(The map is titled ‘Custom
Map of Fillory’; I would give the source if I remembered or could find it
online, and will if I ever do. The seal of Brakebills is from an illustration in the trilogy.)
This is primarily for fans of the TV show on SyFy who have
seen the entire series and may not have read the books or who’ve read them but
not really liked them after one reading.
Until recently, I fell into the latter category, but after the second reread
I just finished, I rank them among the best fantasy ever written.
I became an avid fan of Syfy’s TV show The Magicians after being introduced to it by one of my counselors
at the VA. I fell in love
immediately. I have watched and
rewatched the entire series a number of times, the first rewatch coming just
after the climax of the finale of season 4; first, I went online to see if that
“really” happened, then I finished that fatal episode. Afterwards, when I finished crying, I first
went back to “The Side Effect” and watched it back to back with “No Better to
be Safe Than Sorry”, cried some more, then rewatched the entire season 4 for
all the foreshadowing (there was plenty, though it was subtle). THEN I rewatched the entire series up to that
point to ensure my perception that it was consistent was correct; it was.
After rewatching again in 2020, I decided it was time to
take on the novels from which the series was adapted. As I noted above, I thought they were good,
but not necessarily great. A lot of that
was due to the fact that I kept reading looking for points that weren’t
there. I then rewatched the TV series
AGAIN, in as much of a binge as I could while working a full time job and
without cocaine.
During the writers’ strike, which I wholeheartedly supported
(along with the actors’ strike which began later), I started another rewatch
upon realizing it would be a while before anything new appeared. This time, I limited it to one episode per
week, the same day of the week (Sunday morning with breakfast, if you’d like to
know). I finished that up about a month
ago, and decided the novels deserved another read. And, boy, am I glad I did, and for fans of
the TV show, I highly recommend them all.
Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy
I’m not even sure what if the trilogy has an official
designation as such; if I were, I would use it here. At this point, I’m just going to list them;
what bare descriptions there will be come later. The first novel of the trilogy is The Magicians: A Novel, published in
2009. Its sequel, published in 2011, is The Magician King. The final novel is The Magician’s Land, published in 2014, the year before the TV
series began. Viking Press in the USA
published all three novels.
Showrunners (and creators) Sera Gamble and John McNamara are
both huge fans of the novels. Sera read
and reread them throughout the show’s run while John ceased reading them as
soon as the show began; both followed the approach that was best for them.
Archaia, division of Boom Entertainment Inc., published two
related comics series, both later collected into trade paper back
editions. The first is The Magicians: Alice’s Story and the
second is The Magicians: New Class. With consulation from Lev Grossman, these
were written by Lilah Sturges and illustrated by Pius Bak.
SyFy’s TV series The
Magicians, created and run by Sera Gamble and John McNamara, is comprised
of five seasons of thirteen episodes each, premiering on 16 December 2015 and
concluding on 1 April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic.
What I’m going to do here is describe enough of the
differences so that anyone who reads this will have just enough of their
preconceptions based on the TV show shattered so those won’t get in the
way. And the best place to start with
that is in Fillory, or at least with the heptalogy we all wish we could
actually read, fans of the TV show and of the novels alike.
Fillory in Grossman’s trilogy
In the trilogy, the world of Fillory is not a world in our
universe, but a sole world in its own pocket universe. It is flat and two-sided. Its sun and two moons revolve around it, as
do that stars in the sky, which are not gaseous giants but more like large
nightlights. The nearest analogy I can
think of is the cosmology of the ancient Semitic peoples such as that upon which
the Tanakh (Hebrew scriptures; the Old Testament to Christians) is based.
The continent which the kingdom of Fillory occupies the
largest and central part of has two mountain rages which dividing it from its
neighbors, the Northern Barrier in the north, separating it from Loria, and the
Copper Mountains in the south, separating it from the Wandering Desert. There is a huge Eastern Sea with several
large islands and a Western Sea, at the other side of which is the western
continent, which never appears in Grossman’s trilogy or the in-universe
heptalogy.
