A Slow Afternoon with Wordplay

Q. Wordplay, remember when you used to be fun? You wrote all kinds of silly stuff about little things that happened to you at home, what you were thinking about, dragonflies, colors of the day, etc. It wasn’t all this Dark Academia falderol.

A. Yes, well,  I’m trying to develop a niche here in one little corner of pop culture, if that’s OK with you.

Q. Don’t you even have any comments on larger issues in the culture? With so many serious things going on—

A. You’re quite right. There are a lot of serious things going on and plenty of people available to comment on them. Right now I prefer seeing facts unfold. A bunch of people’s opinions are well and good, but what we need most are facts.

Q. I used to love those little personal anecdotes you shared.

A. OK. Well, I got some grease on a pair of pants the other night while cooking dinner. It didn’t come out even when I dabbed it with detergent. Then I remembered that I once got a similar stain out with lemon juice and salt. Just let it sit overnight, then wash. Voila!

Q. You’re kidding me, right?

A. Pas du tout. Don’t you remember—I once wrote an entire blog post on how to get a stain out of an upholstered chair. That’s a fact. Things were slow in my life then. Another fact is, if you want to deep clean your bathroom, put bleach solution in a spray bottle, spray your shower walls and the inside of your shower liner, turn on the hot shower, close the door, and let the bathroom get really steamy. After a few minutes, you can turn the water off, but keep the door closed for a good long while. I always remove towels and other items before doing this so that they don’t get bleached. I think I read this tip in Real Simple years ago; I just wanna tell you, it works. I got rid of mildew on my bathroom ceiling one time by doing this.

Q. Now you’re being useless. I never thought I’d say this, but even Dark Academia is better than this.

A. OK, well, I just read a novel by Alex Michaelides called The Maidens. It’s set at Cambridge University and involves a series of murders among a group of female students, acolytes of a classics professor who seems to wield undue influence over them. There are atmospheric descriptions of the campus! References to Demeter and Persephone! Quotes from Euripides! One thing I got out of it is to never go to a therapist who is unable to pick up on vibes such as her late husband having been bonking her niece right under her nose for years before he died. Also that her niece has homicidal feelings toward her. Just slipped past her radar somehow. I get it that therapists are just people, but that’s a hell of a blind spot.

Q. That’s depressing.

A. Yes, well. How about some dessert tips then? If you want to make a really delicious dessert that’s kind of like tiramisu but really, really easy, make some vanilla pudding, then mix it with several cups of sweetened whipped cream. Put a layer of graham crackers on the bottom of your pan, then layer it with the filling mixture and repeat, ending with graham crackers on top. Make a simple chocolate ganache to spread over everything. You could sprinkle some espresso on the layers if you want to make it more like tiramisu. C’est delicieux! Not an every night dessert, but great for an occasional treat.

Q. OK, but I could have gotten that from the Internet.

A. I know, but you didn’t, did you?

Q. I can’t stand you when you’re in this kind of a mood.

A. Moi, je l’adore. Mais oui, on est nul.

Q. You’ve been watching Emily in Paris again, haven’t you? What does “on est nul” mean?

A. I think it’s kind of like “f**k my life.”

Q. Gotcha.

Shakespeare Camp for the Uninitiated

Last week, I finished M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, a novel about a group of theatre students in their fourth year of a drama program at an exclusive arts college. Their curriculum consists of all-Shakespeare, all the time, and by the beginning of their senior year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, they are both a well-trained theatre troupe and a close-knit group of friends (or, in some cases, frenemies). Things look promising at the beginning of their senior year, and at the start, I was almost envious of their situation, their ability to focus and train in exactly what they love best with a group of like-minded fellows at a small, idyllic-sounding Midwestern campus.

Actually, Dellecher is not at all unlike Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I studied mythology and Jungian psychology, and I can attest that my program had some of the same idyllic qualities—a beautiful natural setting, a program with a particular focus, and a tight campus community, though PGI is in SoCal and has a definite California vibe rather than the strict regimented intensity of Dellecher as described in the novel. Of course, even in paradise, real life goes on; in the midst of trying out for roles and navigating romantic entanglements and friendships, Dellecher’s seven seniors are looking forward to auditions and professional careers once they graduate. They seem on track to accomplish that and are on top of the world at the beginning of the term.

