Amarillo

A Short Story

It was early evening on a summer day, and the road was nearly deserted—which seemed strange, since it was a major east-west interstate. Nonetheless, she saw few vehicles, only—now and then—large trucks. As the sun was setting behind the mountains, the light hardened to a deep orange, then dimmed into a purple twilight. This part of the country had deep folds in the land, which would continue until it flattened out near Amarillo, her immediate, but not final, destination; she did not remember it taking this long to reach the town after crossing into Texas, but she now realized she probably wouldn't make it before dark. Just before she turned on the headlights, something crossed the road in front of her, some unknown creature that seemed almost to float like a wisp of smoke, not identifiable by any means of locomotion she had ever seen. A roadrunner?

Gradually, the land smoothed out, and she recognized a gas station, calculating she was perhaps 30 minutes from the outskirts of Amarillo. She was tired but alert and saw nothing else moving through the dry landscape except for other vehicles, the occasional RV or truck, on the road itself. As she neared the city limit, the wind picked up, and in the rear-view mirror, she saw that what had looked like a distant mountain range was actually an enormous steel-gray cloud encroaching over the desert and emitting an occasional flash of lightning. It was still some miles away.

She had no hotel reservation, had not eaten since breakfast, and knew nothing of Amarillo except for the long strip of hotels along the interstate corridor. She needed to find an ATM, a gas station, some food, and a place to stay, which seemed a reasonable plan until the wind turned cyclonic once she left the highway to look for an ATM. It whistled around her head while she punched buttons at the bank machine and steadily rose in volume as she dashed through the drive-through at Wendy’s, starting to feel somewhat frantic. The wind was actually shrieking as she made her way back to the interstate and attempted to navigate an access road that led first to a dead-end field, where the grass lay nearly sideways in the wind, and then to an expensive hotel that she could not afford. Coming out of the parking lot, she saw the familiar logo of a moderately-priced chain a mile down the road and sped toward it, expecting to spot a tornado at any moment.

The hotel was new and clean and had vacancies. The deep purple color scheme and Pierrot-inspired decor had a curiously deadening effect, but she just shrugged. Probably designed by a committee. There was even an available luggage cart on which she piled her suitcases, fearful that her car might be destroyed overnight in the cyclone. In the elevator, her breathing began to slow to a more normal level as the sounds of the wind were muted, but when she stepped into her room, the full force of the storm made itself felt once more, a giant body-slamming the building. She looked out the window before closing the curtains and saw an enormous sea of darkness next to the hotel, as if the building were perched on the edge of a deep canyon. With a small shudder, she turned away. Her Wendy’s had gone cold, but she ate it anyway while watching an episode of Fixer Upper that she had already seen. Despite the ferocity of the storm, the nearly constant lightning and pounding hail, the lights never flickered until she turned off the TV and pulled back the bed covers. Then all the lights went out at once.

This won’t last, she told herself. The hotel is bound to have a back-up generator. She walked over to the door, checking to make sure it was locked before lying down. It was only then, with the TV silenced, that she noticed a repetitive sound coming from outside her window, the sound of one hard object pounding another. Fearing that an adjacent window shutter had come loose and was about to crash through her window, she risked a quick peek and found herself face to face with a human-sized winged creature, with red eyes, gray skin, and sharp claws. Although she had difficulty processing what she was seeing, she had no trouble realizing that the creature was trying to open her window from the outside.

Stay calm, she said to herself, amazed that somehow her mind had switched to an automatic pilot mode. She reached around in the dark for something to use as a weapon, picking up a wooden chair just as the window latch came open and the creature put one wrinkled foot over the ledge. She pushed at it with all her might, using the chair to throw it off balance, so that it had to scrabble with one claw to maintain a hold. The coffeemaker on the desk was full of boiled water from the hot tea she’d forgotten to make; she grabbed the pot and threw the contents into the creature’s face. With a piercing cry, it let go of the ledge and fell into the darkness of the chasm.

