Category Archives: Not Manga

Review: The Magicians, and The Magician King

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I don’t normally use this blog as a way to discuss non-manga fiction, but a few weeks ago my residency position had me across the country in the great city of N’Awlins for the American Society of Heath-System Pharmacists’ annual Midyear conference to present some of my research as well as network with other clinical pharmacists from around the US, and in those brief moments where I wasn’t attending CE presentations, presenting research, interviewing residency candidates, meeting new people, catching up with fellow ONU alumni, or drinking hurricanes, I was feverishly consuming the most recent works of Lev Grossman.

The trigger for my original purchase of the first book came from a review of The Magician King from The Onion’s AV Club, which likened these novels to a Harry Potter of the real world – a fantasy novel that was more about people and how wretched they can be than the fantastic feats they could perform. I took the bait, and was enthralled by Grossman’s keen fiction.

The premise of the first novel is simple – a brilliant young man named Quentin, obsessed with novels about a magical land called Fillory (a Narnia of sorts) finds out, in a strange afternoon, that he has the ability to do magic, and that he, instead of being accepted to the halls of Stanford or some other prestigious Ivy-league school, will instead attend the similarly-prestigious and completely mysterious Brakebills School of Magic. He learns the craft of magic slowly throughout the first book, and falls in love with a young woman who will become the crux of the two novels – a woman named Alice. As he graduates and moves on to the real world, he finds that Fillory is a real place – a magical world where he and his other friends can live out the rest of their lives.

But not all is golden in Fillory, and neither is the real world. Neither, for that matter, are any of the characters in these two novels. Each of them has their warts, their tics, and their habits, and Grossman swings, spins, and twists them around stage until their basest desires and hideous natures are revealed, and then pushes them into the face of gods and delights when they spit in defiance. In the near-final portion of the book, Quentin loses things that are precious to him, but the world of Fillory is saved. It is an empty victory.

In the second novel, Quentin and a high-school friend named Julia, traverse the world of Fillory, and Earth and other lands in order to save the thing they both love most – magic. We learn about Julia, who appears briefly in the first novel as a broken and disturbed reject of the Brakebills School of Magic, and the darkness that permeates her character and her life. Oddly, once the dust of the action has settled, Quentin again has lost something precious.

Loss is the central theme of The Magicians and The Magician King. We watch the characters react to loss, whether it is a loss of their faculties, their relationships, their friends, and sometimes, their humanity in the name of heroism. Grossman seems to look into our sense of optimism and longing for happy endings, and chidingly tells us, “But remember children, this is how things actually happen.” It is this sense of loss and how real and biting it can be that has stuck in my craw even now as I look back on the books.

Grossman has a sense of the dramatic, but he also understands the balancing act each person must reconcile as they go about their lives, and he understands what drives people to make terrible, life-altering decisions. Amongst the bad choices and hedonistic tastes of his characters, Grossman sprinkles pop culture references, and brings into focus the books (The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter) which he so lovingly deconstructs.

The Magicians and The Magician King are books that every fantasy reader should read, but not because they are escapist, like the rest of the genre – they should read these novels because they are so rooted in the human. Grossman gives magic its due, but reminds us, sometimes gently, and sometimes with the force of a swinging hammer, that life is neither an escape, nor a fantasy. Our choices often have unintended consequences, and these consequences can unhinge us and make us who we are. Or who we are meant to be.

Thoughts on Paying For It, and Chester Brown’s Polemic

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My comics reading this week was confined to a few select books, but the most interesting, and perhaps controversial of these books is Chester Brown’s Paying For It, an autobiographical comic dealing with his life as a john (person who hires prostitutes). Paying For It is both a work of art, and a polemic, arguing that romantic love is a flawed societal norm that results in pain and suffering and the “monogamous possession” in marriage and relationships is inherently evil while concurrently trumpeting the truth and beauty of paid-sex relationships. These arguments are political in nature; throughout the story, and also in a lengthy appendix, sets up straw man arguments in order to forcefully (and sometimes ineptly) knock them down.

The book is set up into two distinct parts; first, Brown’s cartooning work, and second, his appendices, where information regarding his opinions, arguments, and research can be found. While I find the former to be a fascinating look at a man turning 40, saddled with personal disappointment in relationships and his conversion into a john, I find the later part to be largely detrimental to the composite whole.

Brown’s initial argument that prostitution should be decriminalized and not regulated is founded in libertarian ideology, and is pragmatic, and fairly solid reasoning. His points regarding the evils of romantic love, as succinctly argues, are:

“more of a personal exorcism than a universal truth, but more specific arguments also grate against lived experience. Readers with any knowledge of substance abuse, for example, may find themselves mystified by Brown’s assertion that dependency boils down to rational choice and has no physical symptoms (appendix 17).”

Other arguments are just as mystifying:

Brown writes with authoritarian energy, making statements as matter-of-fact that can only possibly come from a very certain moral and political belief system. It is his excessive posturing and defiance that leads the author to further argue his points in such a way as to make the entire discourse less of an argument for legalized prostitution and more of a browbeating for any person or group that disagrees with his notions of self, property, sexual liberty, and paid sex. Brown’s insistence that humans are always capable of dispassionate choice is often ridiculous when discussing sexuality. Certainly money is not the key driver of human relationships, nor can it truly create or mend significant personal closeness. Brown’s arguments are played too roughly from his own personal experience, and his assertions regarding pimping, sex-slavery, and coercion are naive at best, and often self-serving beyond believable limits.

These things being said, Brown’s comic, as a separate entity from his appendix diatribe, is actually quite interesting. Brown has an eye for panel composition, and he has distilled his cartooning into the very basics, each character carved as if from stone. Noah Berlatsky of The Hooded Utilitarian has some interesting points on how the perspective and distancing of Brown’s illustrations undercut his point that sex is both spiritual and joyful. I thought that this was particularly interesting, and I resonate with most of Berlatsky’s stated opinions of the illustration, but I am unsure as to whether or not the distance in these panels is intended to distance the reader from the sexual act, show how the act of sex eliminates the ordinary and the mundane, or just make the reader into some sort of voyeur.  The comics themselves are much more open to argument than his writings – his friends and fellow cartoonists argue about the morality and legality of prostitution, and the sex-workers themselves also assault Chester’s worldview. This is welcome, since most of the appendix is Brown being insufferable.

Clearly Paying For It is a complex book; its discussion is relevant, and it stands as a memoir of a life of a middle-aged man trying to find his way both emotionally and sexually. It also acts as a grand humanizer, despite its illogical arguments, of those involved in sex work. The book lends itself to rereading and discussion, which is a great characteristic for any type of written work. I am not a staunch fan of Chester Brown, but I believe that Paying For It was an enlightening reading experience because of all the great analysis and discussion surrounding the volume.

Recommended Reading:

There is quite a bit of discussion around the comics blogging part of the web, and I’m sure I didn’t collect all of them, but here are the discussions that I found particularly interesting or thought provoking.

A Chester Brown Notebook – Jeet Heer

DWYCK: Sacred and Profane Love –

Slowly Paying For It: God and the Machine – Noah Berlatsky at the Hooded Utilitarian

Untitled Chester Brown Article – Matt Seneca

The Comics Reporter Review – Tom Spurgeon

NY Times Review – Dwight Garner