Lev Grossman
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What exactly does one do with a degree in magic? Excepting the odd Hampshire student, it’s a dilemma confronted mostly by fictional characters, such as the recent graduates of Brakebills, the magical college in Upstate New York where Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was set. The answer, though, is not so different than it is for non-magical graduates: anything. You can do anything with a degree in magic, though in practice — and perhaps as a direct consequence — more often you wind up doing nothing. Quentin Coldwater, the titular king in Magicians sequel The Magician King, has left behind a vague and cushy sinecure to reign over Fillory, a Narnia-like kingdom, with three friends. Having saved the kingdom in the previous book, they don’t have a whole lot to do, except drink copious amounts of whiskey and gallop around the forest in “man-tights” looking for a quest. When the quest finally finds them, it brings Quentin directly back to the place all recent grads, magical or not, fear the most. As in The Magicians, Grossman manages to create a rich and dramatic adventure that remains honest about the drawbacks of having the whole world at your fingertips.
eMusic’s Jess Sauer spoke with Grossman about the benefits of youthful aimlessness, the psychology of fantasy, and the worst fistfight he never got into.
Compared to realist fiction, fantasy gives you a lot of latitude to let your imagination run riot. Have there ever been scenes or creatures that you’ve created and then realized they’re too over-the-top even for fantasy?
Oh man, you can go pretty far! I had a dragon in the first book that I cut out — it was just too Dungeons & Dragons — but then I went ahead and put it in the second book. You have to wait till the time is right for a dragon.
It’s funny about fantasy: Fantasy worlds are governed by very sharp rules. They’re not necessarily the rules of reality, or thermodynamics, or whatever, but fantasy worlds tend to play by psychological rules, which are very real. Your subconscious has its own laws. Fantasy worlds play by those rules, so it’s not like just anything can happen, though definitely different sorts of things happen. There are some things that you wouldn’t do in fantasy. For example — at least in my world, and in most fantasy novels — magic can’t raise someone from the dead. There are certain calamities, certain problems that it can’t solve. At the very least, there have to be dire consequences for using it to solve those problems.
That makes sense. In The Magician King, there are bargains and sacrifices that have to be made, but that’s also just true in life. That seems to be one the benefits of fantasy, that it allows you to explore everyday psychological issues in a more concrete way.
Yeah. I often get touchy and defensive when people refer to fantasy as escapist, because I don’t really think it is escapist. In fantasy, you leave reality, but only to reencounter it in transmographied form.
What I really like about this book, and The Magicians before it, is the idea of magic as a form of privilege that can be kind of oppressive in the same way that it’s helpful. For instance, Alice’s parents in the first book are kind of these bored people who just use magic to redecorate their house, and there are these loops Quentin goes into constantly, where despite having everything he wants, he’s still miserable.
I’m very influenced by Evelyn Waugh. He’s mostly a comic novelist, but he has one full-fledged masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. In his time, he was much criticized for writing about the upper classes. Everyone said, “Well, they don’t have real problems. You should be writing socially conscious fiction about the proletariat or something like that.” The fantasy writer’s predicament is in some ways a little bit similar. Why write about Harry Potter? Why not write about Dudley Dursley, who’s got some real problems coming to him down the line? It’s all in what you choose to use to talk about problems. You can use stories about magicians to talk about real problems. It’s just that magicians are sexier.
There’s an idea expressed in The Magician King that you really can’t go out and knock on trees looking for a quest. If you really overdo the striving, you’re probably going to mess things up. It seems like beyond getting educated and trained and preparing to deal with the future, the best you can do to find your purpose is to wander around in the forest a little bit. That idea seems to apply not just to the perils of being a 20-something magician, but of being a 20-something anything.
I definitely think so. You know that an author has sunk low when he starts quoting conversations with his shrink, but I’m going to go ahead and do that. I remember whining to my shrink about all these years that I wasted. In my 20s, I temped a lot, I just mooched around, not — to the naked eye — actually doing anything. I remember talking to him, like, “God, I can’t believe I wasted all those years, I’ll never get them back.” And my shrink said, “What makes you think that you wasted them? You were spending all this time getting ready and solving stuff away.” It’s a bit like Quentin, you know, you’re on the quest but you don’t know it yet. You’ll only figure that out after you’ve been on it for a few years.
When you’re engaged in world-building, how do you organize it? Do you outline the details of the world in the same way you’d outline the plot of a book, or do you let it unfold and create it as you write?
