psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (ha!)
psocoptera ([personal profile] psocoptera) wrote2014-09-01 01:49 am

The Magician's Land



Overall: I loved it, I love the way Grossman chose to end the trilogy, I have many thoughts about it, there are a few flies in an otherwise excellent ointment.

This book is right in the sweet spot of so many of my interests. As someone who has written nearly 40000 words of fanfic imagining young characters grappling with adulthood, you can imagine my delight at Grossman taking his protagonist from adolescence to adulthood. This book was basically a canonical thirtyfic. And simultaneously a commentary/callout to yet more of my crucial childhood fantasy media consumption, a lovely sandbox to play "how does this link to that?" in.

I loved how so much of what made Quentin so frustrating as a character in previous books turns out to be that... he was in his twenties. I mean, that is so true to my personal life experience, it was so great to actually see him grow up and get his shit together.

I love that we get a "pro-magic" ending. (More on that below.)

The bad: I still really hate that Grossman sees all of his female characters as members of the sex class. Why does Janet's otherwise interesting, powerful backstory (I loved the fakeout ordeal with the sand) have to include an element of sexual betrayal and being called a whore? Why is it important that she decides she's not having children but we don't see a similar train of thought for Eliot? I mean, I know why, it's because Grossman still has his head up the patriarchy's ass, but it's frustrating. And never more so than in that hideously painful scene after Alice gets humanified again, when she just can't wait to climb on Quentin's +10 magical healing cock. Seriously, Grossman, "Show me what bodies are for?" Where is your EDITOR? Everything else about the Alice plot was so excellent, the bits in her POV feeling trapped in her human body were so painful and perfect, Quentin trying to reconcile her to corporeality with bacon and champagne was perfect, just, every time anything happens with Alice I was like YES ALICE MORE ALICE but UGH that scene threw me out of the book.

Book connections. So obviously Narnia is the central reference for the series, but I think it's interesting that after book one I would have said "Narnia and Harry Potter" and I didn't think this one was much about Harry Potter at all. I mean, sure, we get a little bit of Brakebills, but I think it's less important than the scenes taken from two other works, Deep Wizardry and The Neverending Story movie. Of the two, I think the movie is going to be more familiar to more readers, and the two sequences from it, with the giant turtle in the swamp and then the land literally coming to pieces, into fragments in the void, are vivid visuals that I imagine might jog the memories of people who haven't thought about the movie in thirty years. On the other hand, I feel like the whale-tale door knocker at the end is a sign that the Duane connection is even more important to what Grossman is trying to say. (I have to say I squeeed *so hard* when we got to the whales bit, because I was so excited that Grossman had read that and loved that just like I had.)

I think it's really significant that Grossman chose to reference these two stories. Duane's series is about the inevitability of entropy but the power of magic to change things for the better in the meantime; Neverending Story is about magic as creation and creation as magic. Grossman, I think, is *taking a side* in a very long argument about what happens at the end of fantasy, rejecting the Tolkien-Prydain-DarkIsRising-DarkMaterials tradition in which magic has to depart and the mature work of the world is to get on without it. Quentin's Land, in the end, might actually be a new bridge to Fillory. (I don't know if I'm reaching or not to read that as a reproach to the portal-closing, world-isolating end of Amber Spyglass.) And Quentin can come into himself and live his best life without having to be merely mundane, because magic - authorship - imagination - the *mending* of things - isn't just a crutch on the way to maturity and Serious Literature, it - Fantasy - is an end in itself. (I'm muddling a lot of things here but I just love so much how all the themes of this book are working together on so many levels. The whole thing with Quentin's mending discipline, where first it's this disillusionment, coming to terms with himself as ordinary, and then in the end he becomes the Mending God and I just about cried, and Grossman himself is engaged in a sort of mending, taking things that are broken in fantasy literature and trying to make something in tune.)

One last thought and then I will shut up (for the night, at least). When I started trying to think about what all Grossman was drawing from, there was a point when I was surprised that there *wasn't* more Dark Is Rising (because he must have read them, if he was reading Narnia and LOTR and Duane and Harry Potter). But then, I thought, it's sort of interesting that the climax of the book includes Quentin taking a magic sword and cutting down both the Light and the Dark. Maybe a little jab at the bloodlessness of cutting a branch off a tree?

Okay, also, I lied about one last thought. I am really really torn about Julia taking Quentin to the Garden of Feels and telling him that he was a super special fragile rare flower all along. On the one hand, gag, barf, didn't we just spend the whole trilogy undermining the idea that he's so very special. On the other hand it would explain why the fucking series is about him, and it's maybe on the sweet side of precious that ultimately it's the wonder he experienced as an eight-year-old that lets him make his Land. Kind of indulgent of Grossman but very on-theme.

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