Why did I get this book?
I’ve read everything else Novik has written, so it seemed like a good bet.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes? She’s incredibly readable even when she has a protagonist info-dumping in a way that feels a bit too functional or instrumental. On the other hand, the book overall feels a bit like George Martin and China Mieville sharpening their knives for Tolkien and fantasy written in his shadow, except the target here is J.K. Rowling and specifically Hogwarts, and that actually cramps the space available for this novel to unfold on its own terms. (Unlike The Magicians, which I think succeeds more subtly in its referencing of Hogwarts and Harry Potter.)
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’m actually working on a project about fantasy and historical scholarship, so there’s that vague utility in the back of my mind when I’m reading genre work these days. I think I might try to work it into the chapter that tries to think about the political economy of magic as represented in fantasy literature, as the book is doing a lot of worldbuilding work around magic, as it ought to. (Another sideways knock at Rowling’s notoriously bad worldbuilding when it comes to the implications of magic.)
I’ve used The Magicians in a course about higher education. There’s almost enough work out there to teach a course on speculative fictions of education: Harry Potter, The Magicians, Zindell’s Neverness, Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind, Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Battle Royale, etc. but I think I’m not qualified to teach a class that’s just literature, fun as that syllabus would be. (Might make a great book club aimed at college students and faculty, though.) Anyway, this book would be a fantastic addition to that imaginary course or club.
Quotes
“‘You know, it’s almost impressive,’ he said after a moment, sounding less wobbly. ‘You’re nearly dead and you’re still the rudest person I’ve ever met.’”
“She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s ok because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I haven’t read any reviews of this, so I have no idea here whether I’m reprising frequent sentiments or I’m way out on a limb.
As per my earlier comment, I don’t think you’d have as much fun with this book if you hadn’t read or seen Harry Potter and had the numerous thoughts that have reverberated through its readers and viewers about how Hogwarts seems like an abusive place full of adults who willfully and carelessly put young people in danger while pretending to be in charge of their welfare. Novik’s Scholomance is a school that puts young people in danger on purpose and with a relative indifference to the consequences. Novik is also thinking, like Lev Grossman, about how to imagine a magical society and its educational institutions that tracks against contemporary meritocracy and socioeconomic hierarchy in a more relevant and potent way than the mash-up of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Worst Witch and the Chrestomanci books appears in Harry Potter and tracks into British class hierarchies in a rather musty fashion. There’s a sharp edge to the way that this school interacts with privilege and power in the wider world that I really appreciated—and an almost-on-the-nose referencing of “diversity and inclusion” and their underlying rationale.
Oddly the book also made me think of Audrey Watters’ new book Teaching Machines, which I’ll write about soon, because of the way that students in the Scholomance learn spells and magical skills.
I’m always curious in fantasy, superhero and SF worlds about whether the pop culture referents and sources of those worlds are diegetically available to the characters and in what form. Say, for example, we know that in Marvel Comics, there are comic-books about the Marvel superheroes, but they’re more like authorized transmedia that are loosely biographical or based on the characters’ real adventures. Except when they’re not, which is confusing. (E.g., there seem to be comics based on Spider-Man within the Marvel Universe, but presumably they don’t feature Peter Parker, who is not known by the general Marvel public to be Spider-Man, whereas the Fantastic Four’s authorized comic adventures have their real names and some details of their private lives. On the other hand, the existence of other comic-book characters or superhero-adjacent popular culture is harder to speak to. Are there Underoos in the Marvel Universe? Was the Phantom a character in comic-strips in newspapers?). Anyway, the question here I had was whether the main character of A Deadly Education is aware of Lord of the Rings, given that her name is Galadriel. And yes, eventually it turns out she is, and as is often the case when things get metafictional, it raises questions about the worldbuilding. It sounds like the films and the books are the same thing in this world as they are in our world and that’s just really strange when you think about it. (Galadriel’s mother wouldn’t let her see the movies because of “the violence”, which is kind of hey wait a minute given that Galadriel AND her mother were both educated by a school where evil things attack and try to kill the students constantly.) More importantly, it just feels like high fantasy fiction in a universe where magic is real would come out a bit differently.