The population of the kingdom of Fillory is very small and
fairly stable at ten thousand humans and ten thousand magical creatures, many
of them human-animal hybrids, plus all the talking animals and talking
trees. The magical creatures include
griffins, hippogriffs, giants, dwarfs, pegasi, (hippo)centaurs, elves,
minotaurs, fairies, satyrs, nymphs, dryads, fauns, manticores, sphinxes,
spirits, elementals, grimlings, pangborns, cynocephali (dog-headed humanoids), reptilians, shas, vulpa (fox)
centaurs, merefolk, assorted human-animal hybrids, and jinnis. There are myriad talking animals, of which
Humbledrum the bear is the recognized leader at the time of the trilogy.
Loria has no magical creatures, just humans. The Wandering Desert has the “Southern Nomads”
and giant talking bunnies, possibly others.
The Fillory and Further
series
(that all fans of
both the novels and the TV series wish they could read)
A notable difference between the TV show and the novel
series is that in the novels, there are five Chatwin children (versus three on
TV), in descending order of age: Martin, Fiona, Rupert, Helen, and Jane. Also, their adventures in Fillory begin
during the Great War, also known as the First World War, not during the Second
World War as portrayed in the TV show.
Having laid that out, let’s now take a look at the contents
of Christopher Plover’s children’s series Fillory and Further, as described in
Lev Grossman’s trilogy, The Magicians,
The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land. The TV show adds other detail, but its
version isn’t really in the same continuity.
Fillory and Further, Book One: The World in the Walls (by Christopher Plover, January 1935)
Features Martin and Fiona, who get to
Fillory through the grandfather clock at their Aunt Maude’s house in the year
1917. Aunt Maude’s house is called
Dockery House, on Darrowby Lane in Fowey, Cornwall. The Chatwins are there because their father is
at war iun Belgium and their mother is in an asylum. Martin opens the grandfather clock and
discovers Fillory in the walls of the house.
Martin becomes a master horseman and Helen a forest scout. Together Martin and Fiona look for the trees enchanted
by the Watcher Woman. Martin and Jane
prevent the Watcherwoman from permanently stopping time at 5 o’clock on a rainy
afternoon.
Fillory and Further, Book Two: The Girl Who Told Time (by Christopher Plover, Fall 1936)
Features Rupert and Helen shanghaied
from their respective boarding schools in the winter (with all five Chatwin children
eventually in Fillory together). Their
adventure crosses over with the previous adventure, with Rupert dogging Martin
and Fiona in disguise as the Wood One while Helen chases the Questing Beast.
Fillory and Further, Book Three: The Flying Forest (by Christopher Plover, October 1937)
Features Rupert and Fiona getting to
Fillory by climbing a tree. They spend
most of the novel looking for the ticking which is driving their leopard friend
Sir Hotspots crazy. The ticking turns
out to be a large clock made by dwarfs in a cave, which a giant seals
shut. Afterwards Rupert and Fiona go to
Castle Whitespire, which is in essence a giant clockwork. Rupert trains as a deadeye archer. Martin appears toward the end, only to
disappear into the Darkling Woods, never to be seen again.
Fillory and Further, Book Four: The Secret Sea (by Christopher Plover, 1938)
Features Rupert and Jane, who get to
Fillory by riding a magic bicycle then stow away aboard the Swift to
escape the pursuing Watcher Woman; the ship is crewed by a party of wrongly
accused noblemen masquerading as pirates.
Fiona, trains as a master fencer.
Rupert turns twelve and is never invited back.
Fillory and Further, Book Five: The Wandering Dune (by Christopher Plover, published
posthumously in late 1939)
Features Helen and Jane, who are
transported to Fillory while painting in a meadow. The sisters are taken aboard the Windswept,
a clipper crewed by bunnies cruising the sands of the Wandering Desert. Captain High-bound gives Helen and Jane five
buttons with which they can magically travel to Fillory at any time. Helen hides them all (in a dried-up well at
their aunt’s house, it later turns out) upon their return to Earth,
self-righteously stating that entry into Fillory should be up to Ember and
Umber.
