The Magician’s Land brings a stunning fantasy trilogy to a close

Lev Grossman: I didn't know that much, honestly. I knew that I wasn't done with Brakebills. We had to find a way to get back there. I had this idea about the land itself. If Quentin — having become who he's supposed to be — learned to understand his place with other people, he was ready to get to work, to figure out what his life's work is supposed to be, figure out what for him magic is for. And as it turns out, it's this strange, wonderful act of creation.

Lev Grossman: My own 20s were a pretty spectacular wipeout. They were a series of professional and personal failures that felt like it was never going to end. I felt very conscious that the fantasy novels that I loved — for example, Narnia and Harry Potter, but lots and lots of them — they tend to leave that period out.

You can think of it as this whole generation raised on Harry Potter, and then you get to the end of Deathly Hallows, and there's a big blank spot. He graduates high school, and then you see him again in the epilogue and he's well-established. How do you get from the one to the other? I felt as though that was something that I had a lot of trouble grappling with, myself personally. I felt like I wanted to tell a story about that, but tell it through the lens of fantasy.

Lev Grossman: I'm very interested in one of the conventions of fantasy novels, which is the specialness of the hero, or the heroes. The hero is special. He's chosen. He's singled out by destiny to do great things. I wanted to write a fantasy novel, but to think about people who aren't chosen. What it's like to be one of the many unchosen ones, not marked out for any particular path or greatness. What's that experience like?

I'm also conscious of books like the ones that I write where you're in the real world, but then there's a magical subset of it. There's this built in snobbery, which is that we care about the magic people. We don't care about the rest of them. I wanted to break that distinction down a little bit, too.

Lev Grossman: I guess for me, I wanted to write about people who had a problem with the world, who felt as though who they were and what they needed, there was a big gap between that and the reality that they were trying to cope with. For me, magic was a way of bridging that gap.

I always felt like I was dealing with all of these strong emotions, a lot of anger, and I struggled with depression as well, but they didn't matter. They didn't change the world around me. Nobody would walk you by or would even know that I felt like I was falling in on myself. Magic is a way of letting those feelings out, and I feel like people who did magic — if magic were real — would be the struggling ones, the angry ones, the depressed ones, because they felt so badly. They have these huge feelings inside them that couldn't get out.

Lev Grossman: There is a link for me between magic and creation. It's one of the things that magic stands in for in the books. I guess it is this funny act of taking reality, and kind of reshaping it, bending it to your will, and turning it into something that more resembles what you've got in your head. Magicians do it in this super cool way because they have awesome powers. Lacking awesome powers, all I could do is take it and then reshape it in the form of art. I feel that's common. It's a good skeleton key when reading fantasy novels. If you want to know how the writer feels about their art, look at the way they feel about magic.

Lev Grossman: I don't watch very much TV. With a job, and writing, and kids, it's one of the things that takes a hit. The Sopranos was definitely an influence, though. That really disenchanted take on an established genre was something that made a huge impression on me.

And of course, in terms of comics, Watchmen was one of the formative reading experiences in my life. Watchmen and Miracleman were just transformative for me. I looked at the way works like that are critiquing a genre, or they're interrogating a genre and looking at its assumptions and where they hold up and when they don't. But they're also telling a great story in that genre. Watchmen destroys superhero stories. It just overturns everything that's sacred about them, but it's also the greatest superhero story ever told. I feel like that's just one of the cool things about art is that you can do both at the same time.

Lev Grossman: It's really complicated. I read an academic paper once about Magicians, which was making the case that [C.S.] Lewis is like my Dad and [J.K.] Rowling is like my Mom, and I'm having an Oedipal struggle with them. A take away from that is that I should never read academic papers about Magicians. But there's a lot of truth to it. That complicated feeling one has about one's parents. One loves them, but one is also super pissed off with them. And those two emotions kind of alchemize into this one, very complicated interchange I often thought about when I was writing The Magicians. I thought of myself saying to Lewis, "I love your books, so much but there's so much they leave out. There's so much that they didn't tell me that I was going to have to deal with." And I sort of very badly wanted to say that to Lewis in this loving but also aggrieved and disappointed spirit.

Lev Grossman: Definitely when I first read them, when I was 8 or 9, they gave me everything I wanted. They just checked every box. I loved them so much. A lot of people talk or write about kind of falling out of love with those books because of the Christian themes. That never bothered me at all. It was never a big issue for me, possibly because I was raised without any religion. It's just not a sore spot for me.

But I think that when I was a teenager, I was really feeling the lack in my life of a kind of powerful mentor figure. I felt as though I was waiting for someone like Aslan, or Gandalf, or Dumbledore, to come along and get me back on track and help me figure out, if I was going to go on this incredibly long, arduous journey, where's the path, anyway? I didn't even know what direction to go.

I think I felt a looming sense that nobody was helping me the way that Aslan helped the Pevensies. And I became conscious also that Aslan doesn't help the Pevensies nearly as much as he could. He's more or less omnipotent, but he's always wandering around in the woods while Narnians are fighting and dying for whatever cause they're dealing with. Aslan, he sort of plays peek-a-boo with them. He's sort of like, "I'm here. I'm gone." I felt myself, as a teenager, getting angrier and angrier about that. I felt as though, if he could have helped, he should have. And why wouldn't he, unless he's a very cruel, neglectful god?