In shock, the coffeepot still in her hand, she noticed that the wind was much less desperate-sounding than it had been a few minutes ago; then the lights came back on. How long had they been off? Two minutes? Five? The curtains blew in toward her along with some cold rain. Numbly, she latched and locked the window, which was completely intact; stumbling away from it, she hit the TV remote with her hand, and HGTV switched on to a discussion of shiplap and the choice of a door for an excited couple’s walk-in pantry, followed by a commercial for Lowe’s summer sale. It was incredible that even in the face of an incursion of the fantastic, the rational part of her brain could still take in details about custom doors and tile choices, could still tell her to straighten the chair and return the coffeepot, now empty, to its place. It was as if nothing had happened, as if she had just awakened from a nightmare without realizing she had ever gone to sleep.

Maybe that’s it, she told herself. I’m overwrought, I fell sleep while watching TV. It's all this pressure from the sales meeting. This will all fade to nothing in the morning. Still, she decided to leave a couple of lights and the TV on before lying down. To her surprise, she was suddenly exhausted and fell asleep with no difficulty, though she woke several times during the night. In the morning, she awoke to a bright daylight seeping through the curtains. All seemed normal, except for the damp places in the carpet near the window.

When the pleasant middle-aged woman at the reception desk asked if everything had been alright with her room, she took a deep breath and asked if the woman was aware of any large birds native to the area, really large, like a condor or possibly a harpy, that might have been noted around the hotel. The woman frowned with thought, as if contemplating an unexpected but pleasant puzzle, before saying no, not that she was aware of. “Although I’m not from around here,” she added, handing Cass’s receipt to her. “I’ve only been here for about six months. Why do you ask?”

“I just thought I saw a really big bird outside last night. But the storm was so wild, I probably imagined it.” Cass made a mental note that this was now the official story she would take with her from the incident, when anyone from the office asked about her trip.

Once she was behind the wheel of her car, she sat for a moment, thinking of the many miles she still had ahead of her. She still needed gas. She tried not to look toward the chasm at the rear of the hotel as she pulled onto the street. Everything looked ordinary in the morning light, which helped quell the unease that lingered in her mind. It simply had to have been a dream.

She filled up at the gas station and went inside to pay. The gas station did not serve breakfast, so she grabbed a package of crumb cakes and a bottled tea before going to the counter. She was the only customer. The clerk had the radio on to a morning news show; a stack of newspapers sat on the counter with a photo of a presidential candidate in a headlined story. Morning in America.

She had paid the clerk, taken back her change, and was saying thank you before she noticed how ashen the clerk’s face was. When he nodded to her thanks, his movements were stiff, and there was fear in the glance he flicked at her. The inside of the gas station was as conventional as could be, but somehow the slant of light wasn’t quite as it should be. It was as if he knew, as if she was marked in some way. She had never seen him before. Still, that look.

As she walked slowly out to her car, the miles and miles ahead of her seeming to stretch into infinity, she began to wonder for the first time, strangely, if she would ever make it home.

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.

What Drifted in on the Wind

The air quality here in Kentucky is back to what the Air Quality Index considers “Good” (under 50) for the first time since June 1st. We had rain yesterday and last night that seemed to help clear the air, and I woke up to blue skies this morning minus the feeling of hazy oppression we’d been living under with the wildfire smoke. It wasn’t bad here compared to the East Coast and the Northeast, but it was bad enough to make you reconsider your normal activities. I noticed fewer people swimming in the community pool all week until yesterday afternoon, when things began to clear. I myself wasn’t enticed to either sit on my porch or go for a walk during much of this AQI event; I wasn’t sure if I was a member of a “sensitive group” who might be affected more easily by particulate matter or not (I suspected not, but why take a chance?)—so I sipped my iced tea and read my books inside.

