This post might contain spoilers for Grossman’s The Magicians , Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Abercrombie’s The First Law and Shattered Sea and Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy is a series of books that has stuck in my mind ever since I read them back in the fall of 2014. It hit so many buttons for me mentally that it feels like a book I could have written (if I could write!) and given its popularity I am apparently not the only one touched by it. I will even go out on a limb and say it is a defining epos of our time. Explaining why will involve a bit of a detour so tag along!
I am no historian of fantasy but it is obvious to me that fantasy has been getting darker. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) might have been the popular turning point, it amped up the realism and cynicism to a new level. In the books the “heroes” are fallible and morally corrupt, they do good things out of selfish motives and few have any moral standard they try to uphold. The villains are sadistic yet uncomfortably relatable and the main characters get slaughtered or die in trivial ways without any mercy given to the reader. If a character happens to be good and decent they more often than not end up getting impaled by a few feet of steel, goodness is equated with naivety in Martin’s world and naivety gets you killed mighty fast.
Martin has inspired a lot of followers, the foremost in my mind is Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy. Abercrombie keeps a lighter tone and cranks up the situational humor, but the themes of his books are pitch black. Abercrombie completely subverts the traditional hero trope, by the end you realize the heroes you have been cheering for are horrid, even worse than the villains. Abercrombie’s more recent young adult series, Shattered Sea, is just as bleak and the end makes you really despise some of the heroes. There are very few characters one can admire for their moral standards, everything is pretty much dark shades of gray except for a few bright light.
There are other authors that nail the dark mood, Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes, for instance, is one that falls somewhere in between Martin and Abercrombie, Morgan’s heroes are rather heroic but jaded due to how the world has treated them, the world itself is incredibly grim and hardly worth fighting or dying for.
The current state of the genre is darkness, heroes are far from role models and villains are ordinary flawed people thrust into dark situations. It is bleak, it is gritty and perhaps it is realistic. The darker parts of our nature are celebrated and larger themes like good vs evil are brushed aside or used only to show that humans capacity for evil is equal to any monsters. The books do have some kind of grand goal or fight though. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the white walkers seem to be pure forces of destruction and mayhem without any redeeming quality, in The First Law there is an evil wizard and his army, in A Land Fit for Heroes the world faces invasion. In those books, despicable things are done but there is some greater purpose (well, perhaps not in the Shattered Sea). The storylines are epic but the characters flawed.
Then we turn our eyes on The Magicians. The Magicians takes that darkness and boosts it, it is in some ways a deeper tale. Grossman uncannily captures the mindset of someone severely depressed. On the surface, the storyline is an adult version of Harry Potter mixed with Narnia. You have a bunch of gifted kids in a school of magic that ends up battling an evil wizard. That entire storyline is just a backdrop to the real fight though, the struggle against the bleak and pointless existence itself, how to find meaning in a world without meaning. I suspect that Grossman has struggled with depression in his life because it takes someone that has lived through it to write such a book and perhaps it takes a reader that has experienced it to fully appreciate the book. I have never encountered writing so infused with nihilism and bleakness while at the same time remaining entertaining and readable. Perhaps it is my own multi-year journey through depression that enables to me fully enjoy the book and identify with the protagonist so much. I would warn anyone currently in such a state of mind to avoid the book though because it sure won’t make you happier.
The entire series is a rollercoaster where we follow the protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, as he time and again encounters some purpose to his existence just to inevitably find that it, in the end, feels just as pointless as anything else. Even the death of his father is treated as a cold and distant event that barely touches him. Other characters in the book suffer far worse fates than Quentin, there is rape, mutilation, death and things worse than death. While those events motivate or drive the other characters to revenge or just overcoming the odds Quentin is simply slipping down into his depression. He is often an observer of the madness unfolding around him while he tries to make sense of why he is there and his own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The triviality of his personal problems contrasted with to the horror around him demonstrates the reality of depression, it is not always a rational response to horrific events.
So why is this book series a defining epos of our time? I only started thinking in those terms when I heard Jordan B Peterson talk about what Nietzsche meant with “God is dead”. Nietzsche was afraid of what humanity will do when we lose the external purpose to our existence, a fear that isn’t easy to discount. We now live in a world defined by moral and cultural relativism, where you are not supposed to hold any values over any other, where secularity has replaced God and where death is the end and nothing you do can change that. In such a world it is very hard to find a sense of purpose, we are after all just a bag of chemicals clinging to a rock in an uncaring universe whose complexity exceeds our capability of understanding. Grossman takes all those feelings and distills them into the Magicians, reading it and the rest of the books in the series is like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex. If you are a person who seeks external motivation than The Magicians is a crushing book.
Believing is perhaps “easier”, but belief is no longer a natural part for many in the western world. God is dead and it is up to us to find a meaning. Some throw themselves into fantasies, some devote their life to ideology, some put a gun into their mouth and some bafflingly don’t need any reason to just enjoy life. The Magicians ruthlessly examines the question of purpose and it will certainly touch anyone that has spent any time asking “why”. Just don’t expect to find any answers in the book, the book shows that purpose is something you create for yourself and no matter how grand your external life is you will never be happy if you don’t get the motivation from within.
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Source: In the Madhou.se – The Magicians and the meaning of life