The Magicians trilogy

The Magicians trilogy is the common name for a series of fantasy novels written by Lev Grossman, including The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014).

Book trilogy

Grossman's The Magicians was published in hardcover in August 2009 and became a bestseller. The trade paperback edition was made available on May 25, 2010. The Washington Post called it "Exuberant and inventive...Fresh and compelling...a great fairy tale." The book is a dark contemporary fantasy about Quentin Coldwater, an unusually gifted young man who obsesses over Fillory, the magical land of his favorite childhood books. Unexpectedly admitted to Brakebills, a secret, exclusive college of magic in upstate New York (an amalgam of Bannerman's Castle and Olana), Quentin receives an education in the craft of modern sorcery. After graduation, he and his friends discover that Fillory is real. Michael Agger of The New York Times said the book "could crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults," injecting mature themes into fantasy literature. The Magicians won the 2010 Alex Award, given to ten adult books that are appealing to young adults, and the 2011 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

In August 2011, The Magician King, the sequel to The Magicians, was published, which returns readers to the magical land of Fillory, where Quentin and his friends are now kings and queens. The Chicago Tribune said The Magician Kingwas "The Catcher in the Rye for devotees of alternative universes" and that "Grossman has created a rare, strange and scintillating novel." It was an Editor's Choice pick of The New York Times, who called it "[A] serious, heartfelt novel [that] turns the machinery of fantasy inside out." The Boston Globe said "The Magician King is a rare achievement, a book that simultaneously criticizes and celebrates our deep desire for fantasy."

The third book in the series is titled The Magician's Land and was published on August 5, 2014.

Adaptations

Television

Main article: The Magicians (American TV series)

In 2011, Fox optioned but eventually declined to order a television adaptation of The Magicians. In July 2014, Syfy greenlit the production of a pilot episode, and ordered a 12-episode first season which aired in January 2016. The series was renewed for a second season consisting of 13 episodes, which aired in 2017.

The Syfy series is written by John McNamara and Sera Gamble, and produced by Michael London and Janice Williams. The pilot episode was directed by Mike Cahill, and the cast includes Jason Ralph as Quentin, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Hale Appleman as Eliot, Summer Bishil as Margo Hanson (renamed from Janet in the novel), Arjun Gupta as Penny, Stella Maeve as Julia, and Rick Worthy as Henry Fogg.

The series ages the characters up to graduate school students and compresses the Brakebills degree to three years. Most of the events detailed in the novel, the Antarctic trip for instance, appear to happen in Quentin's first year at Brakebills with years in the novel being roughly condensed into semesters in the TV show. Jane Chatwin is involved earlier and more heavily, and Quentin is more formally diagnosed with depression.

Comic books

Grossman contributed to two comic book adaptations of his novel in 2019, published by Boom! Studios: The Magicians: Alice's Story and The Magicians: The New Class.

The first comic adaptation is the graphic novel entitled The Magicians: Alice's Story. The story in the comic is fairly similar to that of the original novel, but told from Alice's perspective. The comic ends with the death of Alice and shows a bit more insight into her thoughts and life as a Niffin. It also expands on parts of Alice's life as well as events that were mentioned in the novel as well as the television show.

The Magicians: The New Class is the second comic book adaptation of the series. This story is different from the previous comic book adaptation as it focuses on a different cohort of students at Brakebills.