Author Stephen Pyne, whose book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, describes the new era that he says our management of fire has created. While Dr. Pyne believes we can take actions to ameliorate some of the effects of the mega-fires that are probably our new normal, there’s no getting around the consequences to our long-term health and well-being that this era has ushered in. I can remember when wildfires out West were a fairly regular occurrence before the scale of them shifted so wildly. They were distant events we would hear about on the news, destructive and concerning, certainly, but not nearly as monstrous as they are now. 

The scenes coming out of New York City during this past week were very nearly apocalyptic, as have some of the wildfires in California and the Northwest been over the last few years. Sometimes I’m glad my move to California was so short-lived because I’m not sure I’d want to be there now. The last time I was there, for a job interview, fires erupted the day before I got there and resulted in my interview being cancelled. While it was not the first time I had been in California while fires were raging, these were closer to where I was than the previous fires I’d seen. I remember walking down a street in Santa Monica and seeing a few people near a hospital wearing masks. It didn’t occur to me at first that this was because of the air quality, but indeed the smoke grew worse over the next day. There was nothing to do but watch the coverage on TV in my hotel room and worry. By the time I left two days later, I almost felt I was fleeing Armageddon by the skin of my teeth.

I was thinking tonight about the symbolic meanings of fire in world traditions and was reminded that fire is associated with the Manipura chakra, located at the solar plexus and associated with organs in the abdomen. If this chakra is blocked, it’s said that one suffers from a lack of agency, confidence, and the will to achieve, the energy from Manipura being the engine that drives self-esteem and purpose. It may be a coincidence, but I noted that several of the symptoms the yogis ascribe to a blocked Manipura chakra were symptoms I had been unable to shake over the course of this past week. I had a strange stomach ache after drinking an iced coffee (which normally doesn’t bother me) and felt rather sluggish throughout the week, oppressed by the haze that seemed to hem us all in. Reading the situation symbolically, I would say that the imbalance created by the fires raging out of control almost seemed at some psychic level to have stolen my own personal fire, leaving me at a standstill, though I wasn’t completely aware of the reason.

I hope we can collectively summon the will for the hard work it will take to stave off some of the worst effects of climate change, but I admit it isn’t looking good at the moment. Perhaps that will change. Meanwhile, I did one of the worst things I possibly could have done to reset my personal sense of agency by picking a library book this week that deals with the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophic event. Granted, it had nothing to do with climate change; it was a flu epidemic, but all that did was bring up memories of the recently lifted COVID-19 emergency. Wisely, I think, I decided to put that book aside and find something more fun to read. There’s only so much catastrophe you can reasonably expect to cope with in one week, even in the name of reading events mythically.

We Interrupt Our Programming on Dark Academia to Bring You . . . Two Families

Wordplay has published a number of book reviews recently, but it turns out that a week sometimes isn’t long enough for me to finish a book. This could lead you to believe that Wordplay is just a lazy bum who doesn’t care about disappointing its readers. This isn’t true, and that includes all six of you! To make it up to you, this week I have two books to share, both of which, as it turns out, deal with the subject of grief and loss in a family context. I didn’t know that’s what I was getting when I started reading them; it was probably NoveList that put both of these books on my reading list when I decided to take a break from Dark Academia for a little while.

Sue Miller’s Monogamy (2020) is a story of a happy marriage that ends in grief with the death of the husband. Graham and Annie have been married for decades when Graham’s unexpected death leaves Annie devastated. She slowly recovers from her loss with the support of a large circle of family and friends; it’s months before she suddenly realizes that Graham had been having an affair with a woman of their acquaintance just before he died, a realization that turns sorrow into rage. What had been a deep but fairly uncomplicated grief is transformed into a second loss as Annie struggles with feelings of betrayal.

The background to all of this is that both Graham and Annie had been shaped by the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s and had each enjoyed casual sex. Graham’s first marriage was an open one in which he thrived but his wife did not. Graham had had another brief affair early in his marriage to Annie, and Annie had had a brief adventure of her own with another man while already married to Graham. Thus the use of the word “monogamy” is a bit relative as applied to their marriage: it was mostly monogamous. 

