Yeah. That’s the high we’ve all been chasing since The Secret History came out. Every publication season, there’s some new book that the publisher and reviewers insist is just like The Secret History, and if you’re like me, you fall for it every time. You just want that feeling back. You need it. You need it.

At the end of one (1) decade of chasing that The Secret History high, I need to report that it is not replicable. No book, except for one, will ever be The Secret History. It’s not even that no book will ever be that good, because The Secret History isn’t even my favorite book.¹ It’s just that no book will ever be that exact combination of rarefied college Latin nonsense and suspense powerful enough to prize apart my ribs. No campus novel will ever be such a successful iteration of Macbeth. No Macbeth will ever be a campus novel. The Secret History is the perfect marriage of forms. I have to stop wishing that it could be recreated, and instead live satisfied with the knowledge that one such book exists.

“What you’re saying is you finished The Truants?”

UGH YES I FINISHED The Truants. It was no The Secret History, because — as I have proved to myself one million goddamn times now — no other book is ever going to be The Secret History. But here are some of the books that I wished and hoped would be.

(Note: As a marketing strategy, it’s quite solid to compare a book to The Secret History. Evidence: I always want to believe it, and I always read the book. But it’s no mindset to bring to the reading of a book you hope to enjoy. Like, it seems perfectly possible that I might have read and enjoyed any of these books, had I not gone into them wishing they were an exact recreation of one of my all-time faves. That sort of expectation does not a generous reader make.)

The Truants, by Kate Weinberg

I actually enjoyed this one! I think. Somewhat. It’s hard to know, because so much of my mind was taken up with the thought “this is not enough like The Secret History.”

The Truants is set in Norwich, an English town of which I am fond, and it features a charismatic, unreliable South African journalist called Alec, a friendly beautiful delight called Georgie, and an Agatha Christie expert called Lorna. The narrator is equally obsessed with all of them, and I think Weinberg does quite a good job of making the reader understand why — in that way where I, the reader, am too old and cynical to be swayed by these people but I totally get why a university student would not be. I moreover found the explanation of the death quite satisfying. I love the sort of story where you think all the mysteries have been revealed, but then there’s one final reveal that gets uncovered undramatically at the end.

Why it’s not enough like The Secret History: Not enough suspense! Not enough campus! I enjoyed it as a story about friendship and love and sex and death, but I wanted more information about Agatha Christie, and I definitely wanted everyone to feel more guilty and worry more about getting caught. That’s the aspect that absolutely kills me about The Secret History: how the reader is seduced into rooting for them to kill Bunny, and seduced into rooting for them not to get caught. It’s so insidious! It’s so good! It truly makes you confront the narrative weight that goes along with making someone a protagonist.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Secret History meets the Chronicles of Narnia, said a bunch of lying liars, when this book came out. (They also said it was grown-up Harry Potter, which was a further piece of false advertising.) The Magicians has many good things about it and many bad things about it, but while it has many points in common with the Chronicles of Narnia and has clearly been heavily inspired by those books, it bears almost no similarity to The Secret History. Like, to the extent that I’m confused that anyone ever told me it was good for fans of The Secret History. I guess they just meant because it was a campus novel? Ish?

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that in my year of being a finisher (2019), I wished to finish The Magicians but had to stop because I was so mad about a certain event that occurred at the end of season four. Like, seriously. Some shows will do anything to avoid having a canonical queer romance, incl. being really irresponsible in their depiction of mental illness. This is why all shows should just be CW shows. CW shows have gotten gayer and gayer year over year, to their great advantage.

If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio

Things I remember about If We Were Villains, a book I read fewer than five years ago:

• Shakespeare stuff that was like fine I guess but also mainly made me want to reread the parts of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin where Janet and her friends go see plays at the local theater. I very much enjoyed those parts, not least because they convinced me to read Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, which is a very good play indeed.
• One of the characters was called Wren, and I liked that. My name is Jenny as in Jenny Wren, so yes, I do enjoy a fictional Wren.
• Maybe some sort of very annoying power couple
• Actually had some canon gay characters
• Some sort of a scene at a lake? Something that happens at a lake at night? I don’t remember. There is a lake, I think, in this book.

If my very limited memory of this book serves, this is the one from my list that felt the most like The Secret History, although it was still very much the diet version. If I had enough time to reread this book, I’d honestly just reread The Secret History instead.

Long Black Veil, Jennifer Finney Boylan

This is the only fiction book I’ve read by Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author whose memoirs I truly adore. She’s one of these memoirists with a true knack for marrying jokes to tragedy in a way that plays up the best parts of both. Any day now, I am going to feel strong enough to face her latest book, which is about dogs and will certainly break my heart.