Main characters

Brakebills students

• Quentin Makepeace Coldwater is the protagonist of the trilogy. At the start, he is 17, obsessed with a series of children's books called "Fillory and Further", and depressed. After a successful interview, he moves to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy to study magic. After his graduation from Brakebills, Penny brings him evidence of travel between worlds and he travels to the magical realm of Fillory. Following a confrontation with the Beast in which he is seriously injured, he spends six months unconscious being healed by centaurs. He returns to Earth, taking a non-magical job in a company before Eliot, Janet, and Julia arrive and he goes with them to rule Fillory. As a King of Fillory, he travels to the Outer Islands to collect unpaid taxes and is accidentally returned to Earth. After returning to Fillory and helping Eliot finish a quest to return magic to Fillory, he is again ejected from Fillory. Back on Earth, he returns to Brakebills, is assigned the Discipline of Minor Mendings, and becomes a professor until, after a prank by Plum, a Brakebills student, goes wrong, he is fired. He accepts a job attempting to steal a suitcase from a pair of magicians, and begins working with Plum. In the aftermath of the heist, he moves to New York with Plum, and they try to use the contents of the briefcase to create a magical land. Missing a key ingredient, they fail. Following Eliot to Fillory, which is now almost dead, he sacrifices the gods Ember and Umber, gains their power, and repairs the land. He returns to New York City, and is then successful in creating a magical land, which he begins to explore. In an interview, Grossman describes Quentin at the start of the trilogy as being a lot like he was as a teenager and "at the very end of the books gets to somewhere around where I'm trying to be". Quentin is at least somewhat bisexual, as though he prefers women, he was open to sleeping with Eliot.
• Julia Wicker is a childhood friend of Quentin's. Following an unsuccessful interview for Brakebills on the same day as Quentin, she works to learn magic herself from other online searches, amateur self-taught magicians (nicknamed "hedge witches") and secret clubs. Eventually, she finds Free Trader Beowulf, a group of highly intelligent hedge witches like herself, and she moves to Murs in France to study with them. Following an accidental summoning of Reynard, the trickster god, in which she is raped and has her humanity taken, she finds Eliot and Janet and travels with them and Quentin to become a Queen of the magical realm of Fillory. During a quest to restore magic to Fillory, the goddess she had intended to summon makes her a dryad, and she becomes a demigod, after which she goes to look after the other side of Fillory. Grossman has stated that she is very like what he was like in his twenties, when he "really got lost in the way that she does", and in writings about his own struggles with depression has used similar phrasing to the way he describes her.
• Alice Quinn is a friend and lover of Quentin's and a talented magician. She is in Quentin's class at Brakebills, moves up a year with him, and is sorted into the Physical magic group by her Discipline, which is Phosphoromancy. She comes from a family of magicians; her older brother was at Brakebills eight years before her, and died when he was transformed into a niffin, a spirit of pure magic, by a spell that got out of control. At first, she is painfully shy, and is "deep in a trance of unworthiness", but she is able to pull herself out of it. After Brakebills, she and Quentin fall into a hedonistic lifestyle until they travel to Fillory. She transforms herself into a niffin to be able to defeat the Beast, saving her friends and Ember in the process. As a niffin, she explores Fillory, travelling in time back to its beginning, before making her way back to Earth and to Brakebills. There, seeing Plum and Quentin, she follows them until Quentin traps her in a failed attempt at making a magical land, and is able to transform her back into a human. She travels to Fillory with him as the land is dying, and assists him in the process of repairing it, before returning to New York. There, she and Quentin succeed in making a magical land and set out to explore it.
• Eliot Waugh is a friend of Quentin's who becomes the High King of Fillory. He comes from Oregon, where he was bullied for his sexuality. Two years older than Quentin, Eliot welcomes him when he takes his entrance exam. Eliot is described by Quentin as "conspicuously brilliant" despite never seeming to study. He takes great care in his appearance, is a heavy drinker with an appreciation for fine wines, and cigarettes. He travels to Fillory with Quentin, and then becomes its High King, where he is able to develop into a mature and caring individual. In an interview, Grossman stated that Eliot was based on several people, including a college roommate that he looked up to.
• Janet is a peer of Eliot and Josh, was in the Physical magic group, and becomes High Queen of Fillory. She is called "Janet Way" by another student in the first book, but "Janet Pluchinsky" by Dean Fogg in the second. She is outspoken and sometimes unkind, but fiercely loyal. She travels with the others to Fillory, where she becomes High Queen. During Eliot's absence, she tours the lands and writes a constitution. Her discipline involves cold magic, and in the third book she has a pair of ice axes she calls her "Sorrows." In an interview, Grossman describes her as being free with her anger in a way he wishes he could be and notes that she says the sorts of things he would want to. Grossman has also noted that the discrepancy in her names is due to "operator error", in that he had forgotten that he'd revealed her last name and inadvertently renamed her.
• Josh Hoberman is a peer of Eliot and Janet and later King of Fillory. He is the overweight comic relief of the Physical Magic group; an incredibly strong but inconsistent magician, he barely graduates from Brakebills. After travelling to Fillory with the others, he uses one of the "buttons" that allows users to travel between worlds to explore the multiverse, before he sells the button to the dragon in the Grand Canal and uses the money to buy himself a mansion and set himself up as an intermediary between self-trained "hedge witches" and classically trained magicians. He accidentally returns to Fillory with Quentin and Julia, and ends up becoming King of Fillory and marrying the Australian magician Poppy, with whom he has a child.
• Penny is a peer of Quentin's and later the Librarian of the Neitherlands, the city between worlds. It is revealed that his first name is William and his middle name is Schroeder, but no last name is given. He is examined for Brakebills on the same day as Quentin, and his Discipline involves travel between worlds. After leading the others to Fillory and a fight with the Beast, in which his hands are bitten off, he chooses to stay in the Neitherlands. During the fight with the Old Gods, he proves himself capable, and losses in personnel mean that he is promoted to be Librarian of the order that runs the Neitherlands. He has spectral prostheses for his hands, which have a number of extra capabilities. In an interview, Grossman described him as a "suburban ... punk wannabe" who grew up in an upper-middle class home; he has a sheltered life in a Southern California Gated community and "tries to cobble together a personality by pretending he doesn't". Grossman describes him as very close in personality to Quentin, "just not in the ways that would make them like each other".
• Plum Polson Purchas – introduced in the third novel, she is the great-granddaughter of Rupert Chatwin, a student at Brakebills, a friend of Quentin's, and a point-of-view character. At Brakebills, she is the founder of The League, which comprises a group of her friends, and she is responsible for the prank that leads to Quentin's dismissal as professor. Her discipline involves illusions, and she is recruited to assist in the heist, where she works with Quentin. After that goes awry, she and Quentin hole up in a Brownstone in New York she bought with the money that she inherited from the profits of the "Fillory and Further" novels. She remains in Fillory to catch up with Jane Chatwin and explore.

