I began reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians a few days ago, but I’ve been taking it slowly and haven’t quite gotten halfway. It’s quite enjoyable, actually, but rather than talking about it on its own, I was interested to spend a moment addressing something marginally outside of it: fantasy books about schools of magic.

The Magicians is about a university (not a prep school, as is usually the case) of magic, but it’s playing on what we as readers come into it knowing, what even its own characters come into it knowing, since its microcosm (like that of J.K.Rowling’s novels) exist within our world. (In fact, J.K. Rowling exists within the world of The Magicians; Grossman has thus far made two main clear references to her Harry Potter books, one in which a character laughed about quidditch, and one in which the protagonist explained how magic didn’t work like it did in Harry Potter. This could be annoying, but I actually like that Grossman is accurately assuming that comparisons are going to be made and just going with it.) In any case, I can think of several well-known works of fantasy in which their schools of magic play an important role. Let’s see:

• Jane Yolen’s beautiful Wizard’s Hall, which has one of the most awesome covers ever. It’s very much a kid’s book, with an eleven-year-old protagonist who goes off to school at, well, Wizard’s Hall, just in time for an evil sorcerer to threaten. It’s worth noting that Yolen published it in ’91—before Harry Potter, which was published in ’97. Yolen certainly notes this.
• J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. No need to elaborate here, I don’t think.
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin is a crafty writer, but from another school of thought than the rest of these books that I’m thinking of—she writes in an epic style, but she has just as fine of a touch on her world as any other. Finer, really; she’s the only one of these authors who’s written well-thought of books for adults as well, and she and Yolen have both received multiple awards. (She’s also certainly the only one who has books and articles read in college courses that aren’t courses about YA fiction, or courses trying to be hip by including modern media.) In many ways, this book is the most similar to The Magicians in the sense that she’s best getting at pride and actually wondering about what it would mean to be a magician, a wizard. (I can’t resist quoting her, here, because this paragraph has always struck me: “As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight” (35).)
• Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald’s Circle of Magic and its series. They’re clearly the books of this bunch written for the youngest audience—I must’ve been nine or ten or so when I read them, and they were simple then; they have illustrations, for example—but the first book definitely is all about studying to become a sorcerer. (It’s also worth noting that this is the series that introduced the concept of the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream to me. Terrifying.)
• Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic and its universe, which focuses on young people who each develop strange magic and are sent to a school where specialized teachers can work with them. Her Tortall books (Alanna; Wild Magic) also have magical schools in them, but focus less on the school and more on the education—and the characters in those books do not attend Carthak University (think I remember the spelling right)(although one of the main characters had attended there before the Wild Magic series begins, and Alanna’s brother goes to school to be a mage). Even the Circle series doesn’t delve into classes in the same way as the other books above. (It’s worth noting that the Doyle & Macdonald series was published in 1990, and while Pierce published her Tortall books before then, her circle series wasn’t published until ’97.)
• Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This one fits perhaps less well, since it’s a series for adults (although I read the first several books at thirteen maybe) and the magic schools (the White Tower and the Black Tower, primarily the former) only get small moments where they are important. But there are a number of lessons of magic, and the White Tower is actually very important—just not always as a school.
• If you can think of others, please let me know.

There are definitely other books that reference schools for magic—Dianne Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series; in some ways Monica Furlong’s effortless and beautiful Wise Child (followed by Juniper and Coleman) focuses on magical educations; Terry Goodkind (not YA) —but the difference in the examples above is purely in the ways that the mechanics of magic are important for their stories, and the way the school itself becomes an important part.

That’s certainly the case in The Magicians, where Quentin (the protagonist) from the beginning falls in love with the school itself, a place in upstate New York called Brakebills. It’s equally the case for Harry Potter and the kids in Pierce’s books, whereas Ged (Earthsea) and Randal (Doyle & Macdonald) both are rather unimpressed. But in all of these books, the schools are nonetheless central. Adorably, wikipedia has a category about magical schools, and an article about them as well. (It mentions The Worst Witch series, which I’ve never read and have no desire to. The Terry Pratchett school is also mentioned, but I don’t think the novels ever are about the students.)

What I love about these books especially is their meditations on how magic might work. It’s always a question—not the why but the what-do-you-do?—that needs some explanation. David and Leigh Eddings (who in some sense have a school, of sorts, in their Belgariad) have “the Will and the Word”—you must will something to be as it is, and then say the word that makes it that way. Robert Jordan explores similar ideas. Many stories fall into that basic idea: you desire something, you say the word (or the words, or the spell, or the incantation), and it is. J.K. Rowling includes a wand, which is conspicuous then in its absence from most of the rest of these books. Grossman, in The Magicians has his magic follow very specific rules, all of which must be learned; the Circumstances with a capital C of the spell and the incantation and the finger movements.