Those are the two options, right? I always think of Tolkien and Lewis, who wrote at the same time and were friends. Tolkien, before he started Lord of the Rings, he wrote himself entire Elvish dictionaries and things like that, getting everything planned out. Ridiculous amounts of stuff he’d never even use. Lewis just made up everything as he went along, and it drove Tolkien crazy. At one point, Lewis borrowed a place name from Middle Earth, but he misspelled it, and Tolkien was like, “How can you do that? That’s awful!” Lewis was the sloppiest world-builder imaginable. I think I’m somewhere in between. You make the world that the story needs, and then you’ve got these rules, and then in a funny way it starts feeding back into the story. You may have the story, and then you’re like, “Okay, here’s the world. But wait, if this is true, then the story has to go this way.” So you sort of push and pull from both directions. Or, I do, anyway.
Speaking of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, has writing these books put you in touch with any other fantasy writers you’d really admired before you started writing it yourself?
Yeah, actually. It’s sort of great, because I move both in fantasy-writer circles and then also in the kind of more literary circle, and I know some people on both sides. It’s very strange to meet people who you’ve spent literally dozens, if not hundreds, of hours reading their stuff. It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience, standing there and talking to Jonathan Franzen or George R.R. Martin. It’s hard not to panic, but if everybody panicked when they talked to Jonathan Franzen, no one would ever talk to him, so you just have to kind of pull yourself together. Pull yourself together, man, and talk to George R.R. Martin, who is an incredibly kind, friendly, warm person.
Martin is enjoying wider mainstream success due to the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. Not that he wasn’t wildly successful in the fantasy world to begin with, but he’s gaining more fans among people who previously had not really read much fantasy.
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic. I have been tracking and trying to promote George R.R. Martin’s work for years — that whole business of him being the American Tolkien was me, writing in Time. I think people still don’t give him enough credit for how incredibly radical his interpretation of the Tolkien tradition is. He is an interesting writer, and I think, ultimately, as important as any literary writer working today. He’s a radical and complicated guy. What he does is really not simple. So I’m still happy that people outside of fantasy are finding him. He should be read. Everyone should read George!
I’m interested in the role that science and religion play in your books. In this book, especially on Julia’s part, there’s a very strong desire to reconcile religion and science with magic. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. I didn’t grow up in a household that was religious at all, so I have to tread carefully. I don’t have any religious heritage that was passed down to me, and I don’t particularly identify with any of religion. My father’s Jewish and my mom was Anglican, but they both didn’t have much to do with their religions. I have to tangle with religion because, basically, when you’re dealing with a magical universe, eventually you’re going to run into some people who are powerful enough that the only word for them is gods. If I’m saying something important about religion, that’s for somebody else to decide. As far as science, I’m just extremely interested in science. I cover technology for Time. I don’t like to leave my magic vague and mystical; I like to violate as few laws of physics as possible. So, if someone is, I don’t know, freezing some water using magic, well, I kind of want to know where the heat goes. It’s got to go somewhere else, so let’s save as many laws of thermodynamics as we possibly can. To me, that makes the magic feel more real.
Are you planning a followup? I’m not going to give away the end of The Magician King, obviously, but there’s ambiguity as to whether it’s over or not.
It doesn’t seem really over, does it, at the end of The Magician King? Yeah, I’ll write one more. I know a medium amount about what happens in it. But I’ve got to finish this tour first!
Did you know there’d be a second book while you were writing the first?
I can honestly say — and this says something about my ability to plan for the future — that it never once occurred to me that there would be another book after the first one. The Magicians took me five years, and I did it all on spec. There wasn’t any contract, and I hadn’t talked to publishers about it. It was so hard for me, every time I sat down to work on it, to convince myself that there was some chance that this would actually be published. I had to get past that. I would spend like half an hour just trying to buck up the nerve to go work on this thing. I never even thought about what would happen after it. I barely believed that it would be published in the first place.
I’m hoping you’re convinced now.
Yeah, it’s starting to sink in!
One last question: there are some pretty epic fight scenes in your books. Have you ever been in a real fight?
Ha, I can honestly say I’ve never been in an actual fight. I should probably go out and get beaten up for research. When I was in high school — I guess most people do their fighting in high school — I wasn’t a fighter. I wasn’t a lover, either. Whatever you are if you’re not a lover or a fighter, that was me.
You were the third option.
Yeah, I was door No. 3.
