In The Magician King Lev Grossman delivers the sequel that his 2009 novel The Magicians practically demanded, and delivers it with verve. This new book takes up the story of Quentin Coldwater two years into his reign as one of the rulers of the land of Fillory, the fictional kingdom summoned so vividly to life in The Magicians.
King Quentin embarks on a journey to the farthest reaches of his realm and finds himself consumed by a sometimes perilous quest ranging across the "multiverse" (including some unexpected, unsettling trips back to Earth) to find the Seven Golden Keys he must gather to save Fillory from ruin. Grossman ably draws on the same store of fantasy lore, from Narnia to Middle Earth, that formed the core of the first novel, and he leavens the homage with winks in the direction of pop culture icons like Monty Python and Bruce Willis.
The parallel, and more absorbing, plotline of Grossman's novel tells the story of Julia, Quentin's high school friend who failed the entrance exam to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy years earlier. Through painstaking effort in a series of "safe houses" (reminiscent of crack houses), inhabited by a bizarre assortment of would-be magicians, she cobbles together the tools she needs to perform the magic Quentin had acquired in the "safe orderly system of Brakebills." Grossman manages to infuse the story with provocative explorations of the nature of heroism, the presence of magic in the "real" world and the eternal human quest for happiness and fulfillment.
In a recent Wall Street Journal profile on authors of literary fiction who've turned to fantasy and science fiction, Grossman asserted, "We are the mainstream. Literary fiction is a subculture." While that point is open to debate, if he and his colleagues keep turning out novels of this quality they'll doubtless attract a new cadre of avid readers. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer