Brooklyn Book Festival OnePage
Week of 01-Jun-2012
This is the first page of the first chapter of my novel in progress, working title: The Magician’s Land. It's the third book in the Magicians trilogy, and it starts out from the point of view of a new character named Plum. Like the other point-of-view characters from the first two books, Quentin and Julia, Plum is a magician-in-training, but unlike Quentin and Julia she's not depressed and anti-social.
You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.
You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?
Plum was president of the League -- unelected but undisputed -- and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since Brakebills had been around for something like 400 years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been another League at some point in the past, or at any rate something along the same lines that you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P.G. Wodehouse story.
They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was laying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.
Plum made the room go silent – it was a little spell that ate sound in about a 10-yard radius – and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said solemnly. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”
Go Back
Visit Lev Grossman's Webpage
The Brooklyn Book Festival OnePage is made possible in part with a grant from
You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. It wasn’t that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.
You couldn’t call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?
Plum was president of the League -- unelected but undisputed -- and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, probably, though since Brakebills had been around for something like 400 years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been another League at some point in the past, or at any rate something along the same lines that you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in fact she’d gotten the idea from a P.G. Wodehouse story.
They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was laying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.
Plum made the room go silent – it was a little spell that ate sound in about a 10-yard radius – and all the attention immediately focused on her. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said solemnly. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”
