Its curious that Syfy wouldsneak-peekThe Magiciansthe week thatStar Wars: The Force Awakensmaterializes in theaters.
From a certain mind-tricky point of view, Id say the web link was trolling its own audience.
Time to put on a gray suit and get rich, I guess.
Credit: Lorenzo Agius/Syfy
I joke, of course.
(It was a Jar Jar costume.
In comic-book parlance,The Magiciansfeels like a Vertigo comic deconstruction of the wonderland hero category of fantasy literature.
Its Harry Potter, distressed with aHeavy Metalacid bath.
Quentin is The Boy Who Hasnt Begun to Live.
Here, the shows gloom and grit give way to a world thats bright and colorful yet suspiciously sterile.
The exterior evokes history, but the interiors lack soul theyre modern, all business.
What happened to them?!
Usually schools in this genre proceed from some stated or hidden moral mission to groom heroic character.
If thats in the Brakebills charter, then itsreallywell hidden.
Now what you do after that is entirely up to you.
If you want to take over the world, we dont teach that, but give it a go.
Brakebills becomes even more interesting as allegory when Quentin discovers that its a gateway or maybe a blockade?
to a magical realm that Quentin knows well: its Fillory, the Edenesque otherworld of his favorite fiction.
During a brief visit to Fillory, Quentin is told that Brakebills cant be trusted.
The world and perspective ofThe Magiciansis more immediately interesting than the characters.
He looks like Robert Sean Leonard fromDead Poets Societybut with hippier hair and zero carpe diem spirit.
Hes as interesting and not as that.
Im currently more interested in a parallel narrative about Quentins childhood friend (and true love?)
Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve).
And who or what is the villain?
Is he a demon from Fillory?
Or might he a gone-native visitor warped by a world not meant for permanent residence?
While writing this piece, I came acrossan interview Grossman gave several years ago.
And as a result I didnt pay much attention to what was going on around me.
I wasnt very interested in this world.
For me part of growing up was figuring out how to break up with Narnia.
I think I did that a lot later in life than most people.
The question Grossman was answering Can dreams and nostalgia ruin ones present?
But when does our fandom and nostalgia for old pop dreams even artfully rebooted and recycled ones turn beastly?
Maybe it can say something about how to carry our past forward without being owned by it.
Or maybe it will come to own us, too.B.