Long Black Veil is probably the book in this list that most suffered by comparison with The Secret History. Not because it’s the least satisfactory, but because that comparison sets up an expectation for what type of book this is, and that expectation isn’t at all in line with the book Boylan actually wrote. It was marketed as a thriller, when in fact it’s a much slower and more thinky book that explores conflict between identity and morality. It’s good, to the best of my memory! Just, like, not at all similar to The Secret History.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

I’m cheating by including Special Topics in Calamity Physics on this list! I reread it in the years between my first and second reads of The Secret History, which was the era in which I was least high on The Secret History and thus least furious when books failed to live up to it. Moreover, I picked up Special Topics in the bookshop and purchased it because he was on significant sale — not because I had been told that it was similar to The Secret History.

In fact, I might have liked it better on a first read if I had understood that it was similar in spirit to The Secret History. I bought it because I loved the writing (and because, as mentioned, it was on significant sale)! I thought it was going to be a bildungsroman! It is not a bildungsroman! Do not go into it expecting a bildungsroman! It is significantly more bananas than that! The writing is also just truly delightful — funny, referential, self-deprecating — and I loved the bananas twist that gets revealed about two-thirds of the way through the book. So, as a book qua book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is my favorite from this list.

The Bellwether Revivals, Benjamin Wood

I cleverly used the “here are bullet points of what I remember from this book” on When We Were Villains rather than The Bellwether Revivals. This was a great idea because I do not remember enough things about The Bellwether Revivals to fill out a list of bullet points. I believe it is the first book on this list where I specifically thought, “this is going to scratch that The Secret History itch for me.”

Spoilers: It did not scratch that The Secret History itch for me.

Because I am committed to the bit, I reread my review of The Bellwether Revivals. I am sorry to report that after rereading that post, I remember even less about The Bellwether Revivals than I did before reading it. If you’re thinking about reading The Bellwether Revivals, I recommend giving it a miss and instead reading the book I always get it mixed up with, i.e., Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody, which is kinda like The Westing Game but for grownups.

So there you have it. I have spent a decade wishing that another book would make me feel the way The Secret History made me feel, to absolutely no avail. It was a futile hope all along. I have taken Christopher Yates’s Black Chalk off my TBR list in recognition of the fact that it’s never going to happen. I must just be content that The Secret History exists. I must not go chasing waterfalls. One waterfall must satiate me.

The post Books I Have Read in a Futile Effort to Chase That Secret History High appeared first on Reading the End.

Having said that, I must have been in just the right mood for The Magician King, because I went through it like a hot knife through butter. I kept glancing up for subway stops, glancing back down at the book, and being shocked at how far into it I was after what felt like a very short reading time. Perhaps it was because the references to Narnia were rarer (I still maintain that Quentin’s version of the world can not have the Narnia books as well as the fictional Fillory ones), but I found this book to be something closer than its predecessor to what I would imagine grown-up Narnia to be. It didn’t have quite the safe-and-home feeling that Narnia gives me, but it was like — it felt more viably like someone else’s tribute to Narnia than The Magicians did. I don’t know how to explain what I’m trying to say here so I’m going to move on to plot summary, which will of necessity include some spoilers for The Magicians.

Our protagonist Quentin Coldwater, as ennui-ridden as ever, is a king of Fillory, ruling alongside Eliot and Janet, with Julia around there too, being all weird. He gets a bug in his ear to go off on a quest, and almost at once — to his intense chagrin — he is thrown back into the real world. Meanwhile, in alternating chapter flashbacks, we find out what’s been going on with Julia in the years that Quentin spent ennui-ing all over Brakebills. If you were upset that we didn’t find out what happened with Julia (I was), fear no more, you will find out now.

I spent the bulk of The Magician King feeling slightly grumbly. I have a bias in favor of retaining my first impressions. I was all, “Oh, you may be moving along at a brisk pace, Grossman sequel, but it is not because I love you! Your two narratives are poorly integrated! Your protagonist is still a jerk! I still remember all the stuff that pissed me off about The Magicians!” But as I hit about the two-thirds mark, these complaints began to be answered one by one. The Magician King turned into a coherent whole and what is more, it made a coherent whole out of The Magicians! Which I feel is just what a sequel ought to do. (Only I wanted some movement on the Alice front, and it was not forthcoming.)

In short, The Magicians had a better story for my Narnia/Harry Potter-loving little heart, but The Magician King is a better piece of storytelling. Quentin — not to spoil things for you, but y’all, Quentin kinda grows up. I might just go out and buy a paperback copy of The Magicians someday now. The things I liked about it are still true, and the things I didn’t like about it are handled (almost all of them) by The Magician King.

And now, the obligatory Oscar Wilde nitpick about something that matters absolutely zero and can be easily explained away but irritated me nonetheless because I don’t think the explanations that would be offered in its defense would actually be true:

Brakebills was for Marquis of Queensberry types. Murs was more your stone-cold street-fighting man.

NO. NO to this. NO.

