The shock of being severed from the place he grew up in was all the more surprising because it never really came. Quentin looked for the part of him that should have missed his old neighborhood, but it wasn’t there. He supposed he must have been shedding his old identity and his old life all along, without noticing it. This just made the cut cleaner and neater. Really, it was probably easier this way. Not that his parents had made the move out of kindness, or any logic other than the obvious financial one.
The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous—bulging in all directions with extra wings and gables and roofs—that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.
When Quentin arrived home for summer vacation—Brakebills summer, September for the rest of the world—his parents were alarmed at his gaunt appearance, his hollow, shell-shocked eyes, his haunted demeanor. But their curiosity about him was, as always, mild enough to be easily manageable, and he started gaining weight back quickly with the help of their massive, ever-full suburban refrigerator.
At first it was a relief just to be warm all the time, and to sleep in every day, and to be free of Mayakovsky and the Circumstances and that merciless white winter light. But after seventy-two hours Quentin was already bored again. In Antarctica he’d fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast. The long silences at Brakebills South had made him impatient with small talk. He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway. Real life—or was it fantasy life? whichever one Brakebills was—that was what mattered, and that was happening somewhere else.
As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic
Yellow Submarine
palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time. Quentin had never before really appreciated the cleverness of the second book.
The Girl Who Told Time,
in which Rupert and Helen are abruptly shanghaied into Fillory straight out of their respective boarding schools, the only time the Chatwins cross over in winter instead of summer. They end up back in an earlier time period, one that overlaps with the storyline of the first book. With the aid of foreknowledge, Rupert dogs Martin’s and Helen’s footsteps—the earlier Helen’s—as they repeat the action of
The World in the Walls,
note for note. He keeps just out of view, dropping clues and helping them out without their knowledge (the mysterious character known only as the Wood One turns out to have been Rupert in disguise); Quentin wondered if Plover wrote
The Girl Who Told Time
just to shore up all the plot holes in
The World in the Walls
.
Meanwhile Helen embarks on a hunt for the mysterious Questing Beast of Fillory, which according to legend can’t be caught, but if you do catch it—all logic aside—it’s supposed to give you your heart’s desire. The Beast leads her on a tricksy, circuitous chase that somehow winds in and out of the enchanted tapestries that adorn the library of Castle Whitespire. She only ever catches a glimpse of it, peeking coyly out at her from behind an embroidered shrub before vanishing in a flicker of cloven hoofs.
At the end the twin rams Ember and Umber show up as usual, like a pair of sinister ruminant constables. They were a force for good, of course, but there was a slightly Orwellian quality to their oversight of Fillory: they knew everything that went on, and there was no obvious limit to their powers, but they rarely bestirred themselves to actively intervene on behalf of the creatures in their charge. Mostly they just scolded everybody involved for the mess they’d made, finishing each other’s sentences, then made everyone renew their vows of fealty before wandering away to crop some luckless farmer’s alfalfa fields. They firmly usher Rupert and Helen back into the real world, back into the damp, chilly, dark-wood-paneled halls of their boarding schools, as if they had never left it.
Quentin even plowed through
The Wandering Dune,
the fifth and last book in the series (that is, the last as far as anybody but Quentin knew) and not a fan favorite. It was longer by half than any of the other books and starred Helen and the youngest Chatwin, clever, introverted Jane. The tone of
The Wandering Dune
is different from earlier books: having spent the last two volumes searching fruitlessly for their vanished brother, Martin, the Chatwins’ usual cheery English indomitability has been tempered by a wistful mood. On entering Fillory the two girls encounter a mysterious sand dune being blown through the kingdom, all by itself. They climb the dune and find themselves riding it through the green Fillorian countryside and on out into a dreamy desert wasteland in the far south, where they spend most of the rest of the book.
Almost nothing happens. Jane and Helen fill up the pages with interminable conversations about right and wrong and teenage Christian metaphysics and whether their true obligations lie on Earth or in Fillory. Jane is desperately worried about Martin but also, like Quentin, a little jealous: whatever iron law kept the Chatwins from staying in Fillory forever, he had found a loophole, or it had found him. Alive or dead, he had managed to overstay his tourist visa.
But Helen, who has a scoldy streak, heaps scorn on Martin—she thinks he’s just hiding in Fillory so he won’t have to go home. He’s the child who doesn’t want to leave the playground, or who won’t go to bed. He’s Peter Pan. Why can’t he grow up and face the real world? She calls him selfish, self-indulgent, “the biggest baby of us all.”
In the end the sisters are picked up by a majestic clipper ship that sails through the sand as if it were water. The ship is crewed by large bunnies who would be overly cutesy (the
Wandering Dune
–haters always compared them to Ewoks) if it weren’t for their impressively hard-assed attention to the technical details of operating their complex vessel.
The bunnies leave Jane and Helen with a gift, a set of magical buttons they can use to zap themselves from Earth to Fillory and back at will. On returning to England, Helen, in a fit of self-righteousness, promptly hides the buttons and won’t tell Jane where they are, upon which Jane excoriates her in fine period vernacular and turns the entire household upside down and inside out. But she never finds the buttons, and on that unsatisfying note the book, and the whole series, ends.
Even if it didn’t turn out to be the final book in the series, Quentin wondered where Plover could possibly have gone with the story in
The Magicians
. For one thing he was out of Chatwins: the books always featured two Chatwin children, an older one from the previous book and a new, younger one. But pretty, dark-haired Jane was the last and youngest Chatwin. Would she have gone back to Fillory alone? It broke the pattern.