The Chatwins

The Chatwins are a family of five siblings who travel to Fillory while being sent away to the country; their descriptions of these travels to Christopher Plover form the basis of the "Fillory and Further" novels. They are listed in order of age.

• Martin Chatwin, also known as the Beast, is the eldest sibling and first to travel to Fillory. He features in "The World in the Walls" and appears at the end of "The Flying Forest". Christopher Plover sexually abuses him, and he becomes disillusioned with the real world. He is able to sneak back in to Fillory through a route intended for Rupert, and he gives his humanity to Umber to be able to remain in Fillory forever. He becomes the Beast, rules Fillory as a tyrant, and is killed by Alice.
• Fiona Chatwin features in "The World in the Walls" and "The Flying Forest", and later has children who inherit the house in Cornwall. In her later life, she would pretend she'd never heard of Fillory.
• Rupert Chatwin is the author of "The Door in the Page" and the great-grandfather of Plum Purchas. He features in "The Girl Who Told Time", "The Flying Forest", and "The Secret Sea". He witnessed Martin giving his humanity to Umber in Castle Blackspire, after which he stole a spell and a knife capable of killing gods. He left the spell, the knife, and a memoir called "The Door in the Page" in a briefcase that could only be opened by one of his descendants before he was killed in Africa in World War II; this memoir is included in The Magician's Land.
• Helen Chatwin features in "The Girl Who Told Time" and "The Wandering Dune". She is described as pious, worshipping Ember and Umber and deferring to Their judgement. After she and Jane receive magic buttons that would allow them to travel to Fillory at will, she hides them in a well. Later, she changes her name, becomes an Evangelical Christian, and moves to Texas.
• Jane Chatwin, also known as the Watcherwoman, is the author of "The Magicians," intended to be the sixth "Fillory and Further" book. She features in "The Wandering Dune" and "The Secret Sea". After she finds the magic buttons again at around age 13, she returns to Fillory to be told Martin has become the Beast and that Umber has been killed. She holds a war council with Ember. The dwarves give her a watch that allows her to travel in time, and she attempts many different scenarios until Quentin and his friends are finally able to kill the Beast, after which she destroys the watch. Following this, she ages rapidly. Posing as a paramedic, she is responsible for giving Quentin the note that leads him to his Brakebills entrance exam.