I comprehend perfectly the point of this passage. The Queensberry Rules govern fair play in boxing and suggest, in general, the ideals of fighting like a gentleman. The phrasing of this sentence links Brakebills to the landed gentry while also evoking the cultural metonym of the Queensberry Rules. If it weren’t so dismayingly wrong it would be a tidy bit of shorthand. It’s just — it’s just — God, it’s just wrong. The Marquess of Queensberry was as stone-cold as any character in The Magician King, and significantly more mentally unstable (yes! and I say that having not forgotten all the moderately-to-very mentally unstable characters in this book). I can scarcely imagine anybody who fought less like a gentleman than the Marquess of Queensberry. The Marquess of Queensberry fought like a street urchin. An antisemitic homophobic street urchin. The Marquess of Queensberry wasn’t a Queensberry Rules type. Is all I’m saying. He fought dirty. I’m just saying.

OH BY THE WAY. It turns out? That the Marquess of Queensberry is related by marriage to Osama bin Laden. It’s true. His great-great-grandson had a bin Laden nephew as an in-law (the former head, as it happens, of the bin Laden Corporation). As you may imagine, this news fills my heart with inexpressible joy. From now on when I am having a kankkarankka paiva, I will remember this information and be of good cheer.

Again, The Magician King was sent to me for review by Viking. It comes out the day after tomorrow, the ninth of August.

The post Review: The Magician King, Lev Grossman appeared first on Reading the End.

The Magicians is about a boy called Quentin Coldwater who is obsessed with a series of books about a fictional land, Fillory.  One day, he interviews for and gets into a school of magic, Brakebills, and he spends the next lots of years learning magic, and practicing magic, and eventually (is this spoilers?  I feel like no, because you see it coming from the beginning) it turns out that Fillory was real all along, and he and his friends go to Fillory.

I loved the Fillory thing.  Narnia obviously informed the idea of the Fillory books – the child protagonists, the magic alternate world, the talking animals, etc. – but very rarely did it feel like Grossman was borrowing too much from C.S. Lewis.  (The exception is that he swiped the entire idea of the Wood Between the Worlds with hardly any changes, which kind of bugged me.)  Mainly, though, this device works very well.  The idea of the book is sort of a growing-up of children’s fantasy.  Quentin’s obsession with Fillory makes him expect one thing out of magic, and he finds it works quite differently.  He grows into adulthood and cannot quite work out what to do with his life, and finally he gets to Fillory and finds it absolutely not what he was imagining.  It’s all pretty dark and difficult and messy, like adulthood is – the expectations kids have, and the difficult, compromise-y reality.

(Spoilers here.)  What worked particularly nicely for me, in suggesting the transition from childhood magic to the world of adulthood, is the episode where Quentin decides to play a tiny prank on one of his teachers.  The minor distraction he creates summons a Beast from another world, and a student who tries to save the situation gets killed.  BAM.  It was effective.

On the down side, I did find the book unbearably self-conscious at times, especially on the one or two occasions that the students of Brakebills made reference to Hogwarts and Middle Earth.  It was jarring.  Fillory was fictional Narnia, so the world of the book was obviously not our world; to make reference to a real-world book took me right out of the moment.  If there is Fillory instead of Narnia, Tolkien and Harry Potter can’t exist.  Does that make sense?

Another problem I had was that, although the book was a good exploration of the adulthood thing I mentioned before, it wasn’t tightly plotted.  Extraneous events and stories were easily distinguishable from plot point events and stories because Grossman was telegraphing his punches like mad.  Plus, the trip to Fillory didn’t happen until ages into the book, and it was so brief there wasn’t enough time to build up the necessary suspense.  (Though I did like the final revelation about Martin.)

I spoke a while ago about Neil Gaiman’s story “The Problem of Susan” and the problems I had with it.  Grossman’s story is as creepily effective as Gaiman’s at growing up the Narnia books, without being as disrespectful to Lewis’s writing.  On the other hand, given that it was novel-length rather than just a short story, The Magicians could have benefited by having a good editor.  It was uneven altogether – it dragged in bits, and raced in bits, and while some things worked spectacularly, others spectacularly did not (the niffin thing?  not so much).

I like for my life to be simple, and I have fretted about how many stars to give this book for a while now.  I decided on three as an average, though as I say, in parts it was a five and in parts a one or two.  What would you prefer – an all-bad book you can write off forever, or a book like this that’s inconsistent?

Other reviews: A Novel Menagerie, She Is Too Fond of Books, bookshelves of doom, OF Blog of the Fallen, Reading the Leaves, Books and Movies, Beyond Books, The Wertzone, The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review, Darque Reviews, Wordsmithonia, Strategist’s Personal Library, Stephanie’s Written Word, and tell me if I missed yours!

The post Review: The Magicians, Lev Grossman appeared first on Reading the End.