As you would expect, there’s plenty of interpersonal drama and competitiveness among these students. Some of the tensions that already exist intensify as one of their professors focuses on having each student identify and expose his or her greatest strength and greatest weakness to the group in an acting workshop. Sounds fairly harmless, right? I don’t know if this method is common in acting circles; I suppose it makes sense in terms of having actors get in touch with their own motivations, aspirations, and fears so that they can become better actors, but it’s also fairly brutal because it strips away their defenses. In any event, it marks the beginning of the end of the Dellecher idyll as it leads to psychotic breaks among the students. Instead of merely playing their roles, the actors can no longer quite contain what they are meant to be enacting, and Shakespeare’s rivalries, jealousies, and murderous impulses (which are really their own) spill off the stage and into their lives.

Jungians often discuss a technique called active imagination, which is a way of getting in touch with the contents of your unconscious to spur creativity and personal growth through the use of symbols, images, meditation, and other tools. It can be very beneficial but also, perhaps, destructive, if you’re not on solid emotional ground to begin with. To me, being immersed in the myth traditions of cultures around the world for several years of study was one long exercise in active imagination that was tremendously freeing as far stimulating the imagination goes. To me, it’s difficult to think of anything more beneficial for a writer or an artist. In the case of the Dellecher students, all of the wide world as presented by Shakespeare—while deeply beloved as a discipline—has been largely academic until the lines between role-playing and real life are breached. Once the students’ emotions begin to interact in a serious way with the roles they are playing, life begins to imitate art, and real-life tragedy is not far away.

Jung believed that the type of growth people strive for with analysis and active imagination often takes place naturally in the second half of life as people reach a stage in which their undeveloped capabilities, dormant in the first half of life, begin to make themselves felt. It’s generally a very positive thing. The Dellecher students in the novel, of course, are barely out of their teens and not really equipped to deal with so much emotional flooding, especially in the same context as substance abuse and tentative sexual exploration. Previously unimaginable events overtake the students as rivalries and resentments spill into violence and collective guilt.

At the beginning of the novel, I thought that of all the subject disciplines taught at Dellecher, theatre seemed the most rewarding because it has the potential to teach practitioners so much about psychology and human nature. This is true, I think, but as the plot in If We Were Villains unfolds, the downside to all this exploration of the psyche becomes apparent. If Richard, who has always been something of a bully, can become a full-on murderous sociopath, then James, previously the “good guy,” and Alexander, who has always been ready with “bad boy” behavior, can also cross over to the dark side once murderous impulses find a channel to the surface via a staging of Macbeth or Julius Caesar.

Obviously, this isn’t a common occurrence, and you can probably attend your community’s Shakespeare in the Park performances in relative safety this summer (if you were worried about it). Nevertheless, the dynamic the novel describes of unconscious impulses spilling out uncontrolled once they’re no longer contained is accurate, I believe. A witches’ brew of dark emotions in the plays of Shakespeare, a bit of unlicensed therapy from a teacher a little too oblivious to the dangers of probing complexes and insecurities, and a group of talented but still immature students struggling with all the usual problems of young adulthood—what could go wrong? Probably a lot.

A Bunch of Magicians Gathered in a Manor House, and . . .

It took a while, but I finally finished Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six, and let me tell you, people are throwing around the term “Dark Academia” pretty loosely in applying it to this book. From what I’ve seen, the genre has some very indeterminate edges to begin with, but usually some combination of a Gothic setting, exclusivity, occult knowledge, and sinister happenings need to occur in proximity to one another to qualify. In The Atlas Six, the exclusivity is there, but by the book’s own logic, magical knowledge is really just a form of super-advanced scientific acumen that some savants (“medeians” as they are called in the novel) have the ability to wield according to their specialties. They are basically physicists, naturalists, telepaths, and even psychopaths, if you will; they are simply way ahead of the general population in their knowledge of how the universe functions and their ability to manipulate it.