Annie and Graham move in sophisticated Cambridge circles; dinner parties, art shows, and author readings are part and parcel of their world. Theirs is the East Coast intellectual version of what I think of as the “Santa Barbara” lifestyle, ruled by Aphrodite, the goddess of gourmet sensibilities, wine, good food, and sexual love. Graham is a bit of a Dionysus character, with a large frame as well as large appetites—always the life of the party, generous, gregarious, and loving—which is exactly what draws Annie to him in the first place. Her only reservation is a fear of being “swallowed up” by his larger-than-lifeness. Her character is cooler than his, as she tends to observe and record life. Both of them are “nice” people, but they are in some ways opposites. I suppose the main question the novel raised for me is, can you live in a world of Epicurean appetite and not be tempted to indulge those appetites in more than one direction? Another question would be, is monogamy possible for a Dionysian personality whose very lust for life is what’s so attractive about him to begin with?

Probably, I am reading this novel wrong. I found the story compelling, but perhaps there is some working-class snobbery in me that made me a little less sympathetic than I was supposed to be to Annie’s predicament. Annie and Graham had an idyllic life together, an existence of relative ease and comfort, fueled by doses of hedonism. They are interesting people, but perhaps a bit self-absorbed, taking all of the wonderful things in their lives as simply their due. It didn’t seem surprising to me that monogamy wasn’t quite possible for them.

On the other hand, I was unexpectedly blown away by Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, a 2022 novel about a family trying to hold themselves together after the death of one of their daughters in a tragic accident. The story is told from the point of view of the younger daughter, “ugly duckling” Sally, who idolizes her older sister Kathy even as she suffers in her shadow. Both girls are fascinated by the athletic and charismatic Billy Barnes, who becomes Kathy’s boyfriend while Sally lives out her crush vicariously. The Holts are a typical American family with a comfortable but not luxurious Connecticut life that’s turned upside down by Kathy’s death. What saves them is quite simply the fact that they stay together and tough it out.

One of the things I liked about this novel was the fact that it refused to sugarcoat the horror of the accident and its effects on the survivors but also maintained a sort of effervescent sense of humor on the part of the narrator. Events in the novel can be both terribly sad and funny at the same time, and they often are. There’s a messiness to the emotions in the novel and at the same time an honesty about them. Nothing is going to resolve what’s happened, and there’s no pretense that the family isn’t struggling, even years later. They’re almost destroyed by grief. 

Sally slowly comes into her own as she grows to adulthood but realizes that her life, successful as it seems from the outside, lacks authenticity. Sally’s mother tries to console herself with wine and regular visits to a psychic (who may actually know more than Sally gives her credit for); Sally’s father simply refuses to give up on his family even in the face of overwhelming pain and unforgiving anger. The needs of the family members clash at times, and they often fail to support one another, but they hang on.

It’s difficult to write about this novel without giving too much away; there is an emotional drive to the story that carries it forward. I admired Sally’s authenticity and humor, which persist in spite of a difficult adolescence and young adulthood. Although the financial circumstances of the Holts are probably not that different from those of Annie’s and Graham’s family, they seem worlds apart. The Holts seem more of a functioning family; you see how the tragedy affects all of them separately and all of them together. The novel is really a portrait of the family’s dynamics. In Monogamy, Annie and Graham seem more like ambitious people who just happened to have children; everything that happens with this family seems to happen to each of them individually, as if they never quite coalesced. It is a portrait of individuals.

Aside from that, there is an anarchic bedrock of truth in Sally’s narration that I found irresistible. In such an ordinary life, you would perhaps not expect to come across such extraordinary emotional courage, but there it is, right in the midst of high school Latin club, visits to the dentist, and dead trees that need to be removed lest they fall on the house. I actually gasped once or twice while reading this novel, a little in awe of how persistently it aimed straight at the heart of things.

