AJC DECATUR BOOK FESTIVAL
Lev Grossman. “What’s the Point of Book Reviews?” panel, noon, Aug. 31, Marriott Conference Center Ballroom A. Reading of “The Magician’s Land,” 5 p.m., Aug. 31, First Baptist Decatur Sanctuary Stage. www.decaturbookfestival.com
Lev Grossman will be the first to admit he’s no J.K. Rowling.
The novelist and book critic for Time Magazine took inspiration from Rowling’s Harry Potter series for “The Magicians,” his trilogy of books set partially at a New York school for magic called Brakebills. The final volume, “The Magician’s Land” (Viking) has just been published, following its bestselling predecessors. And while Grossman doesn’t command a legion of fans on Rowling’s level, his series has definitely won admirers.
“I remember the first time I had a reading and saw someone in a home-made Brakebills uniform in the audience. I thought, ‘We’ve clearly crossed the Rubicon now,’” says Grossman.
Compared to the all-ages appeal of Harry Potter, Grossman’s books apply a mature sensibility and rich writing style to a genre that typically targets younger readers. Grossman’s protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, discovers magic to be not a source of flying broomstick games but a demanding, obsessive practice that takes its toll on students and faculty alike.
Grossman’s books use magic as metaphor for the pressures and concerns that face adults, as if Donna Tartt’s obsessive characters were attending Hogwarts. It is a highly arduous skill, demanding lots of boring study and practice, like a stand-in for the unglamorous side of any creative process or craft.
“When I was younger, I was quite a serious student of cello for about 10 years. I was never especially gifted but worked very hard. It was always a struggle,” Grossman says. “There’s a lot of that in my description of learning magic.”
In “The Magicians” – which the SyFy cable channel is developing into a pilot in hopes of making it a series — Quentin discovers an alternate world called Fillory that’s intentionally reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia. The second book, “The Magician King,” sends Quentin on a quest in Fillory with detours in the real world.
No such genre template informs the final volume, “The Magician’s Land.” “I wanted to send Quentin back over the ground he’d been over before, to Brakebills, to Antarctica, to Fillory, to see how much he’s changed,” Grossman says.
The series features otherworldly creatures and page-turning adventure sequences, and an Ocean’s 11-style magic heist proves a highlight of “The Magician’s Land.” But in addition to glimmers of ironic humor, the author also consistently applies the coming-of-age concept to adulthood, revealing that self-actualization is not something that ends with graduation.
“I think coming of age is something that happens at least twice in a lifetime,” says Grossman. “In my 30s, I definitely felt like I had a lot of growing up to do, and it wasn’t easy. Quentin comes of age at least once in each of these books. In ‘The Magician’s Land,’ it’s the last time. He knows who he is, he learns of the power he has, and he has to decide what to do with that power.”
Quentin’s journey shares similarities with Grossman’s path to best-selling author. When he began “The Magicians” in 2004, “I was in a dark place in my life, feeling very stuck personally, professionally and creatively,” he says. “I wrote two books before ‘The Magicians,’ and was quite a slow and deliberate writer. With ‘The Magicians,’ for the first time I felt the story run away from me. It felt so wonderful and wild and ecstatic, and fed back to my description of magic. Magic becomes explicitly about creative action. In a lot of ways, I was writing my own story – Quentin goes from feeling very powerfulness to feeling very powerful, that’s what happened to me [as a writer].”
Grossman won’t rule out returning to “The Magicians” setting in a future project but definitely plans to take a new direction for his next book. “I’m very excited about creating a new world — maybe overly excited. I’ve got four or five ideas, and I have to settle on one.”
He has learned that having highly creative fans can be a downside. “Twice someone has arrived [at events] as The Beast, a character that appears in lectures in ‘The Magicians.’ That’s very disorienting. It’s the only part of the books I wrote based on a dream I had, a fairly upsetting dream. Seeing someone in the costume, for a moment I thought ‘Oh my God, it’s really happening.’”
Fortunately for Grossman, the dreams to come true have been his good ones.
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