For another, half of the fun of the books was waiting for the Chatwins to find their way into Fillory, for the magic door that opens for them and them only to appear. You always knew it would, and it always surprised you when it did. But with the buttons you could shuttle back and forth at will. Where was the miracle in that? Maybe that was why Helen hid them. They might as well have built a subway to Fillory.
Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater. In the mornings he lay in bed as long as he could stand it, in an attempt to avoid breakfast with them, but they always waited him out. He couldn’t win: they had even less to do than he did. Sometimes he wondered if it was a perverse game they played, that they were in on and he wasn’t.
He would come down to find them sitting at a table littered with crusts and crumbs and clementine peels and cereal bowls. While he pretended to be interested in the
Chesterton Chestnut,
he would furiously search for some even remotely plausible topic of conversation:
“So. Are you guys still going on that trip to South America?”
“South America?” His dad looked up, startled, as if he’d forgotten Quentin was there.
“Aren’t you going to South America?”
A look passed between Quentin’s parents.
“Spain. We’re going to Spain and Portugal.”
“Oh, Portugal. Right. I was thinking Peru for some reason.”
“Spain and Portugal. It’s for your mother. There’s an artists’ exchange with the university in Lisbon. Then we’re going to take a boat trip down the Tigris.”
“
Tagus,
darling!” Quentin’s mother said, with her tinkling I-married-an-idiot! laugh. “The Tagus! The Tigris is in Iraq.”
She bit into a piece of raisin toast with her large straight teeth.
“Well, I don’t think we’ll be sailing down the Tigris anytime soon!” Quentin’s father laughed loudly at this, exactly as if it were funny, and then paused for thought. “Darling, do you remember that week we spent in a houseboat on the Volga . . . ?”
An extended Russian reminiscence followed, a duet punctuated by significant silences that Quentin interpreted as allusions to sexual activities that he didn’t want to know about. It was enough to make you envy the Chatwins, with Dad in the army and Mum in the madhouse. Mayakovsky would have known what to do with this kind of conversation. He would have silenced it. He wondered how hard that spell was to learn.
By about eleven every morning Quentin would hit his limit and flee the house for the relative safety of Chesterton, which stubbornly refused to reveal even the slightest hint of mystery or intrigue beneath its green, self-satisfied exterior. He had never learned to drive, so he rode his father’s white 1970s-era ten-speed, which weighed approximately one metric ton, to the center of town. Out of deference to its glorious Colonial heritage the town was governed by a set of draconian zoning laws that kept everything in a state of permanent unnatural quaintness.
Knowing no one, caring about nothing, Quentin took a tour of the low-ceilinged, heavy-timbered residence of some Revolutionary luminary. He inspected a boxy white-painted Unitarian church, est. 1766. He surveyed the lush flat lawns where amateur Continental irregulars had faced off against well-drilled, well-armed Redcoats, with predictable results. There was one pleasant surprise, hidden behind the church: a lovely half-vanished seventeenth-century graveyard, a little square glebe of ultra-green grass scattered with wet saffron-colored elm leaves, with a bent wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, it was cool and hushed.
The gravestones were all winged skulls and bad devotional quatrains about whole families carried off by fever, weathered in places into illegibility. Quentin crouched down on the wet grass to try to decipher one very old one, a rectangle of blue slate that had split in half and sunk halfway into the green turf, which rose up to meet it like a wave.
“Quentin.”
He straightened up. A woman about his age had come in through the cemetery gate.
“Hi?” he said cautiously. How did she know his name?
“I guess you didn’t think I would find you,” she said unsteadily. “I guess you didn’t think of that.”
She walked right up to him. At the last possible moment, too late to do anything about it, he realized that she wasn’t going to stop. Without breaking stride she grabbed the front of his barn jacket and marched him stumbling backward over a low footstone right into the aromatic branches of a cypress tree. Her face, pushed right up in front of his, dangerously close, was an angry mask. It had been raining off and on all afternoon, and the needles were damp.
He resisted the impulse to struggle. He wasn’t going to be caught fighting a girl in a churchyard.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said. “Stop. Just stop.”
“Now I’m here,” she said, clinging precariously to her composure, “now I’m here, and we are going to talk. You are going to deal with me.”
Now that he had a closer look at her he could see she was covered in warning signs. Her whole body screamed unbalance. She was too pale and too thin. Her eyes were too wild. Her long dark hair was lank and smelled unwashed. She was dressed in a raggedy goth outfit—her arms were wrapped in what looked like black electrical tape. There were scabby red scratches on the backs of her hands.
He almost didn’t recognize her.
“I was there, and you were there,” Julia said, locking eyes with him. “Weren’t you. In that place. That school, or whatever it was. You got in, didn’t you?”
He got it then. She had been at the Exam after all, he hadn’t been mistaken, but she hadn’t made the cut. They’d culled her in the first round, during the written test.
But this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen, there were safeguards against it. Anybody who flunked the Exam was supposed to have their memory gently, lovingly clouded by a faculty member and then overwritten with a plausible alibi. It wasn’t simple, nor was it outrageously ethical, but the spells were humane and well understood. Except in her case they hadn’t worked, or not completely.
“Julia,” he said. Their faces were very close together. There was nicotine on her breath. “Julia, what are you doing here?”
“Don’t pretend with me, don’t you
dare
pretend! You go to that school, don’t you? The magic school?”
Quentin kept his face blank. It was a basic rule at Brakebills not to discuss the school with outsiders. He could get expelled. But whatever, if Fogg screwed up the memory spells it wasn’t Quentin’s problem. And this was Julia. Her lovely freckly face, so close to his, looked much older. Her skin was blotchy. She was in agony.