In most of the other Dark Academia novels or TV series I’ve come across, the question of what magic is isn’t nearly so cut-and-dried as it is here. Magicians may be quite skilled at casting spells and capable of doing spectacular things in the wider world of D.A. without really being able to pin down what magic is . . . there is some mystery to it, something that defies explanation. Magic is often set in opposition to the normal, everyday world, and the people who practice it do so on the fringes of society or in some secret corner of it, as if there has to be something a bit wrong with them to give magic the ability to leak through. 

To say that The Atlas Six doesn’t fit this pattern isn’t a criticism of the novel, but I think it reads more like a quirky sort of science fiction crossed with a bit of Agatha Christie than Dark Academia. Magic is a commodity in this novel, something to be used, bought, and sold, so that skilled practitioners essentially rule the world in a very hard-headed, unsentimental way. While some of the characters are fighting their own demons, the main characteristic nearly all of them share is being highly competitive.

I had difficulty relating to the characters throughout the first few chapters, as none of them were particularly engaging or sympathetic. But once the novel takes off, it really takes off; I have to give the author credit for taking a group of prickly, somewhat self-absorbed magical geniuses that I didn’t especially like and placing them in circumstances that suddenly became compelling once I realized what they were actually up against. The novel has a few English “murder mystery” tropes in it, with its small group of oddballs tripping over one another in a manor house setting and matching wits to survive what only appears to be a genteel competition. The weapons at their disposal—the ability to alter time and space, disappear into one another’s psyches, and alter the perceptions and thoughts of their fellow initiates—make for a very lively academic year.

Miss Blake followed this novel up with its continuance, The Atlas Paradox, which I haven’t yet read; a third novel, The Atlas Complex, is expected next year. In the way of a cliffhanger, The Atlas Six ends in the middle of an action-packed sequence in a somewhat different manner than the reader has been led to believe is possible, but OK, yay for that! This popular series takes the magical academia trend in its own idiosyncratic direction with a group of somewhat disaffected characters who practice magic not for personal reasons but for professional ones, with all the competitive edginess found in any highly selective academic program with a limited number of seats. Imagine an English graduate department with a prestigious fellowship program and only a few open slots and picture the chaos when the applicants can see around corners, read one another’s minds, perform battle magic, and contemplate murder to achieve their goals. 

Come to think of it, is this really that different from the actual real world? Doesn’t seem that different from some of the academic settings I’ve known. I often feel that someone is trying to read my mind or figure out what I’m thinking before I even know it myself, and I’m an independent scholar. Imagine the mayhem in the halls of academia, then, if someone were to throw magic into the mix. Oh, wait, they already have, haven’t they—it’s called technology.

How to Be a Magician

“Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.” —Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

After watching the Syfy series The Magicians, I started reading the novels from which they were adapted and just finished the last of the three, The Magician’s Land. In previous posts I discussed The Magicians as an example of the Dark Academia genre, but it’s also a little bit science fiction and a little bit urban fantasy. The TV series diverged in many ways from the books but is true to it in spirit. 

It was ambitious of Syfy to undertake an adaptation of this multiverse-spanning work, but they pulled it off, actually adding complexity to an already complex narrative. The author supplies transitions that help you, the reader, keep track of where you are in space/time with regard to the plot, but the TV series sometimes meanders without ceremony from one space/time labyrinth into another. I kind of liked that about it, the way it could jump abruptly from one world to the next by way of very shifty portals and occasionally leave you wondering where exactly you were. It was very existential, though it sometimes had me wondering if I’d missed something I was supposed to know about the transition. Well, haven’t we all been landed at one time or another in the middle of a world that looked like the one we’re used to but very palpably wasn’t the same thing at all? Of course we have. This series gets you to feeling that that’s just the type of thing a reasonably intelligent magician has to get used to.

In the novels, Mr. Grossman gives a more explanatory diagram of how various segments of the multiverse are enmeshed, particularly in the episode of the prank in which Plum discovers interconnected worlds behind the walls at Brakebills. In the TV series, it’s often unclear, especially later on, if the characters are in Brakebills (where they appear to be) or somewhere else, some anteroom slightly removed from current reality. In my mind, Brakebills serves as baseline reality, which is actually a joke, since Brakebills is itself separated—by a thin membrane only, but still, separated—from the actual modern world of the northeastern United States in New York State. The Hudson River is visible from the campus, but no one on or near the river would be able to see Brakebills; invisible wards shield it from the eyes of non-magicians.