Lev Grossman: There's a glib answer, which is also true. I've been having a lot of kids lately. I had a daughter born in 2010 and a son in 2012, and especially I think having a son made me think a lot about being a father and what a father is supposed to do. My own father was dying over the course of while I was writing The Magician's Land. He died about a month ago. So you can imagine, son arrives, father leaving, it was very much on my mind.

I was conscious that I hadn't dealt with it, but adults in The Magicians books have always been kind of like Peanuts cartoons adults and just off stage and [imitates] wah, wah, wah. You can't tell what they're saying. I felt as if I were avoiding something. I felt that I was avoiding the fact that one of the reasons Quentin is the way he is, and has so much trouble becoming a functioning adult, was that his parenting wasn't very good, and he's really angry about it. And he's got to work it through and get past it, and really understand that now that he is an adult, no one's going to come help him, no one's going to come fix the bad things about his childhood. He just has to metabolize them and move on. He had a hard time doing that.

Lev Grossman: Yeah, it's a new kind of relationship around this idea that he could be a mentor, which is that other thing that makes him feel like more of a grown-up. I felt like for various logistical reasons, it was totally impossible to make him a dad, and I really didn't want to. But I wanted him to have that feeling of being responsible for somebody. And he feels a bit responsible for Plum.

But also doing that he becomes aware that Plum respects him but also gives him a lot of shit. Trying to do that, trying to be a kind of parent figure for somebody, you really become conscious of a lot of your own shortcomings. You have a real sense of power, but also a real sense of what you can't do.

Lev Grossman: That's a question that I ask myself, and I'm not sure I know the answer. To me, the most marked thing about the progression of the trilogy is its refraction through these other characters who weren't initially built as point-of-view characters. Certainly, it's me growing as a writer, and being able to write from the point-of-view of people, who on the surface at least, are very different from me.

I think the turning point was writing Julia [in The Magician King]. Julia wasn't meant to be a big point-of-view character. She was meant to have a chapter where she told her story, because obviously there's lot of huge holes left in it after The Magicians. But when I started writing her, I really hit a vein. She just had so much to say, and she was so angry, I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and then she ended up filling up the other half of the book. So as it turned out, there were things I needed to say that Quentin couldn't say that had to be said from other points-of-view.

But it also, in a funny way, has to do with Quentin's growing up. One of the turning points of the trilogy, for me, is the first time Julia looks at Quentin, and we see him from the outside. I think Quentin, for the first time, is really getting a sense of how other people see him, and he himself is learning to see things, to empathize more and to see from other people's points of view. Weirdly enough, that ends up coming out structurally in the novel.

I feel like the way I'm talking about the book, it's like — I don't know — a kind of moody meditation on death, and life, and parenthood. It's actually supposed to be a sort of kick-ass fantasy novel, with that sort of stuff in there as well. It was very important to me that it be a lot of fun.

Lev Grossman: It's tricky, because I love fantasy so much, but I also really like writing against the conventions of it. So if you want to tell a quest story, but you're very uncomfortable with some of the conventions of quest stories, how do you do that? How do you break it down but leave it intact at the same time?

It was very important to me that it scratches whatever itch you have when you pick up a fantasy novel, which it didn't for a while. I had throw out the first third of it and start again, which is something that's never happened to me before. But I made the mistake of watching the movie Ronin halfway through while I was writing it. That movie, everyone talks about the car chases, but just from a narrative point of view structurally, it's just like a master class. It's so beautifully put together and so utterly engrossing. I was writing this book and watching Ronin and thinking, "Why would I so much rather be watching Ronin than reading this book? Why is Ronin so much more fun than this book that I'm writing?" Then I went back and wrote a scene, which if you watch the movie you could tell it's very much evokes this early scene where they're kind of putting together his team and thinking about committing this robbery. It was so important to me that it has that kind of thriller backbone. The Bourne Identity — the movie not the book — was a major, major influence on me. I felt that whatever I was going to say I was going to have to say it in a way that was very taut, in a way that borrowed as much as possible from those thrillers.

Lev Grossman: It's the thing I enjoy most about novels. It's the thing I enjoy most about stories. It's that wrong-footed moment where you feel like you're set up for something, and then the narrative jogs the other way. It snaps you around and suddenly makes you look at the world and the characters in a way that you hadn't before. I love it, and I do it as many times as possible.

There's a moment, for example, where we get the story that Janet tells about what she was doing, actually during The Magician King, when all the other characters were off saving the world. I felt like I was trying to set it up one way, that she going to have a certain kind of revelation, and then it completely sort of explodes in her face. It's a kind of anti-climax because it's not what you expect, but still exciting.