Fillory and Further, Book Six: The Magicians (by Jane
Chatwin; synopsis in the chapter “The Retreat” of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians)
Features only
Jane, after she turns 13 (which would make it the year 1925), who crosses over
into Fillory after a hedgehog named Pricklepump helps her find the five magic buttons. She finds Fillory beset by ferocious
winds. In the Darkling Woods she finds
the wounded Ember, who tells her about Martin’s transformation into the
Beast. Together on the Cozy Horse, they
visit the dwarves, who create for her the magical pocket watch with which to
control time and create loops. Jane
never returns home to Cornwall ever again.
The Door in the Page: My Life in Two Worlds (by
Rupert Chatwin; found in its entirety in chapters 16-18 of Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land)
A more factual
telling of the Chatwins’ adventures and interactions with Plover; found in its
entirety in Chapters 16-18 of Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land. It
includes an account of the children discovering the clock portal to Fillory
(Fiona was seven at the time; Jane was five).
Martin and Fi went in and came back out somewhat older (their adventures
were told in The World in the Walls). Then Rupert and Helen went in (The Girl Who Told Time). After they came out, just five minutes had
lapsed in real time between then and when Martin and Fi first went
through. By then Jane was awake and they
all five went through.
Rupert writes
that Fiona was the first to mention Fillory to American retiree Christopher Plover,
who lived next door in Darras House. Contrary
to what Plover wrote in the novels, the Chatwin children went through multiple
times, usually all together, all through the year, not just summer. Rupert’s account also includes the truth of
Martin’s last return to Fillory and how he managed to stay, and that Plover
didn’t begin writing his fictitious accounts of the Chatwins’ adventures until
Martin disappeared.
Some major general differences
(mostly but not
entirely in characters)
All the main characters are white. The only nonwhite character in the novels is
Hamish Bax, who is black, like the TV version, along with also likewise being
head of Botany.
Several characters created for the TV series are not in any
of the novels, and some who are by name are actually completely different.
There’s no Kady, no Todd, no Zelda, no Marina, no Pete, no
Harriet, no Charlton, no god Bacchus, no maened Shoshanna, no goddess Iris, no god
Aengus, no goddess Heka, no Binder, no Monster, no Sister, no Idri, no Ess, no goddess
Persephone (though there is an Our Lady Underground), no god Hades, no demigod John
Gaines, no Lipson, no Victoria, no Third Year class that went to Fillory, no
Santa Claus, no Fairy Queen, no McAllistairs, no Fray, no Everett, no Sheila, no
Phyllis, no Cyrus, no Hyman, no Tick, no messenger bunnies, no Prudence Plover
(Christopher’s sister), no Calypso, no Prometheus.
Characters called Dint and Fen do appear in the first novel,
The Magicians, but they are of a
radically different nature. Everyone
should know who TV Fen is, though you may not remember Dint was her father, and
his father before him. Novel Dint and
Fen are both accomplished warriors.
There is a character called Lovelady, but that’s his name,
not a titled passed along like Dead Pirate Roberts. He was a traveling muggle who collected
supposed magical artifacts and resold them.
Ember and Umber are gods, but in the form of actual rams,
not human-ram hybrids.
Novels Poppy, no last name (Poppy Kline on TV), is
Australian, and never went to Brakebills; she studied magic in Tasmania at Esquith
College. But she is an obsessed
dragonologist.
Novels Richard, no last name, bears little resemblance to
Richard Corrigan on TV. He’s a Brakebills
alum two years ahead of Eliot, Janet, and Josh, also a Physical Kid, unlike
Corrigan, who graduated years before and when we meet him is a mental health
counselor. You never ‘see’ him until
after Q & A have graduated.