Some of the characters in the TV series are exactly as Mr. Grossman wrote them, brought to life by a talented cast who seemingly stepped straight out of the pages. Some of the characters have been changed somewhat, or bear different names or roles than they do in the books. One character, Penny, bears only a modest resemblance to Penny in the novel, being much more compelling and dynamic in the series (and actually one of my favorites); I mourned his fate in the series and never really got over his separation from Kady. Penny eventually becomes (in both the books and the series) a Librarian-Magician, and although librarians are not as benign in The Magicians as many people think them to be in real life (having a rather complex relationship with magic that sometimes places them in opposition to magicians), Penny manages both roles, though more satisfactorily in the TV series, I thought, where he was quite a bit more manly.

In previous posts I talked about the idea of magic as psychological agency, and The Magicians is possibly the purest example of this idea that I’ve yet seen. This idea first came to me after I watched a filmed production of The Tempest some years ago, and to my delight, that’s the way Quentin Coldwater, The Magicians’ central character, also sees it: he thinks of the world he wants to create using magic as a kind of Prospero’s island, where he can arrange things to be safe and peaceful. If you ask the question, “What exactly is magic?” I would say, as I think The Magicians does, that it’s a lot like creativity, and not only the kind that spins fantasy worlds and creates symphonies and paintings. It’s also the kind you use in homespun ways when putting together a home or cooking a meal. It’s you putting your stamp on the world, taking what it has to offer and making something out of it that wasn’t there before.

Most, if not all, of the characters in The Magicians are broken in some way or another, and learning magic constitutes a way for them to heal themselves while they are trying to heal the world. They often make things worse, at least for a time, since magic is a messy business limited not only by the magician’s skill but by the material he/she has to work with and the fact that magic has a mind of its own. If you want to get Jungian about it (you may not, but here goes anyway), it’s like the conscious mind, the ego, working with the unconscious, the invisible place of power from whence spring all manner of things, both good and bad. Ever wondered why that spell you cast created a prison world instead of the paradise you wanted? Well, what about that leviathan swimming around down there in your unconscious that shaped your intent in ways you weren’t aware of?

Of course, even going off course with magic can be beneficial in the long run, as Quentin and the others discover. The cliche about the journey meaning more than the destination turns out to be true when you’re jumping worlds as well. You keep trying things out and learning until something sticks, and you suddenly realize you’re home. In the world of The Magicians, it’s only those with an aptitude who ever even learn that magic exists, but I’m not sure Mr. Grossman and I are in disagreement over this. A lot of ordinary people in our world never truly learn what they’re capable of, either.

Wordplay Attempts to Get It Together

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve reviewed several books and TV series related to the themes of Dark Academia and “kids doing magic.” Now you may be wondering what significance all of this has and why so many TV shows, books, and movies using these ideas keep cropping up. What are we really responding to when we’re attracted to plots and characters centered on wizardry and magic, and what is academia doing mixed up in this? There’s a lot to ponder here. Interest in magic is nothing new, but the sheer number of entertainment offerings involving magical schools and/or occult activities at schools points to something in the collective psyche that keeps circling, as if caught in a whirlpool, around the archetypes of Magician and Scholar.

When I was young, amateur detectives and sleuthing were popular themes in many books and TV series. The Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of the day used their intellects and detecting skills to solve mysteries. There was little or no magic involved: everything was based on making observations, gathering evidence, and drawing conclusions—all very scientific and logical. Spooky happenings abounded, but they always had an explanation that diligent searching could uncover. It’s tempting to say that maybe this reflected a simpler time, or a more optimistic time, when it seemed that the march of 20th century scientific progress was carrying us all forward, and technology would finally solve many intractable problems. Respect for scientific methods and powers of deduction are at the heart of these stories.

Could it be that the world has gotten so complex (and troubling in its complexity) that simply restoring order by finding “the villain” or solving “the mystery” doesn’t satisfy in the way that it used to? There are so many villains, and in some cases, they’re also our heroes. Contradictions run through many of our cherished institutions and beliefs that can’t be denied any more; we often find we’re standing on shaky ground that we used to think was solid. We assume we’re doing the right thing, as a society and as individuals, only to be questioned by others who have different ideas. Our country is big and diverse, full of contending parties, and although that’s supposed to be our strength, all the opposing voices make it difficult to see our way forward. Not only that, but the world is transforming rapidly around us, climate change bringing about fresh disasters at every turn, and even nuclear war being spoken of as a possibility.

