It's a strange feeling to re-read The Magician King after having seen a few seasons of The Magicians TV show. On the one hand, Lev Grossman is such a bad writer that the best episodes of the TV show are so much better written. By contrast to the TV show, the book's plot structure has our protagonists being driven by events, with no plans and no motivation, with events unfolding one after another as though in a dream.
On the other hand, a novel (even one in a trilogy of fantasy novels) doesn't have the constraints a TV show has, so characters can die a permanent death. In this book, half the plot is about Julia's career as a hedge Magician, working her way up the hierarchy of a series of safe houses. In the TV show, this was all done in parallel with the first couple of seasons, and obviously, the TV show wanted to keep Stella Maeve in the show, so Julia never got the final arc the book gave her.
Once again, the protagonists like Quentin and Eliot aren't very likeable, but the ending, with Quentin getting kicked out of Fillory had a finality that the TV show never achieved in the episodes I watched. (I haven't seen all the season so maybe his exit from the TV show is better) But the book did give Quentin moments of competence as befit the title of the novel, which to be honest the TV show didn't seem to ever do.
Obviously, I enjoyed the book enough to re-read it, so I have to give it a recommended tag.
No comments:
Post a Comment