The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

He lay down and stared up at the faraway ceiling and thought of everything that was happening there without him, the journeys and adventures and feasts and all the various magical wonders, all across the length and breadth of Fillory, the rivers and oceans and trees and meadows, and he wanted to be there so badly that it felt like his desire should be enough to physically pull him out of his flat hard bed, out of this world, and into the one he belonged in. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.

Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

“Drink?” Yes was the only possible answer.

Some of the ones who weren’t swept away wanted to fight anyway, because they were just that valiant. Eliot supposed they must have had difficult childhoods or something like that. Join the club, he thought, it’s not that exclusive.

It was funny how just when you thought you knew yourself through and through, you stumbled on a new kind of strength, a fresh reserve of power inside you that you never knew you had, and all at once you found yourself burning a little brighter and hotter than you ever had before.

“We will have to do the impossible,” the bird said, “which is why I hired magicians and not accountants.

Drinks were a lot like books, really: it didn’t matter where you were, the contents of a vodka tonic were always more or less the same, and you could count on them to take you away to somewhere better or at least make your present arrangements seem more manageable.

His own transition from Brakebills to the real world hadn’t exactly been graceful either. When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked.

“Except,” she said, even more excited, “why be a goose? We’ve been geese. We could go as something else! Anything else!” “I was thinking of going as a human being,” Quentin said. “Like on an airplane.” Plum was already at her laptop and Googling. “OK, check this out. What’s the fastest migratory bird on Earth?” “An airplane.”

“But you, Quentin, you I understand. You are like me. You have ambition. You want to be great wizard. Gandalf maybe. Merlin. Dumb-bell-door.”

“I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?” “Happiness?” “Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.”

For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her.

There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people’s fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.