A review of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians: A Portrait of the Artist as a Recovering Narniac:

Serious Readers of Harry Potter need to read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Grossman’s Magicians, in brief, is what the Potter Saga might have been if Rowling had let her Nabakov fancy collide and collude with her Narnian imagination.

Is the collision of the modern novel and high fantasy in The Magicians a pretty thing? Not always. In fact, frequently it’s jarring, even disturbing. But both the engagement in another world (as well as a world within our world — The Magicians embraces Hogwarts and Narnia) and the shock of realism in this setting and from the too real failings of adult postmoderns are fluidly combined in Grossman’s third novel.

I cannot say you’ll enjoy all or even most of the book if you love Harry Potter; but your appreciation and understanding of the postmodern fantasy novel, of which Rowling’s work is one example and only the most successful, will be extended remarkably by your time at Brakebills and in Fillory. The Magicians is largely about the experience of reading fantasy, and its rewards and dangers for self-understanding and relationship to the world. Grossman offers front and back, highs and lows, and serious readers will recognize their reflection as well as the shades of Lewis, Rowling, and White, not to mention Salinger, Roth, and Pynchon. [Read more…]

A HogPro in California wrote me last week about his trip to see the Half-Blood Prince movie and the consequent discussion he had with his wife about whether alchemical story elements can translate from page to screen and survive in such a way to have the signature cathartic effect such things have on readers. He said “No way” but the wife disagrees. He submits the question here for discussion, even arbitration.

First, the letter about the movie: [Read more…]

‘Arrabella Figg’ has written me with an idea of how to understand the Deathly Hallows in relation to Riddle’s Horcruxes. She writes: [Read more…]