The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land is a fantasy novel by Lev Grossman, published in 2014 by Viking Adult, the second sequel to The Magicians. It continues the story of outcast magician Quentin Coldwater, interweaving it with the story of several of his friends who are questing to save the magical realm of Fillory.

Plot Summary

After being expelled from the magical realm of Fillory, magician Quentin Coldwater returns to his alma mater, the magical college of Brakebills, as a new professor. Quentin spends his spare time studying an ancient spell found in his travels through the Neitherlands, the magical space between worlds. Near the end of his first semester, he rescues a student, Plum, after a magical prank gone wrong allows Alice – Quentin’s old love who turned herself into a magical creature called a niffin to kill Martin Chatwin in the first book – access to Brakebills. The school’s dean expels Plum for the prank and fires Quentin for failing to follow protocol and expel the niffin.

Quentin and Plum later join a gang of magician thieves led by a talking bird intent on stealing a mysterious suitcase once owned by Martin Chatwin’s brother Rupert, for which they are each promised a payment of two million dollars. It is currently in the possession of two people referred to only as The Couple. Quentin and Plum travel to Antarctica (partially in the form of whales) to consult with Professor Mayakovsky, the strict instructor from their days as Brakebills students. He gives Quentin three coins which he has spent years infusing with power so that they can break the incorporate bond that has been placed on the suitcase to protect it.

The group plans the elaborate heist for several weeks, then steals the suitcase. They are interrupted during the heist by a competing group of thieves (all of whom have translucent golden hands) and a battle ensues. Members of both groups and at least one of The Couple are killed, but Quentin’s group ends up with the suitcase. They are double-crossed, however, when one of their own members reveals herself to be Asmodeus, the teenager who studied magic with Julia in the second book and was the only other survivor of the attack by Reynard the Fox. She takes a knife that was in the suitcase and tells them that it has the power to kill a god and she is going fox hunting, then leaves. The only other item in the suitcase is a book written by Rupert Chatwin, Quentin and Plum take that. It turns out the talking bird duped them and never intended to pay them at all.

Rupert’s book contains his memoirs of his and his sibling’s adventures in Fillory and tell of how his older brother Martin became more and more desperate to go back there even as its ram gods Ember and Umber turned their backs on him and stopped sending for him. Rupert himself stole two items from Fillory before being kicked out for good due to growing up: the god-killing knife and a spell for creating a new world, which is tucked into the book.

In Fillory, Eliot and Janet learn from Ember that the magical realm is dying. They quest on horseback across the land in search of answers, and each discovers that the other has unexpectedly grown up and become responsible with age and experience. Janet tells Eliot that while he was off questing in the last book, she annexed a desert land to Fillory by defeating the land’s leader, the Foremost, after he insulted her.

Eliot goes to earth to consult with Quentin, while Janet, Josh, and Poppy continue searching for answers in a hidden castle on the underside of a lake. The castle turns out to inhabited by Umber, Ember’s twin who had been thought dead. They chase him into the countryside, and he tells them that he is the one who took Martin Chatwin’s humanity, because Martin wanted so badly to stay in Fillory. Just then, the sun crashes from Fillory’s sky into the ocean and an apocalypse begins the unraveling of the land. They watch in horror as most of Fillory’s inhabitants, including some of the forests, begin to fight one another in a massive battle.

In New York, Quentin and Plum use the spell tucked into Rupert’s book to create a new magical land, but the spell goes wrong. It creates an eerie mirror image of the house where they are staying, haunted by the spirit of Alice, Quentin’s college girlfriend, still in her niffin form. Eliot arrives from Fillory to share the news of that realm’s demise while Quentin uses the spell from the Neitherlands to restore Alice to life.

Alice is furious at being reincorporated after being a powerful and carefree spirit for seven years, and tells Quentin of how as a niffin, she watched him and traveled wherever and whenever she wanted – even out into space and back in time, where she watched Fillory being created after a tigress god sacrificed herself and allowed Ember and Umber to rise. Eventually, she and Quentin begin to reconcile. The talking bird shows up in New York, begging for Quentin and Plum to protect it. They learn that it was originally sent by Ember to use them to steal the suitcase, and they realize that Ember wants to use the spell to recreate Fillory. Quentin tosses the bird back out in the cold in disgust.

Quentin, Plum, Eliot, and Alice travel to the Neitherlands. They join up with Janet, Josh, and Poppy, and encounter Penny, who is now head librarian there. They see that he has created magical golden hands for himself to replace the ones that Martin bit off in the first book, and that many of his underlings have replaced their own hands with identical golden ones, both because they are vastly superior to human hands and out of reverence for him. They realize that the competing gang of thieves they fought with over Martin’s suitcase was sent by Penny. Penny tries to make Quentin stay in the Neitherlands for one year as penance for removing the page from the Neitherlands, but gives up after Alice punches him.

Most of the group believes that Fillory is lost and there is nothing left to do, but Quentin and Alice travel to Fillory and press on after Quentin has an epiphany. He realizes that in order to recreate Fillory, its gods must die just as the tigress god did before it was created the first time. He chases down and kills Ember with a sword, and Umber willingly allows himself to be sacrificed. Their power flows into Quentin, and he slows down time so that he can spend hundreds of years rebuilding Fillory while only a moment passes for everyone else.

Quentin then relinquishes the divine power and Julia, now a demigoddess who resides on the Far Side of Fillory, rewards him with a brief tour of that land. There, he finds a plant that was needed in the spell to create a land that he had been forced to omit because he could not locate it – it is created by the wonder felt by every child as they first discover Fillory in the books about it, just as Quentin once did. Julia allows him to take a seedpod from it back with him. Julia also tells Quentin that she was the one who fed Asmodeus the information about the god-killing knife being in Rupert Chatwin’s suitcase, and that Asmodeus did indeed take her revenge upon Reynard the Fox, gutting him.

Eliot, Janet, Josh, and Poppy stay in Fillory as its rulers and Plum joins them to find her own adventures. Quentin returns with Alice to New York and they once again attempt the spell to create a magical realm, this time with the needed plant. They succeed, and Alice tells Quentin that she believes their new land is a bridge between earth and Fillory. They are approached there by a gigantic velveteen horse, apparently the Cozy Horse spoken of by Rupert Chatwin in his memoir. They decide that they will ride it to explore their new land rather than return to Fillory.

External links

• Official website of Lev Grossman's book The Magician's Land
• Official (hoax) Fillory website
• Christopher Plover's (hoax) website
• Official website of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy