This is a gifted writer, and his gifts are at their apex in “The Magician’s Land.” You need not have read the first two novels in the series to enjoy the third, but doing so refines your understanding of these adults, who were once anything but.
What remains are Grossman’s fallible, complex characters and his depiction of magic: how it feels to cast a spell, both physically and emotionally. In fact, the Fillory-related plots of the trilogy are so winding and complicated they quickly dissolve from memory after the books end. Tragically, what makes Julia a powerful magician also depletes her as a human being.
By the end of the second book, Alice has become a dangerous spirit-creature called a niffin the grieving Quentin, as Fillory’s high king, has saved the land from certain doom, only to be exiled and another character, Julia (who learned magic despite being rejected by Brakebills), has gone on to become Fillorian royalty herself. But enchanted worlds can be as devastating as our own, and good and evil don’t bifurcate as neatly as we would like. After graduation, the friends discover a way into Fillory, a magical land Quentin has spent most of his life wishing he could visit, ever since reading (and rereading) a series of children’s fantasy novels about the place. Grossman’s trilogy begins with Quentin’s matriculation at Brakebills College, where he learns magic befriends the upperclassmen Josh, Eliot and Janet and falls in love with shy, talented Alice.
It not only offers a satisfying conclusion to Quentin Coldwater’s quests, earthly and otherwise, but also considers complex questions about identity and selfhood as profound as they are entertaining. “The Magician’s Land” is the strongest book in Grossman’s series. If Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” was like “The Secret History” crossed with “Harry Potter,” and if its sequel, “The Magician King,” was a descendant of “The Chronicles of Narnia” (with a touch of the 1990s flick “The Craft” thrown in), then what cultural mash-up does Lev Grossman conjure in “The Magician’s Land,” the trilogy’s final book? I can’t tell you, because I was too thoroughly swept away by this richly imagined and continually surprising novel to be concerned with cute comparisons.
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