I think the interest in magical schools may point to a deep-seated response to the complex and overwhelming world we’re facing. What is magic but the ability to overcome the laws of physics, the strictures that bind us, and make things happen, things that we want to happen. Magic is a way of breaking through complications and exerting one’s will on the world, instead of being at the world’s mercy. It’s an intense form of psychological agency, reflecting a need to have influence and control over events when we actually fear we may have neither.

Meanwhile, the theme of “Dark Academia” points to a concern, perhaps more accurately an anxiety, about secret knowledge, knowledge that most people don’t have. There is a pervasive feeling, especially in a work like Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, that venerable institutions intimately bound up with power structures harbor secrets that make the rest of us vulnerable. These are only penetrated at great risk. What you don’t know can hurt you, but what you do know can also hurt you. There’s a preoccupation with long-buried secrets trying to come to light only to be pushed down again, things too disturbing to really look at in the sober light of day. Trauma is tied to hidden connections running beneath things, like a dark underground river. This theme is also present in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance books, in which enclaves for the powerful are built, quite literally, on top of trauma.

Themes of secret knowledge and agency may not be present in every work related to magical schools, and there could be other reasons for the genre’s popularity. In particular, I think of a program like Legacies, in which all of the students at the Salvatore School are actually freaks of one kind or another. They are in the one place where they have a chance of being understood and accepted. In some ways, this might reflect the unwillingness of some formerly marginalized groups in our society to remain marginalized. It’s a demand for recognition and acceptance of one’s authentic self, with plenty of heavy-duty spell-casting underlining the need for personal agency. In a gentler way, the same thing happens in The Bureau of Magical Things, in which magical races of fairies and elves go from co-existing with humans but hiding who they really are to letting others see them, gradually forming relationships based on trust.

If there’s one way to sum up the psychological underpinning of the current popularity of magical schools and occult happenings it would be that they are a response to rapid and extreme change affecting our physical, social, and political environment. Most of these works have dark overtones that reflect with some seriousness real-life issues related to change, instability, and uncertainty. There is defiance, certainly, and some hope, but there are no guarantees of a better world in progress.

More About ‘Dark Academia’

I mentioned in last week’s post that “Dark Academia” is having a cultural moment; I decided a while back to plunge into the genre and see what it was all about. You may have noticed a lot of storylines about kids going to magical schools in books, television series, and movies, but in my opinion it takes more than that to qualify as Dark Academia. The Bureau of Magical Things, an Australian program on Netflix, features students at a select (and secret) school of magic hidden behind a bookshop, but the kids are wholesome, and the mood is generally upbeat and sunny. You might call it “Magical Academia,” and its audience is young children.

A truer example of Dark Academia is Legacies, (a CW Network series now on Netflix) about a K-12 school for kids who happen to be vampires, werewolves, and witches, with other magical beings occasionally thrown in (one kid is actually a phoenix, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him). They all attend the Salvatore School, a private institution in Mystic Falls, Virginia, which greatly resembles many a private or prep school that regular mortals may have attended. There are the plaid skirts, the school crest, the gated grounds, the polished wooden floors, and all the other accoutrements of a well-heeled and decorous institution. Some of the characters are so likable that you almost forget they’re dangerous, until the fangs and claws come out or someone casts an especially evil spell.

The school has been established to create a safe haven, protecting the students from the world and the world from them. Attempts are made to school them into controlling their proclivities, although it’s a little unclear how successful Salvatore is in doing this. Every effort is made to present the school to outsiders as simply a private academy; there is an annual football match with the local public high school that Salvatore students are encouraged to lose, the more to cement their reputation as a bunch of harmless preps. While this sounds dark enough, the real kicker is that the magical powers the kids have at the tips of their fingers attract all kinds of monsters, so that not only are they constantly contending with themselves, each other, and the world at large but also with a variety of evil beings that inevitably come calling. One week it might be a Golem; the next week, it’s an evil Cupid.

