Title: The Magicians
Author: Neil Gaiman
Rating: 5/5 stars
A lot of the early books I read were written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and had some kind of… “auteur” quality, a definite voice that seemed to come out of the words. Maybe “blueness” would be the right word, but it was more than that. The kind of bluish-grayness of the text was distinctively their bluish-grayness.
This “distinctive voice” was often annoying. It felt like I was reading some sort of “self-aware” novel, one that could wink and self-consciously admit that it was a “self-aware novel.” I guess they could do that. But this was very early in the development of a trend, and I was willing to accept it as a novelty at the time. It was part of the thing, if you could call it a thing.
And then, all the sudden, sometime around 1994 or 1995, and almost out of nowhere, good things happened to self-aware novels. And now they’re everywhere.
They’re everywhere except The Magicians by Neil Gaiman. But it’s not just that it’s the last self-aware novel. That was a novelty in and of itself. But the novelty fades, and you’re just left with… something that’s really, really good. It’s almost like it was a tutorial, the last word on the topic. It almost feels like you’ve read it and you can’t read it again. You feel a little disappointed, a little stupid that it’s gone.
It’s the last in a long series. It’s the first in what has become known as the “Neil Gaiman Trilogy.” This trilogy consists of American Gods, and now The Magicians – which, although it’s not set in America, is a work of American mythological fiction – and… well, I should probably end this review here, but I’ll keep going. See, the next book is already planned and written and there are some rumors that it’s gonna be called The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I’m not sure which of these three titles is the best.
See, the series wasn’t just the first trilogy. There were two more. First we had The Graveyard Book (2009), which was almost entirely about an urban, suburban boy trying to win a contest for his father’s inheritance; it was very ordinary. Then there was Coraline (2002), the one that inspired the movie, about a little girl and her friend who go exploring in a house. And then there was American Gods, about two different worlds colliding at the same party, and about a woman who was never happy but learned to be anyway.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, if it gets made, is almost a prequel to these stories.
But then, American Gods was really, really good, and it was like I could finally see why it was a “tutorial,” and now The Ocean at the End of the Lane has a very large fanbase, including one of my closest friends. (We started talking about it some time around 2004, he had already read it, and he told me American Gods didn’t feel like a “tutorial,” and here I am, writing this review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane for… someone who hasn’t read it, but who used to be me.) So I think I’ll just end this post right there, and I’ll tell you all what I really really thought about The Ocean at the End of the Lane, because it is very, very good and I liked it and I will be sharing it with you.
Good night.
Great review frank, I was very entertained. It’s just that the timeline is a little confusing, maybe if you could go into more detail? Especially about the individual films and books referenced here. You dropped many titles
Glad you enjoyed it! To be clear, though, I’m not saying that American Gods “ended” the trilogy. It just started it.
The American Gods-Coraline- The Ocean at the End of the Lane storyline is, in some ways, just an extension of the same idea that was happening in American Gods. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, it takes place “in the future,” where the two “American gods” (in the sense of those in American Gods that are not Norse or Norse-derived) of the “old gods” have taken up permanent residence on the American continent. The two old gods, Yggdrasil and Hel, are “overpowered” by the two American gods, Mr. Godot and Mr. Gaiman.
I guess the Coraline-The Ocean at the End of the Lane story can be seen as two stories. One has a little girl named Coraline living with her parents in the old neighborhood, where she sometimes visits the big house (Mr. Godot, in this case) and where she learns the history of the two gods. The other story is set in that old neighborhood some months or years later, now long since the old people are dead, and where Coraline is “in search of her father.” This story is “the old neighborhood” of the old gods and their relationship with the American gods; it is written in the same voice as Coraline, and uses many of the same characters. It has only one direct reference to “the real Mr. Godot,” but the real-world Mr. Godot, Godot in the world the girl lives in, is the same as in American Gods. So Coraline finds her father in her neighborhood (she visits him in the old neighborhood before she travels to the “new neighborhood”). But of course her father is in that neighborhood now, not the old one. So is the American God, Mr. Gaiman, the one Coraline’s father had been searching for in the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood is “long since the old people are dead,” just as in The Graveyard Book. (This is sort of implied to happen in Coraline by the absence of any mention of their parents – but one can argue that there’s nothing in the story to indicate this, and they still could have come back.) In the real old neighborhood, the old people never return, as in The Graveyard Book. So Coraline’s father has died (or maybe he has, maybe it’s all still the same as the old neighborhood, maybe it’s “long since the old people are dead” because she never found her dad, but it’s still in the past tense) and Coraline’s mother is grieving. (Coraline never really knew her.)
If you were wondering, I think this is how it should be read, but it’s not a perfect reading, and is the least satisfying way to read it. The story of Mr. Godot in The Ocean at the End of the Lane would be a pretty good story, but the story of the old neighborhood would be a pretty good story, too. These two stories could exist in parallel: the reader has a choice whether to see them as the same or different (although it’s also possible to interpret them both as the same.) But either way, they don’t have to. They don’t have to be the same. (It’s a very good story, though, you should read it, and it’s definitely worth taking the story as being the same or different.)
Of course, this reading of the two stories is probably the least satisfying reading of the American Gods story – the one in the old neighborhood has no direct connection to Yggdrasil and Hel – and there’s something sort of hilarious about it. The real Mr. Gaiman does live in the real old neighborhood, and he does visit with Coraline’s mom, so even though he’s the new American God, he has to go to the old neighborhood and live there. Which is exactly the same as he would have to do to live in the American Gods world. But there is only one of Mr. Gaiman, so he has to live in the one old neighborhood. He’s in the real old neighborhood. He could move there for exactly the same reason he’s had to move before.