Lev Grossman: Yeah, almost all of them, Julia most of all. Julia was a genuine throwaway character and in the first draft of The Magicians, she never came back. She was in the fist scene, and then she just vanished. A lot of these characters, like Elliot and Janet, they showed up as kind of non-player characters, and then over time they became playable. I spent so much time with them that I realized that they were a bit more than stock characters. They had layers to them and I got very interested in them. I felt as though — it's a cliche but it's true — they were telling me things. They were saying, "Hey, we're in the story too, and we want to talk about how we feel about it." So I let them.

Lev Grossman: It's easy when you're writing fantasy to go down the rabbit hole and just get consumed by this inner world which is coming out of you. You don't do any research for it. You make it up, and you build it, and I could stay there for the rest of my life.

Time is a very good influence on me, because it sends me places and makes me talk to people, and not books people. I spend a lot of time of talking to engineers, people who build things, people who make changes in the real world, as opposed to what I do. It's a good thing for a writer to stay in contact with the real world, and it can be tough for a fantasy writer, because you spend so much time elsewhere. But working as a journalist keeps me in contact with reality.

Lev Grossman: I have learned things, because this knowledge changes sort of quietly as the trilogy goes along. When I wrote The Magicians, I started it at at time when I still thought of myself as a literary novelist. I wanted to be Jonathan Franzen or Jhumpa Lahiri or Zadie Smith. When I wrote The Magicians, it was a huge deal for me to put that aside, and say, "No, honestly, there are things that those books don't do for me, and I want to write a book that does those things." It was huge rebellion against my parents, who were both English professors.

But you can see in The Magicians, the language is thicker than it is in The Magician's Land. It's more literary. I'm more interested in language in The Magicians. By The Magician's Land, I'm more interested in pace. I'm more interested in storytelling than I was in The Magicians. I'm more in love with plot and less in love with style in The Magician's Land. Which I see as a good trend, so it's going to continue.

Lev Grossman: I looked at a lot of last books while I was writing this. I looked at the way people ended series. It's a tricky business because it would be so much simpler if you could simply kill everybody and then salt the earth so nothing grows there ever again. But they have to have lives after the book ends. You just have to know that their story is over, which is a tricky thing and I don't think all series manage it.

I think the key is that the characters become who they're supposed to be. When The Magicians begins, Quentin is somebody, but he's obviously not going to stay that way, because he would be insufferable for the rest of his life. He's not the person he's meant to be. By the end of The Magician's Land, you know who he is. He's who he should be, and he's going to stay that way for the rest of his life. He was done growing, and you want to really make the reader feel that.

And then of course, there's just a lot of things blowing up. That also tells you that you're at the end. You really max out the special effects budget.

And you break all your rules, that's another thing. People are dismissive of the Twilight books, but I admire them, and in particular, I admire the last one, because [Stephenie Meyer] breaks all the rules that she'd set up that really, up to that point, made the series work. Bella could never had sex with Edward, and Bella could never become a vampire. That tension powered the whole series, and in the fourth book, she throws it away. She breaks all the rules, and then you know she's done. I wanted to do a bit of that too.

Lev Grossman: That's a question that calls upon me to be very indiscreet. I spend a lot of time thinking about James. In the very first scene in The Magicians, it's Quentin — major major character — Julia — major major character — then James. What happened to James? There's also that watch that Quentin acquires.

Those things, you look at them and they're ticking time bombs. Are they going to go off? And not all the bombs go off, which was important to me, because it's not real life, it's a story. But it has to reflect what the real life is like. It has to feel like real life. I don't know about your life, but my life, there's a lot that doesn't pay off. I have to suspect it'll never pay off. It feels like something's being set up, and then nothing happens. That's a feeling that I'm familiar with. That note has to be in there as well.

Lev Grossman: Interesting things I hope. While I was working on The Magician's Land, I wrote about half of another novel at the same time, which is a weird thing to do, and I've never done it before. But I got really interested in an idea, and it wouldn't wait, I had to write out a substantial part of it. Now I'm going back to it and then finishing that book. It's not a fantasy novel. It's not a reality novel, definitely impossible things happen in it. But I have high hopes for it, and if it proceeds at the standard rate, I should finish it next year — sometime, hopefully, early next year.

So yeah, I'm starting new things, I'm telling new stories, and then at the same time, The Magicians is taking on new life most obviously, as a TV show, which is fine. I feel like I know so much more about The Magicians and what I was trying to do than I realized at the time when I wrote it. I wouldn't write it differently, but I was doing things without being aware of it. And now I look back and think, "Oh right, that was happening," and "That's why I did that." So it's interesting to return to it with literally 10 years after I started it, and be reminded of how much I still love it even though my life has changed so much since I started it.

It'll be interesting to see it get in front of different audiences in different ways. The TV show, it doesn't run exactly the way that the books do because TV stories are structured differently. So it's interesting to watch them reshape it in that way. And there are other Magicians things that they're going to happen that I can't talk about yet. But it's having its afterlife, in a way that some books do.

Lev Grossman: It's very satisfying. It's very fun to watch. When I think about where I was at when I started The Magicians. I was in another house, another marriage, I've felt like I was stuck, professionally and personally. The fact this book lived and made it as far as it has, I never would have believed it. If you told 2004 me, I never would have believed it. It is really satisfying.