Another series that I quite enjoyed was The Magicians, a program originally shown on SYFY and based on Lev Grossman’s Magicians novels. At the beginning of this series, a young man who thinks he’s bound for the Ivy League finds that he’s been invited instead to interview at Brakebills, a college of magic in upstate New York that can be reached by various hidden portals, though no one outside the school seems to know it’s there. While Legacies is aimed at a younger audience, The Magicians has adult content; there’s the occasional wild party, some truly terrifying supernatural beings, regular trips to the Underworld (usually one-way), and unforeseen consequences of the use of magic. Unlike the Salvatore kids, who seem to wield their powers with total panache, as if they were in a music video, the students at Brakebills often seem to be spitting into the wind, achieving everything except what they set out to do and breaking things more than they end up fixing them.

What I liked about this series was its total unpredictability; you can never tell where the characters are going to go or what will happen next. The mix of quirky personalities is occasionally grating, but all the characters are memorable, often funny, and sometimes tragic: imagine a group of hip, smart young urbanites with a lot of competitive qualities and neuroses trying to learn how to be magicians while grappling with the usual problems of college life. A magical world called Fillory looms large in the plot, though I found it tedious, as it seems more a child’s fantasy world in which Brakebills students get stuck than the Utopia it first appears to be. That’s probably somehow the point. This fantasy world is more a trap, or perhaps an extended test, than it is an escape; growing into their abilities often means the characters have to figure out how to transcend Fillory. It turns out being a magician is much more than just being able to do cool things all the time.

Perhaps the best exemplar of Dark Academia that I’ve yet come across (this list is not exhaustive) is Leigh Bardugo’s novel Ninth House. When I first heard of Dark Academia, I was imagining something like this and wasn’t much interested in exploring the genre. After the first chapter or two I wasn’t sure I’d finish the book, but if you can get past a fairly stomach-turning beginning, the novel rewards you with a gruesome but fascinating fictional take on Yale’s secret societies. Ms. Bardugo, who was a member of a society at Yale, has said that she was attempting to “hyper-mystify” the societies rather than write a tell-all. I think she means by that that the fascination anything secret has for outsiders simply provided too golden an opportunity for fictional fodder to be passed up, and she’s right.

The Ninth House, in this novel, is the society with the job of keeping the others within bounds and making sure that their rituals and magic are used “responsibly.”  When it appears to the newest initiate of Lethe House that its protocols mainly lean toward covering up wrongdoing rather than policing it, she discovers that the job means more to her than just an escape from an extremely troubled past. As she learns more about the activities of the societies and Yale’s relationship to the town at large, she begins to see the disconnect between what she’s been led to expect and the way things actually are and decides to investigate further.

The book would have been too morbid for me if it were not for the characters, who only reveal themselves slowly; they, too, are keeping a lot of things under wraps. It’s almost as difficult to believe in the beginning that a street kid like Alex will manage to survive a single semester at Yale as it is to imagine her mentor, Darlington, turning out to be deeper than the stuffed shirt and Yale traditionalist he appears to be. I liked the characters better the more I got to know them, and that includes some of their supporting players, the diffident Dawes, always preoccupied with her dissertation, and the skeptical police detective, Turner. In this world of privilege and power, a strategy of keeping motives and means hidden is simply the way things are done.

While one hopes that the actual doings of Yales’s secret societies don’t include using the most marginalized townies as subjects in such activities as the reading of entrails to predict the stock market, you suspect there is some form of truth in the theme of “might makes right” that runs through the novel. Most of the truly bizarre activities Ms. Bardugo depicts are clearly fictional, but there’s a ring of uncomfortable truth in her portrait of a closed society of wealth and power exerting its will over the town and other institutions, and respectable appearances covering up even the foulest of deeds. This is another novel that includes trips to the Underworld and portals to hell dimensions, though these are even more chilling than those depicted in The Magicians. Sometimes, people in The Magicians break into light-hearted, spontaneous song; it’s difficult to imagine anyone in Bardugo’s oppressive Yale environment doing so, unless it were part of a drunken revel.

