Fillory and Further

[shewhomust]

At boybear's urging, I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. I took some persuading: I had read Grossman's Codex, and thought it was fine, an entertaining thriller, but not fine enough to make me want more. boybear explained that The Magicians centred on what were clearly the Narnia books with the serial numbers (only just) filed off, and that I would find this interesting: and yes, I was intrigued, so eventually I gave in and read it.

I found it absolutely gripping, but not necessarily in a good way. I don't enjoy the feeling of apprehension - of dread, even - that comes from a narrative which persuades me that something bad is going to happen, that the protagonist is making an awful mistake ... If this is a fault, it's a fault in me, and it's why I'm not, on the whole, a fan of suspense or horror. The Magicians is not horror, but it's quite upfront that there is darkness in its fantasy: "Power comes at a terrible price" proclaims the front cover, anxious to establish that yes, this is fantasy, but it's adult fantasy. So I anticipated that terrible things would happen, and they did, but I also anticipated terrible things which didn't happen, or which hadn't happened by the end of the book. I found the central character annoying in ways that suggested he would get his comeuppance; I found the school for magicians positively sinister. These things remained unresolved (Read the rest of the trilogy, said boybear); other things were just me reacting in ways that the author apparently did not intend, so that [minor spoiler redacted], which I thought was signalling itself as a Really Bad Idea turned out just to be another cool invention -

Because there are some very cool inventions. Grossman is good on the details of the magical landscape: Quentin's room at the school, built into the curve of a tower, the outer wall stone and the inner wall panelled with cubby holes, who wouldn't like to study in such a room? The topiary animals that roam the maze, the court where the magical game of welters is played - just details, but such decorative details. Not entirely original, obviously, but that's deliberate: this may be a book about magic, but it is also a book about books about magic, and although the Narnia books are its central concern, it has time for others too. "Harry Potter for grown-ups" says the Guardian review on the cover of The Magician King, the second book in the series, and I think that is harsh but fair.

If I were a Harry Potter fan, though, I might disagree: yes, there is a magic school, or rather college, but Grossman keeps being distracted from it to talk about a completely different series of books, Fillory and Further, a series of five adventures published in England in the 1930s but set earlier, in which a family of children find their way into the magical land of Fillory. This is close enough to Narnia that I wonder whether there is some significance in the differences between them: in setting the books a generatiion earlier, or in reducing the number from seven to five. (Or perhaps it is just a question of deniability, of making a difference between this invented myth and any real author, living or dead: Christopher Plover is certainly not C.S. Lewis.) But The Magicians is packed with Easter eggs, with unmistakable allusions for the reader to enjoy identifying. My favourite of these is probably the magical transit point, transformed, in a very pretty twist on the original, from the Wood between the Worlds into a chequerboard of Italianate city squares, each with a fountain at its centre. Fillory has talking beasts and naiads and dryads and its own curious gods, twin rams called Ember and Umber, which I find simultaneously a brilliant piece of naming and a slightly off-key equivalent of its original.

Is that off-key note deliberate? Like many readers, I am not comfortable with the only-just-below-the-surface Christian content of Narnia, but removing it from its Fillorian analogue has its own problems. Fillory is decorative (did I mention its moon, which not only looks like but sctually is an elegant crecent?) but if its gods are not, at some level, real gods, does it lack meaning? And what am I to make of the Cozy Horse, almost the first named inhabitant of Fillory, not so much an "affectionate equine" as an ambulant bed, evidence of the "strong whiff of the English nursery" which lingers about the Fillory books? Clearly, as boybear said, I was going to have to read the rest of the trilogy; but first I needed to revisit Narnia itself.

I had expected this post to be about Narnia, with a bit of a preamble about The Magicians. It seems I had more to say about that than I thought: well, life is full of surprises. Two things, then. One is that as soon as I picked up Prince Caspian (I started with Prince Caspian, because reasons) I realised that Grossman never mentions illustrations in the Fillory books* - yet they seem to be for younger readers for the Narnia books, and Pauline Baynes's illustrations are a huge part of my perception of Narnia. The other is that by the time I put down The Silver Chair I was convinced that for all their faults, the Narnia books are better and more important than The Magicians - and that I really hope that reading the rest of the trilogy will not make me feel the need to re-read The Last Battle.

ETA:*Finally, in Magician's Land, we learn that the books were illustrated by Plover himself. At best the illustrations are dismissed as "charmingly amateurish" admittedly not by Grossman directly, but by a character who may have a personal bias about how things should look ("Plover had the most ignorant, sentimental ideas of what a dwarf looked like"). Oh, well ...