Interestingly, there is a Wizard Court, but it is only
mentioned once. It exists, but it never
plays a part in the stories.
Jane Chatwin not only survives Martin, she is still alive at
the end of the third novel (yes, a bit of a spoiler, but not much, really).
TV’s Kady Orloff-Diaz is represented somewhat by Brakebills
student Amanda Orloff and by the member of Free Trader Beowulf Asmodeus (whose
real name may actually be Betsy), though they are not the same.
Alice is a brunette.
Josh is a Physical Kid, not a botanist.
Penny (no last name) is a punk with a Mohawk.
There is an Iris, but she’s not a goddess.
Benedict is the official map-maker of Fillory the kingdom,
but it is Quentin whom he comes to hero-worship; he never even meets Penny.
TV’s Plum Merritt is Plum Purchas in the books, who is
Rupert’s great-granddaughter rather than Jane’s granddaughter.
Novel Bigby is also a pixie, but is male rather than female.
Magic is never turned off, though it comes close.
Quentin’s parents are still married.
There is no opium in the air of Fillory in the novels.
Martin killed Plover in 1939 in Darras House.
Although Jane Chatwin used her clock to rewind time
countless times, she didn’t always involve the same specific people, much less
the same from Brakebills thirty-nine times.
It was actually so many times not even she knew how many.
Notes from The Magicians
The main character of the entire novel trilogy is Quentin
Coldwater, and in the first novel he is also the only POV character.
Brakebills College of Magical Pedagogy is 100 miles north of
Manhattan and two-and-a-half months behind the outside world in time. So, when James (rather than Julia) accompanies
Quentin for his Princeton interview, it’s November, but when Q gets to
Brakebills, it’s August.
Brakebills University on TV is all grad school, and I don’t
recall a length of study being specified.
Brakebills College is described in the novels as the equivalent of a
four-year undergrad program with one year of post grad, but it’s really like
doing the senior year then a four year undergrad. Each class year has a minimum of twenty
students.
Some two hundred prospects take the entrance exam, which
only Quentin and Penny pass. You find
out later Julia also took it at the same time but failed, and that she was too
strong for the mindwipe to completely erase her memories of the events.
Students are required to be in their school uniforms
whenever they are not in their dorm rooms.
Much of Brakebills College is patterned after English boarding schools
(it says so explicitly in The Magicians),
with formal dinners every night and a strict curfew.
The Dean Fogg of the novels is more authoritarian and
without much of a sense of humor. He
would have expelled all of the TV Physical Kids.
All students sleep in the House, the name for the main
building at Brakebills where classes also take place. The Physical Kids Cottage was a hangout place
used for seminars, not living quarters (same true for all other
disciplines). Only the Physical Kids,
Bigby, and Fogg could find it.
The different major magic fields (not the same as
disciplines) are Physical, Natural, Illusion, Knowledge, Healing, and Psychic. Students are tested and sorted at the
beginning of their Third Year.
Physical magic is the rarest; for most of Q’s time at
Brakebills, there are only five Physical Kids, him (Quentin Coldwater), Alice
Quinn, Eliot Waugh, Janet Way/Pluchinsky (called Janet Way by a student in The Magicians and Janet Pluchinsky in The Magician King), and Josh
Hoberman. Q & A were, of course,
Third Years, the rest were Fourth Years.
There had also been five Physical Kids the previous year, but Richard
(no last name) and Isabel (also no last name) graduated. Four rising Third Years tested into the
Physical Kids at the head of Quentin’s and Alice’s Fifth Year (names never
given).
The Beast doesn’t invade Brakebills until Q’s Third
Year. He traumatizes Professor March and
eats Amanda Orloff.
Fogg initiates a revival of welters at Brakebills, then
begins to build an international system of games and playoffs.
Brakebills South normally takes place for nearly all the
fall semester of the Fourth Year.
