![]() ![]() ![]() If you’re going for this series, do start at the beginning, and I really think that if you have even the smallest interest in magic and how irresponsible people can be with it, then it’s worth checking in and spending some time in the company of some of the most intelligent magicians of all time.Finally! Lev Grossman had sought to use a line from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the epigraph for The Magician King, but the intricacies of intellectual property law prevented it. There’s a lot of wisdom about books in here, especially the repeated wisdom that you can never unread a book, so be careful which ones you choose.įrankly, as a series, it is a thing of beauty and I’ll probably end up returning to it again at some point and discover many, many things I missed or don’t remember from the first time round. Perhaps it ends too abruptly, but that might just be me always wanting to know what happens next, and there’s definitely a quite literal dues ex machina quite late in the story, but you can forgive it (just) because everything else has been so smart. Without trying to give too much away, this book contains a flying billiards table, a moving chalk man, a room in a library that contains all the novels that were never written, time spent in the mind of a blue whale, a potential explanation for why ghosts are happy to stay ghosts, and the most powerful spell ever encountered. Whatever causes him to produce his ideas must be pretty special indeed, and I want some of it. Grossman is a very smart writer and his style is beautiful. There’s not too much exposition on what has come before, but we do get lots of long stories from the characters about things we didn’t see first time round. Everything ties together but you better have a good memory because there are things brought back to the forefront here that haven’t been relevant since the first book, and given it’s been two and a half years since I read that, my memory is a bit shaky. Like the previous two installments, Grossman fills this one with a wonderful series of interlocking narratives, taking the reader on a journey backwards and forwards through time, teaching us things we haven’t yet learnt, and explaining things that have so far been unexplained. With time rapidly running out, they must try and find a way to save their kingdom before the apocalypse comes and wipes everything out.Īnd on top of all of this, the ghost of Quentin’s ex-girlfriend Alice has started appearing at mirrors throughout the multiverse, which is probably not a good thing. The clock trees are running out of sync, the daily eclipses have stopped, and even the animals have started going a bit funny. Meanwhile, back in Fillory, Eliot and Janet, the High King and Queen, are coming to terms with the fact that the world appears to be ending. ![]() Quentin and Plum join the team and soon find themselves up to their necks in some of the most powerful magic they’ve yet encountered. The bird says that the contents are valuable but claims not to know what they are. They are given a task by a blackbird: track down two thieves known only as the Couple and steal an unstealable suitcase from them. Now unemployed and with even less direction than before, he finds that he has been summoned to a bookstore where several other magicians have gathered. And then something terrible happens and he has to leave, and so does one of his students, Plum, a highly talented witch who seems to have her own private link to Fillory. Dedicating his non-teaching time to decoding the page, he develops further passion for magic and its wonder. However, he is also distracted by a page he stole from a book in the Neitherlands – the world that exists between the worlds – which seems to contain some kind of very heavy duty magic. He’s not sure how pleased they’ll be to see him, but Dean Fogg allows him to join the teaching staff, where he proves to be a competent teacher. He manages to find his way back to his old college, Brakebills, where he learnt so much of his magic. Now forbidden to return by the ram god Ember, he is alone in the world and has no direction. The book opens with Quentin Coldwater back in the real world, banished from the fantasy land of Fillory which, until recently, he was the High King of. NOTE: Below there will be spoilers for those who haven’t yet read The Magicians or The Magician King. So I’m going to crack on and, please be careful, there are spoilers ahead. Not that I’m packing in this blog, but nonetheless the completion of a series – particularly a very good one – is always a moment for reflection. The first one, The Magicians, was my first ever review, and this has a weird sense of a circle closing. A year and a day after my review of The Magician King, I finally produce one for the final book in the trilogy, The Magician’s Land. “The letter had said to meet in a bookstore.” ![]()
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