Novelist and critic Lev Grossman's 2009 grownup fantasy novel, The Magicians, almost demanded a sequel. In The Magician King he delivers it with verve, resuming the story of Quentin Coldwater in this richly imagined, emotionally satisfying and philosophically challenging new work.
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 what starts out as an innocent journey to the farthest reaches of his realm and soon finds himself consumed by a sometimes perilous quest that ranges 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, but he leavens the homage he pays to those predecessors with sharp bursts of humor, often winking 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, but whose memory of her close encounter with that institution somehow was never expunged. 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." As the novel unfolds, Julia becomes enmeshed in the ever more dangerous efforts of a band of young magicians ensconced in a French farmhouse who are determined to erase the line between the human and the divine.
Slashing swordplay, along with profusion of dire predicaments and equally daring escapes sufficient to satisfy the most demanding reader of fantasy adventures, propel the novel's plot. Alongside this, 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
Shelf Talker: In a sequel to The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater and his Brakebills compatriots return to the land of Fillory for a daring quest.