Ultimate Wounds to give her an appropriately tragic past without getting bent over a table.

There is one good argument I can think of for it being a rape, rather than something else, and that is that perhaps Quentin, who really does see women in terms of their cunts, would not have done what he does at the end if Julia hadn't experienced that particular kind of suffering. I don't think the text actually supports this - maybe if we'd gotten more of a reaction-shot from Quentin when Julia finally tells him her story - but I could see Grossman doing something with this.

Which brings us to Quentin. My read on the end of this story is that Quentin commits an unselfish act, a Good Deed, thus becoming a Real Boy at last, to which I say, bleah. Because Quentin's problem is not that he's selfish - not that I think that's a problem, but, enh, prevailing cultural morality, Grossman could think that. But the text doesn't. Quentin's problem is that he has no goals. He has immense capabilities, but can't seem to think of anything interesting or worthwhile to do with them, and drifts along waiting for his destiny to be handed to him. Even when he finds a goal, it's just to get back to the life of ease he enjoyed before (first by getting back to Fillory, then by keeping magic from leaving the world). When Quentin finally makes his heroic sacrifice and becomes a real king, the important thing is not that he's putting Julia's interests ahead of his own, it's that he's actually trying to do something!

You could argue that there are two previous occasions where that happens, once when he wreaks a path of destruction through the castle and once when he goes to the underworld. But in both cases, it's pretty clear that he's acting a role; he doesn't really know who the people in the castle are, or whether violence is the right answer, he just thinks it would be fun to be an action hero. And he goes to the underworld to find Benedict because it seems like what a king would do. (Also, you know, because he needs to collect the Underworld stamp on his quest passport (which turns out to be surprisingly literal here).) Wanting to save Julia is the first thing that seems really personal for him.

He casts this in terms of *atoning* - for his failure to help her years earlier, maybe for his failures more widely. (He doesn't mention Alice, but she's always there.) I'm not sure that I agree that his not helping her was something requiring atonement. But the text seems pretty sure that it does, and that failure to help, generally, is *failure* (Fillory is a Pleasure Island making him more of an ass precisely because the people don't actually need anything from their king, to get back to the Pinocchio metaphor). I want Quentin to have discovered that he needs to actively pursue happiness, that if he wants his life to be "exciting and important and to mean something", he needs to figure out the meaning, and make it happen. Instead he seems to have learned that self-sacrifice is noble. And that's the essence of his new full humanity. Bleah.