How Much Will You Take for That Mermaid?

This week, Wordplay is once again visiting the topic of mermaids. You might recall my review of Imogen Hermes Gowar’s slinky and mysterious The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018) on the Wordplay Facebook page last year. This time, it’s Julia Langbein’s serio-comic American Mermaid, a 2023 novel about mermaids, the creative process, matriarchy and patriarchy, world domination, Hollywood, and the ways in which the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious inform and reflect one another.

The two novels are very different in tone but somehow share an underlying sensibility: both acknowledge the danger of trying to capture the natural forces moving freely through the world and trying to use them for mere profit or selfish ends. Ms. Langbein’s book made me laugh out loud several times while Ms. Gowar’s book was wreathed in watery darkness, but both novels have something to say about the sexual allure of the mermaid and female commodification. While the allure is natural, the failure to understand the power it represents is the real culprit. 

In Gowar’s book, a dead mermaid “specimen” put on display for exhibit-goers is an evil-looking creature with sharp teeth, and a living mermaid turns out to be impervious to attempts to hold it against its will. In Langbein’s book, men who succumb to the sirens’ song quickly find that is they who are being used and that the mermaids are indifferent to their fate (though they will do the men the honor of naming their progeny after them). An attempt to bring the mermaids into a corporate scheme to re-make the world through a planned global disaster backfires due to their ferociously independent nature. But it would be reductionist to say that both novels are simply polemics about the foolhardiness of failing to respect nature, in the same way it would be to say that of Moby-Dick, which in some ways is their spiritual forebear. All three novels paint a complex portrait of nature, including its destructive side: nature is ultimately creative, mysterious, spiritual, conscious, and very much alive.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ms. Langbein’s book, for me, was her depiction of the creative process of her heroine, a high school teacher and writer of fiction named Penelope Schleeman, whose first novel draws the attention of Hollywood filmmakers wishing to turn it into popular entertainment. Penelope’s novel draws heavily on her own life experiences, and because it’s an honest attempt to work through issues important to her, it simultaneously offends her family and catches fire with the world at large. Penelope’s adoption of a mythological creature, a captured mermaid, to stand in as a sort of alter ego, whether simply a fortuitous choice or not, actually invites the eventual intervention of real-life mermaids (yes, they turn out to be real) who subvert attempts to turn Penelope’s novel into a fatuous screenplay.

As with The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, American Mermaid paints what I think is a true portrait of the protean nature of mythology. Mythology is a human construct that reflects our understanding of the world around us but ultimately springs from a deep, indeterminate place where the human and non-human meet and are not so distinct from one another. Penelope’s writing draws from the collective unconscious, and she, in turn, has an effect on it. It’s both painful and hilarious to watch her struggle with the Hollywood handlers who love her book but want to turn it into something trivial. Once she begins to realize that her main character, Sylvia, has a life and power of her own, she becomes less and less bankable and can only watch as her subconscious/alter ego unleashes chaos to save her novel.

Personally, there are a lot of things I like about Los Angeles, but the novel’s description of the film business and Hollywood people rang true based on the little I know about it. I imagine it would be painful to see something you created turned into something completely different than you intended. At the same time, money and flattery are great temptations, and film is a business like any other. People are in it to make money. In American Mermaid, a sort of clash of the titans occurs when the honest businesspeople of Hollywood invite the wrath of the mythological world by attempting to use it in a bland moneymaker that won’t challenge anyone. In the end, this novel says, the mythical world will always win in a battle like this.

Matriarchal and patriarchal values are both given a place in American Mermaid, and if the matriarchy eventually has its way, that isn’t to say she is more benign. She can be cruel and heartless, too, even if in service to the continuation of life, which might give you an idea of the reason the patriarchy tries so hard to keep her down. Better for both to live in harmony with one another if only they could figure out how, but that is one of life’s continuing unresolved stories.

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.