So which school would I choose to attend, if I had to make a choice? It would clearly be Brakebills for me. Salvatore School seems too dangerous a proposition for a mere human, as does Yale as Bardugo depicts it. Brakebills is kind of a port in the storm. I could imagine settling in there as a campus librarian and trying to stay out of the way of the more wayward spells and trips to the Neitherlands. Maybe I could even come up with a library circulation system that magically extracts wayward books from the desks of patrons who refuse to return them and gives them an invisible rap on the knuckles that leaves them unable to pinpoint the source. That would be fun.

The Scholomance: A Campus Visit

I know nobody else cares, but if anyone knows who’s causing that pinging sound I’m always hearing in my ears, if you could get them to stop, I’ll be so grateful I’d probably bake you a cake. Once I find the party that’s doing it, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, I guarantee you. I was talking to a customer at the store today when it started up; I mentioned it to him, and we both decided, in lieu of a better idea, that it was coming from a debris field strung somewhere in the Atlantic. OK, that’s off my chest for now. Just remember, though, I warned you: I’m cranky about these sound effects.

I do actually have a topic for this post, and that’s the trilogy I just finished reading that I think some of you would enjoy, Naomi Novik’s “The Scholomance” series. I sometimes use EBSCO’s NoveList database (which you can probably access through your local public library) to find books similar to other books I’ve enjoyed, and I think that’s where I came across the trilogy’s first book, A Deadly Education. I was investigating books in the intriguingly named “Dark Academia” genre, and that led me to this title. Dark Academia is having a definite cultural moment. Some of this interest can be traced back to Harry Potter, but there are a lot of wildly different variations on the theme, as I have found.

In the Scholomance, students attend a school of magic in an alternate universe with the void as its backyard and spend four years of secondary education trying not to get killed. That’s it, in a nutshell. There are no adults around; course schedules appear out of thin air, the cafeteria is self-serve, and monsters (or “mals”) may found at any time in the food, in the shower heads, in the library, or around any random corner at all. Students spend their time learning and perfecting spells and tend to specialize according to their aptitudes. If they survive until the spring of their senior year, they must run a gauntlet of monsters through the gymnasium to escape the Scholomance and find their portals back to the real world.

The survival rate at the school has been pretty poor until Galadriel Higgins (“El” to her friends) and Orion Lake appear on the scene with some superior mal-fighting abilities and new ideas about how to manage monsters. Antagonists at first (as nearly everyone at the school is in this dog-eat-dog environment), they slowly begin to form alliances. One of the joys of the novels is to see how the fiercely independent El gradually comes to see who she can trust and whose talents align best with hers. Alliances in the Scholomance are truly life-and-death decisions, since trusting anyone in an environment in which people are played against one another for survival is a serious thing. While the purported reason for the existence of the Scholomance is to give the young people a fighting chance in the mal-infested world to which, if they’re lucky, they’ll be returning, it usually seems the school itself is rigged against them. When El’s class decides to follow her lead in working cooperatively to kill mals, things take a different turn, though not everyone is sold on the idea.

El, Orion, and their fellow students have the fight of their lives in The Last Graduate, and the build-up to and execution of their graduation exercise is unforgettably exciting and suspenseful. Scholomance students come from all over the world and bring with them the political struggles and rivalries of life as we know it, of New York and London, of Beijing and Dubai. In addition to being mal-fighting warriors, though, the students are also teenagers and experience the normal issues of adolescent angst sandwiched in between the flashy heroics.

Somehow the author maintains a buoyant tone that carries you through the horrors of the Scholomance, and in the final book, The Golden Enclaves, you get to see what a Scholomance education buys you, in case you were thinking of enrolling. I probably wouldn’t agree with my local library on a lot of things, but I do agree with their categorization of this trilogy as science fiction. It’s too much like the real world to come across as fantasy. Although it’s full of magic and spells, it maintains a businesslike approach to realpolitik while also making a daring case for idealism. An uneasy cross between a junior United Nations and a penal colony, the Scholomance may actually succeed in what it sets out to do but at a cost. We can surely say the same about some of our own devil's bargains.

This would make a smashing TV series, so I hope someone gifted ends up bringing this to the screen. (See, just a couple of years of Netflix and I’m already leaning into “Let’s get this streaming so I can watch it from the comfort of my couch. And bring me a bowl of popcorn while you’re at it.”) Yes, I’m all about the hygge these days.