review of
James Gunn's The Magicians
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 10, 2011


After spending something like 6 mnths reading Joseph McElroy's Women and Men I've decided to only read short bks for a looooonnnnnggggggg while - bks that I can read in a day or a few days. Every time I reach for something over 300pp long I shrink back. It's time for 'beach reading', 'vacation bks' - but when I was at the beach on 'vacation' I was reading McElroy. The Magicians fit the bill perfectly - even more perfectly than I'd hoped.

The Magicians entertained me in a way similar to a Ron Goulart novel but had a bit more substance. Gunn actually made a reasonable attempt to explain magik in scientific terms as the control of hidden forces w/o the 'necessity' of obfuscating religious/satanic anthropomorphisms. On p 56 he referenced the 'devils' of Loudon (a fascinating subject delved into brilliantly in Ken Russell's film The Devils & elsewhere by Aldous Huxley, Krzysztof Penderecki, etc..). On p 106 he references Senoi dream theory (another subject that fascinates me). & in chapters 8 & 9 he describes the main character's dreams. After I read those descriptions, I went to sleep & dreamt my own dreams wch I then awoke to write about - the 2 events seeming an obviously inter-related sequence (perhaps my dream description will appear here: http://annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/). Gunn also references another subject of substantial interest to me, secret names, on p 139.

Gunn's fluid pulp style & humorous & fanciful telling of a story about a private detective being sucked into a world of witchcraft was just what the witch doctor ordered for me. All in all, the imagining of magik as something possible w/ sufficient scientific knowledge is a pleasant daydream that I'd explore further if I weren't already dedicatedly on a different path. It interested me to learn that Gunn lives in Lawrence, KS where William S. Burroughs also lived. I wonder if they knew each other?
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I read The Magicians as a teenager and the mixing of magic with a detective story was amazing to me.

Today it holds up okay. At times it feels like you're getting a lecture on history and it doesn't treat it's female characters well. But still entertaining in the main.

Gunn's Magicians is a rational fantasy about sorcery set in a mid-20th century from which actual modern occultism is absent, much in the way that Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell concocts an alternative world of magic for Georgian England. Of course, Clarke takes her literary cues from Jane Austen, while Gunn's seem to reflect Raymond Chandler by way of Who Shot Roger Rabbit?

To the credit of Gunn's imagination, when he wrote the original version of this story in 1954, or even in 1972 when the fuller novel was published, occult magicians weren't yet actually in the habit of meeting via hotel-based conventions. The whole story is a relatively cornball melodrama, but chapters 8 and 9 are each a sleeping dream of the protagonist about historical sorcery--one a Brocken Mountain sabbat, the other a French Black Mass--which have solid entertainment value.