I’m very happy to have read this book. When I read the first volume in the series, I ended up frustrated and gave the book to another fantasy fan with a warning that while the magic was great, the protagonist, Quentin, was too gloomy and immature to make anything out of it. So it was a tremendous relief to see him grow up in this sequel, gaining the ability to appreciate what he has and to risk it for someone else’s welfare.
Not that he is making much out of magic yet. The irony of becoming king in a magical land seems to be that one’s magic isn’t all that necessary, and the beginning of this book finds Quentin feeling some lack of agency and direction. Enough so that he jumps at the first quests that are offered, and from there we are off on a voyage that channels The Dawn Treader, down to the talking animal passenger.
That is only one part of this very dense story. Another gives us the backstory of Julia, who could neither attend the school of magic with Quentin nor forget about its existence. The way this messes up her life resurrects the giant unanswered question from the first book — what is magic really good for? And even when Julia finds her soul mates among an order of magic practitioners, their goal seems to merely be more bigger stronger — until they get something decidedly too big for them to handle.
(By the way, I loved the handling of the trickster god in this book. Think tricksters would be on our side? Think they’d accept our homage and take us under their patronage, because we are so ironic, clever, and appreciative of moral ambiguity? Yeah, right. What happens in this book is far more believable.)
While I felt much better about Quentin in this book, and more inclined to trust him not to waste his life and his powers, the fact that nobody in either book has found a good enough use for magic to justify their obsession with it makes for an uneasy substrate to all the Narnia-style adventuring. Julia’s story brought me the closest I’ve come to being satisfied with magic in this series. She ends up going further into it than any of the others, in a direction in which what magic is for ceases to matter. Quentin goes the opposite direction, toward a life where he will have to decide what his magic is for; and after this book, I feel hopeful about what he’ll come up with in the next installment.