I had a hard time putting my finger on why the book was a bit difficult to dive into as immersively as Novik’s other works. I think some of it is Galadriel’s aka El’s rapid-fire internal monologue/narration. It feels strained sometimes, like Novik is reaching for a character she’s got in mind and not quite finding her. Galadriel has too much to say to herself and about her world inside her own head for a character who is trying to be as cynical and alienated as she imagines herself. She’s both too self-aware and not self-aware at all in a way that seems to be authorially-mandated (e.g., she is our guide to her world even though she is talking to herself, not to some external audience).She knows too much, because she needs to execute all the world-building that Novik wants to do—she has to tell us about the New York kids and the Dubai kids and the Somali kids and the magical disadvantages of having dreadlocks and the history of the school and functioning of everything in it. She knows about all kinds of evil creatures, all the kinds of magic, all the debates that adult wizards have. She knows the exact details of the academic performance of the third ranked student in the senior class (El is a junior), she knows everybody’s name and background (except when it’s plot-important that she doesn’t). There doesn’t seem to be anything she doesn’t know about her world except the things that nobody knows—or the things that are being kept from everyone. But she doesn’t have the garrulous, gregarious sort of sociality that produces that kind of knowledge about other people and their backgrounds, and she doesn’t have the dogged studiousness that finds that information somewhere else—she’s bored by history (but knows a lot of it), irritated by language study (but knows a lot of them). (Nor does the Scholomance make information accessible in that encyclopedic a fashion. Hermione would be out of luck in this school.)
It makes her in the end somewhat exhausting company. This extends to her conversations, where she moves back and forth between clever repartee, anger, exposition, long-windedness, terse resentment and operatically performative sullenness. In this sense, she’s very much the opposite of Harry Potter—she’s not a plot device that is clumsily trying to evolve into a protagonist, not just acted upon. (Though there’s also a Chosen One thing apparently going on.) But she felt to me like she was unfinished, doing and saying and thinking too much in too many ways that were instrumental to the book’s progression rather than to developing her as a character. When El gets to an important moral conclusion about her future ambitions a bit after the halfway mark in the book, you’ve been so swamped with her internal long-windedness that it’s hard to grasp it as a turning point.
This isn’t just El, mind you—or if it is, the issue with El overwhelms other aspects of the book. The action sequences, for example, sometimes go on and on and on and it’s impossible to separate the dramatic situation from El’s play-by-play commentary on it.
There’s one respect in which the worldbuilding is lacking compared to Harry Potter, which is that the characters stay entirely inside the world of the magical school. That’s good in many ways—it builds the Scholomance as a setting and it delivers the book’s almost suffocating (in an aesthetically appropriate way) sense of horror and banality—the Scholomance is sort of Hogwarts + Battle Royale + Hope’s Peak Academy, where the students both menace each other and face malevolent forces trying to gnaw their way inside. But I really began to wonder whether the outside world that El and the other students represent to the readers is actually the way they think it is in a great many respects and thus whether the Scholomance is what it appears to be. There’s time for the series to get to that point and for Novik to surprise the students (and the readers) by revealing the secrets of the world. But this is part of what makes El’s voluminous knowingness feel at odds both with her character and the world itself. Every other “bottle story” I can think of that puts young people by themselves to figure out their own situation amplifies the drama of that situation by emphasizing what the characters don’t know or understand about what’s going on. In the end, I couldn’t quite figure out how El or any of her compatriots know as much as they do about the Scholomance—there are no alumni visitors, no headmaster, no cabinets full of trophy cups from past classes, no carriers of school tradition. They’ve all been told by their parents about what’s going to happen, but even a fifth-generation Harvard undergraduate hasn’t been stuffed as improbably full of prior knowledge of Harvard before arriving there as all the Scholomance students seem to be.
One last thought on El and her internal narration. I was really surprised that it took her 294 pages to swear. I think, that is—maybe there’s an earlier point, but she feels like she should be profane all the time. And it in that same sentence that for the first time she addresses us: “Reader, I ran the fuck away.” Which seems to me to indicate just how unevenly Novik is thinking about why all of this internal narration is happening. If El’s suddenly aware she’s explaining things to a reader, then that sensibility might help focus her voice—at other times, she’s explaining to herself, or to no one in particular.
I’ll read the next book in the series, but by the end, I really found myself hoping that it’s not entirely inside the Scholomance again. And that we aren’t quite so trapped in El’s head, or that if we are, she becomes a more interestingly defined character to spend so much time with.