After graduating, Quentin and Alice move into an apartment
in Tribeca in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Janet and Eliot are in Soho, and Richard has a room in their
apartment. Josh stays with Anaïs,
Luxembourgeoise star of the Pan-European welters team. A lot of their time is spent aimlessly
partying and fucking, though Q & A only do each other (though Q and Janet
do have sex after putting a very drunk Eliot to bed one night).
It’s Penny who discovers Fillory is real, showing up the
same morning Alice catches the three asleep in bed in the morning to invite
them to go with him. After having
discovered the Neitherlands himself, he buys a button from Lovelady that turns
out to be one of the five Chatwin buttons.
Unlike the TV show, he can’t travel to Fillory as a traveler without
going thru the Neitherlands and without the button.
The party that goes to Fillory is Penny, Quentin, Alice,
Eliot, Janet, Josh, Anaïs, and Richard.
The battle with The Beast takes place in a large and
extensive cavern called Ember’s Tomb (not an actual tomb), where the Beast eats
Penny’s hands and a good part of Q’s shoulder, before he is killed by niffin
Alice.
Quentin’s coma last six months, not three weeks, followed by
six months of physical therapy. During
his therapy time, Jane Chatwin visits to give him back her Fillory and Further: Book Six, and, among other things, informs him
offhandedly about Plover’s molesting her brother (there is no ghost loop like
in the TV show).
The hunt for the Questing Beast lasts a year, and, like the
TV show, he ends up wishing to go back home.
Also like the show, he quits magic and Fogg sets him up to
work at the advertising firm, where after five months, he meets Emily Greenstreet,
whose story is pretty much the same as on the TV show. A month after that, Eliot, Janet, and Julia
appear outside his 12th floor window and invite him to be the fourth member of
their royal court in Fillory.
Notes on The Magician King
Quentin is one of two POV characters here, the other is
Julia Wicker. The Quentin POV is told in
the “present”; that of Julia’s POV is the story of what happened after she
failed the Brakebills entrance exam. The
novel moves back-and-forth between storylines, thankfully in whole chapters.
The novels opens after the four Earth magicians have been
kings and queens of Fillory for two years.
We learn how the survivors of the Battle of Ember’s Tomb retreated to
Earth, how Eliot and Janet met Julia, and get a vague notion of what Josh did. Penny entered one of the building in the
Neitherlands and never came out.
Quentin mounts an expedition to the Outer Island to collect
back taxes, upon which he departs in the Muntjac, with Julia, Bindle
(bodyguard), Benedict, and Abigail the Sloth (representing the talking animals),
in addition to the crew of the ship.
After landing, he is given The
Story of the Seven Keys, which is radically different from the version in
the TV series, and he is given the quest to find all the keys (they are all in
Fillory). Not even those who give him
the quest know what they unlock.
When they find the first key, Quentin and Julia both grab it
and find themselves transported to Chesterton, Massachusetts, where his parents
live after moving from Brooklyn. It
takes them three days to get back to Fillory, and when they first get to the
Neitherlands, it looks like it’s been through a war, which, in fact, it has,
and still is. The old gods have come to
destroy it, with the only force standing up to them is the Order of the
Library, with none other than Penny leading the fighting. Just before Quentin and Julia enter the
Fillory fountain, help arrives for the forces of the Library.
When they return, a year has passed. Eliot has taken over the quest for the keys
and has found six, with the only one missing being the first key that Quentin
and Julia found. The two go the the
underworld to get it, and the underworld here is unique to Fillory, with only
the shades of those who’ve died in Fillory there.
The Julia POV describes her journey after encountering
Quentin when he is at his parents’ on vacation, her discovery of the world of
hedge magic, her quest across the USA to different hedge safehouses, and
becoming part of an online group of hedges called Free Trader Beowulf.
Remember Julia saying the following to Kady in ‘Ramifications’ (season 2, episode 12): “Lightning storm, huge.
