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.

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.