I’ve always particularly liked Le Guin’s ideas of magic, though; they show up in other books but A Wizard of Earthsea, published in 1968, might well be the first. As a mage tells Ged, far off in the wilds of Roke Island, when he’s sent there to study for a year, “He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea” (46). Ged comes to understand that “magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing. So [the mage] had said to them, once, their first night in the Tower . . . ‘magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, or the Old Speech from which it grew’” (46-7). In her books, magic has much to do with study, with knowledge of the ways to discover names. A true name holds power. For some reason I’ve always loved that idea.

I really do like the way Grossman explains it, though, in The Magicians. Near the beginning, after Quentin’s become accustomed to being at Brakebills, he thinks to himself about what magic is:

Learning magic . . . turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.

But there was something else to it, too, something beyond all the practicing and memorizing, beyond the dotted i‘s and crossed t‘s, something that never came up . . . If a spell was going to work, then on some gut level you had to mean it. (Grossman, 55-56)

He later goes on to suggest that these things can be internalized, learned so well that you can figure them out. Which kind of makes sense. Magic becomes more useful that way.

On some gut level, I guess I like these books about schools of magic because they make sense. A book where the hero just comes into his powers, starts using them, is a magician because he has to be, these books are the fantasy equivalent of sports story where someone just suddenly is a brilliant goal-keeper. You would have to study to be a great magician. And, of course, there’s that other element. When you read a book like The Magicians, or any of these books where ordinary [usually] children suddenly discover another world, you can say, “Hmmm, this could happen to me.” Maybe they just haven’t discovered me yet. And isn’t that the ultimate escape that books never quite get you to?

(Update: After some searching, I realized that tv tropes has an excellent listing of different magic schools. Although I have mixed feelings about the site, and often am annoyed when I read it, they certainly got all of the magic schools I had here, and a few more.)

Garth Nix is an Australian author, from the Aussie-land capital, who has written quite a few novels. To be honest, most of them don’t much appeal to me; many years ago I tried a few others of his books and was unimpressed. But I fell in love with Sabriel not long after when it came out, maybe in 1997 or so, and bought both of its sequels, Lirael and Abhorsen when they came out. I’d rank them, as a group, as among my top ten favorite novels written for children and young adults; they’re maybe number three for most-read books.

The series takes palce in the Old Kingdom, separated from Ancelstierre by a magical wall. On the one side, Ancelstierre is a facsimile of the modern-day world, with electricity and telephones, perhaps a 1980s world. On the other side is the Old Kingdom, with magic and necromancy, upon which the series falls back. It’s by no means swords and sorcery, but the series is decidedly hardcore about its reliance on magic and avoidance of modernity—in fact, it’s quite clear that magic makes electricity and things produced by machines fall apart.

The main characters, however, cross both worlds, although the threats primarily are derived from the Old Kingdom, and primarily presented by the dead. What’s great about Nix’s world is how fully-formed it seems to be—the rules fit, the history is there, the reactions of people to strangeness is there. It’s also nice to have strong female protagonists, saving the world because it’s their duty and doing so with men, but really coming up with the ideas on their own. As far as fantasy books go, the series is pretty rare, even today. (Although I can think of some fantasy novel with strong female protagonists—look at Tamora Pierce, or Robin McKinley, or Anne McCaffrey—it’s just not always quite this clear.) Anyway, among the most engaging fantasy, and the most clever.

The other book I wanted to mention is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which came out just two years ago, and has already been followed with two sequels. It’s been selling very well, almost a million copies by now; I’ve heard it mentioned in quite a few places, although I first heard of it in February from a friend of my mother’s. The plot could be compared to any of a number of other works, none of them really children’s literature—the Japanese film Battle Royale, the myth of the minotaur, and any dystopian novel you’d like. The story is simple enough: Katniss, a 16-year-old girl (which gives you an idea of the audience, as sometimes is the case in YA novels), lives in a future Appalaichian mountain state, subsidiary of the powerful Capital, in the Rocky Mountains. Every year, two teenagers from each of the 12 districts, one male and one female, are sent to the capital for a gladiatorial battle-to-the-death. Katniss’ younger sister is chosen, in a lottery very like Shirley Jackson’s famous short story (“The Lottery”), and Katniss volunteers to go in her place. The rest of the story is about her struggle to make it out alive.

What’s wonderful about the book is that while the plot is decidedly fast-paced, holding your attention with ease (I read it in less than a day, starting at night and finishing the next morning), there’s still some thoughtful moments. Battle Royale, which has a very similar plot, is distinguished here in large part because we don’t get to see what the characters are really thinking. We get to see everything Katniss thinks. We get to see her struggles. And that’s really enjoyable, really interesting, and rather thought-provoking. It’s this that made me like The Hunger Games, made me think that it won’t just go away in the next few years, but might hold on for a while. We are obsessed with dystopia, we are fascinated by what could go wrong, what people will put other people through. So I’d recommend it, and not just for children.