Happened every time Persephone ascended from the Underworld. She used to
come every spring. Now, decades, no pattern, no trace. Except these modern
accounts show four storms stretch across the entire swath of Southern Europe,
and, smack in the center, Murs, France.”
The apex of the hedge world turns out to be a chateau in
Murs, France, where the top hedge witches in the entire world gather. There are ten counting Julia, six who are
from FTB, also counting Julia, one of whom uses the name Asmodeus. Seeking more power, they decide to summon a
deity, and they one they choose to call a local deity whom they name Our Lady
Underground, after the Notre Dame de Sous Terre at Chartes in France.
Unlike the group in the TV show, there is nothing altruistic
about it; they are all feeding their ambition.
Only seven of those at Murs are involved; the six from FTB and another
named Iris. The result is the same as
that in the TV show, with Reynard the Fox coming instead, killing everyone but
Julia and Asmodeus, with the latter escaping while Reynard is raping Julia.
It is the actions of the group at Murs which gets the
attention of the old gods and makes them aware of the loophole that has allowed
magic into the universe for mortals to be able to use, which is what spurs them
to try to close it (rather than doing so as collective punishment for the
killing of a god by a mortal).
After having retrieved the seventh key, Quentin and the
questing party go to the door at the edge of the world, where he inserts and
turns them all, restoring magic back to its full strength (while never turned
off, it had been getting weak) permanently.
At the end of the novel, Quentin is expelled from Fillory
back to Earth (why? You’ll have to read
the book) and Julia is made a dryad by Our Lady Underground (who is not
Persephone) and crosses over to the Far Side of Fillory, with Josh and Poppy
taking over their places as the junior king and junior queen of Fillory.
Notes on The Magicians: Alice’s
Story
The graphic novel by Sturges and Bak is a retelling of
events in Grossman’s The Magicians
from Alice’s point-of-view. It mostly
stays faithful to the original story, with the exception of leaving Richard and
Anaïs out of the Fillory party and contradicting the source regarding Fen’s
actions in the Battle of Ember’s Tomb.
Notes on The Magician’s Land
First, kudos to Lev Grossman for mentioning Norton Juster’s
1961 fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth,
the first fantasy I ever read. The POV
here alternates between Eliot, Quentin, Plum, and, in one section, Janet.
Fillory is dying.
Ember says so. Eliot begins a
quest to try and save it, one he gives himself and onto which the other royal
sign.
On Earth, former Brakebills professor Quentin and former
Brakebills student Plum Purchas (later revealed to be Rupert Chatwin’s
great-granddaughter) have been recruited into what turns out to be a heist,
specifically of something held by the Couple, with the crew radically different
in composition from the version on the TV show.
Quentin, now thirty, finds out his discipline upon being
hired by Brakebills, and, like the TV show, it’s Minor Mendings. His one real friend on staff is Hamish Bax,
head of the botany department.
Plum is expelled halfway through Fifth Year, and Quentin is
fired from trying to cover up the incident which led to her expulsion. Thus their like need for income from the
heist.
On a journey of the two to survey the state of the kingdom,
Janet recounts to Eliot her walkabout in the Wandering Desert and encounter
with the band the TV show called the Southern Nomads. There are similarities to the TV account but
also very significant differences. Also,
the phrase “hard glossy armour” gets a whole new meaning.
After the heist, Quentin and Plum hide out in a safe house
(not the hedge kind) in Brooklyn, and it is there Quentin encounters niffin
Alice. He eventually reincorporates her,
and like the show, uses bacon to get her to eat again, and also fresh mangoes
and very good chocolate, along with champagne.
In the meantime, Eliot has returned to Earth seeking
Quentin’s help in attempting to save Fillory.
Of course, they do, but that is all I’m going to say because anything
else really would be spoiling.
Anyway, the novel trilogy is fantastic and I am as much a
fan of it as I am of the TV show. I
can’t wait to reread it again.