Texas Book Festival
Author Lev Grossman on magic, lazy deities and cursing
Oct 21, 2011 | 2:10 pm
Lev Grossman's second novel Codex became a surprise bestseller in 2004, allowing him the creative freedom to create 2009's wildly ambitious The Magicians. The book, right on the line between literary fiction and fantasy novel, follows Brooklyn teenager Quentin Coldwater as he attends a Hogwarts-esque magic academy called Brakebills, graduates and experiences recognizable post-graduate ennui—and then finds out that Fillory, a very Narnia-like magical land from his favorite childhood books, is a real place. The Magicians won raves for it's ambitiously unique take on the logistics and perils of magic, and its very human, complex characters.
August saw the release of its highly anticipated sequel, The Magician King. On the eve of his appearances during both days of the Texas Book Festival, we spoke with Lev Grossman about making magic seem like an accomplishment, having his characters speak like real people and the recent announcement of a Magicians television series in the works.
First, as a huge fan I have ask: ideally when would you see a third Magicians book coming out?
Well, the first one took five years, and the second one took two years, so extrapolating from that, point eight years from now a new Magicians book should appear. But it won't actually, because I don't think I can the get time down under two years, so we're looking at 2013. Summer of 2013, mark your calendars!
The Magician King ends in a much more final way than The Magicians, but it's completely open ended. Do you have a vague plan of where it would go from there?
I think a "vague plan" is a good way of putting it. When I write a book I tend to know what the beginning is and what the ending is. I've got the beginning and the ending, but the middle parts are still shrouded in mystery.
Is it something you see as a three part series only?
I think a trilogy has a nice arc to it. To me, the grammar of a trilogy seems very simple and natural. For some reason stories seem to fall into three parts in a fairly easy way. So I'm going to say trilogy.
Now you're on the record.
Well, I reserve the right to maybe go back and add a fourth book. I feel like, if Ursula Le Guin did it with the Earthsea books, then that makes it okay.
I love the treatment of magic in both books, both as something that takes hard work to master and something with real consequences. Was that a conscious response to other fantasy that you've read, that treats it with less weight?
I think it's fair to say that it was a conscious response to a lot of things that I've read. It was very important to me to get the magic right, and I had strong feelings about how magic would work, if it worked. I was asked the other day in an interview whether I believed in magic, and I said "No." Because magic doesn't work, but I felt bad, as if I were destroying somebody's dream. So it was very important to me, certainly, that magic be hard. I always felt that if you were going to be a magician, there must be a reason why everybody isn't a magician, it must be incredibly difficult. You rarely see what the work involved is.
And likewise, magic having consequences was very important to me, and that's what separates fantasy literature from fantasies in the psychological sense. When you're having a fantasy you can do anything you want, but when you're writing fantasy you can do a lot of things, but you can't do everything you want. I'm not alone in this, of course, I feel like one of the great shifts in fantasy over the past few decades has been towards rationalizing magic and making clear the trade-offs that come with it. Le Guin certainly did that, but you see it just as much in George R. R. Martin. Or Robert Jordan, Patrick Rothfuss, there's been a lot of attention to the economy of it—I don't want to claim "I'm the reformer of magic!" or anything, lots of people are doing similar things, and I think it's very important.
There was an element to both books that felt very psychologically plausible amidst all the fantasy elements. There was no "ultimate evil" to fight, even in Fillory, for example.
It was something, again, that I consciously was trying to get away from. Again, not for some great high reason, but when it came time to write a villain, I just never bought into Sauron as a psychological being, which made him always seem a little bit flat and un-scary to me. Voldemort seems more plausible, but again just not that interesting. He seems like a sociopath, which is fine, there are definitely people like that, but I was more interested in someone who had feelings but decided to be evil anyway. And of course no one in the books is perfectly good or perfectly evil, and sometimes they don't even know if they're doing good or evil. There's just no convenient moral compass.
Probably the biggest difference between Narnia and Fillory is the lack of any major religious underpinnings in your version. What led to that?
Religion's always been a funny thing for me: I'm not one of those people that consider the Narnia books Christian propaganda on a fundamental level. But from a practical point of view, I always felt bothered by Aslan as a deity, and the way he deployed his power. I felt as though there were a lot of problems in Narnia, and Aslan spent a hell of a lot of time playing peekabo with Lucy in the woods rather than actually solving them. Why didn't he stop those battles in Prince Caspian where so many Narnians died? Why did he wait till the end to turn up? It just bothered me. So I felt strongly that Fillory, like Narnia, should be a world that had a god in it, and not just somewhere or anywhere, but literally in a particular place walking around and doing things. I felt as though I should get into that question, of why he didn't simply solve everything- and the answer turned out to be that he was a bit shabby, and kind of a jerk.
Why did you decide to have your characters, unlike most fantasy characters, use pop culture references and curse?
For some reason I find it really funny. The particular fantasy tradition I write in, which is the tradition of C. S. Lewis and Rowling, is extremely British. There's always been a lot of Americans that worked in epic fantasy, as far back as Robert E. Howard, but we expect characters in this kind of fantasy to speak in this very correct, English-English. So I never stop finding it funny when someone says, you know, "dude, you really fucked up that spell. What the hell?" Forcing the genre into that kind of diction seemed important to me. One of the biggest experiments of The Magicians was taking this tradition and transplanting it to American soil. What kind of things grew there when you did that? So I wanted to constantly remind people that we weren't in England, and the way the characters spoke was the main way of doing that. And also I just found it very funny.
I probably laughed the loudest when a being in The Magician King is described as bald and silvery in appearance. I thought to myself: “Like the Silver Surfer.” And a few lines later: “It looked a little like the Silver Surfer.”
I just thought that's what everybody would be thinking, that it really looks like him. So I thought if everybody's thinking something, somebody has to say it. There's a point early on when they stumble on this odd circle in the forest, and all Quentin can think to say is "Man, this place is enchanted as balls." That's all he comes up with. Probably somebody would say it.
I think that accessibility is part of why The Magicians was recently optioned for television by Fox. Congratulations on that, by the way.
It's exciting, it's something that I've been working on behind the scenes for a really long time. At least two years. The stars have to align for a deal like that go through, and they did.
What involvement would you like to have in the series as it develops?
What tends to be written into those contracts, and was written in to mine, is that I work on the project as a “creative consultant.” And I think that that's purposefully vague, and I think that my role will emerge from whatever dynamic forms between me and most importantly the writers, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz. So it's not clear—I certainly don't have any sort of veto power. I'm hoping to be part of the conversation.
Do you have any interest in writing for television, or movies, in the long term? You style would seem to lend itself well to that.
The weird thing is that I don't. When I started talking to people in Hollywood about this stuff, I thought, yeah, I can work my way into movies and TV. But I found that I had no interest in it at all, I'm really just a novel person and I always have been. It's taken me forty years to figure out how novels work, I'm not going to spend the next forty figuring out how tv show work. I think I'm going to leave that one to the pros.