“Some love comes like a wind off the sea, while others grow slowly from the seeds of friendship and kindness.” In particular, there are two quotes about love that I found especially memorable: Christopher Paolini’s Eragon and Eldest are great examples of this, and Magician has a few such quotes too. That is, whether there are any succinct lines of dialogue or narrative that convey profound wisdom even when removed from their context.
The cultures of each world are starkly distinct, which adds flavour to their inevitable clash as we experience the world of Kelewan through the eyes our Midkemian heroes.Īnother metric I often judge a book by is how quotable it is. Kelewan is an entirely different beast, home to sentient insectoids and centaur-like creatures and political houses and a power struggle reminiscent of Game of Thrones. Midkemia (I’m always reminded of Midgard, the Old Norse name for Earth) is more your typical fantasy flair with elves and dwarves and goblins and fire lizards and a monarch and dukedoms and negligent peerages (alright, that last one is common to all worlds it seems). Midkemia and Kelewan are the two worlds across which the story unfolds. They remain as characters who weep and laugh and whose stories we wish to discover, never devolving into mere soldiers in the ongoing war. But it’s to the author’s credit that no matter how vastly the scope expands – even across dimensions – we never lose sight of our heroes’ origins. Armies clash, cities are sieged, negotiations are sought, alliances are made, and betrayals hide around every suspicious corner. Magician is also the first book in the Riftwar saga, and this is one instance where the term war is thoroughly justified. The city of Crydee acts as the pivot point of the narrative, becoming the reader’s home town as much as the characters’: all our heroes hail from Crydee, and it is for them we root as events turn decidedly pear-shaped. Like any grand adventure, however, it wouldn’t be all that compelling without a strong cast of characters.
Magician clocks in at over 800 pages, but in scope, it’s bigger still, for it spins a tale of global proportions across not one but two worlds. I mean, you may think that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is big, but that’s just peanuts to Magician (actually, it’s pretty close, but let’s roll with it). You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
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