I recently went down an odd little reading/viewing trail. Before Christmas, I discovered that The Magicians was on the CW app. I never saw the last two seasons because that was when I lost cable, but I didn’t remember what happened in the earlier seasons, so I started rewatching from the beginning (and then, wouldn’t you know, they dropped it from the app right after I got to the parts I hadn’t seen, so I still haven’t seen the final season).

That series is basically Hogwarts meets Narnia, so when I finished the book I was reading on Christmas day, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf to reread it. And then when I finished rereading the series (mostly, since I generally avoid The Last Battle), I figured I’d reread the book of The Magicians.

I read the first book when it was relatively new and had no interest in continuing the series. It was only after the TV show came on that I read the whole trilogy between seasons, and now rereading the first book right after having reread the Narnia books reminded me of why that book didn’t grab me. Mostly, it’s not original enough to be very interesting.

I think the concept of mashing up the Hogwarts-style magical school and the magical land concept of Narnia has a lot of fun potential. The book’s story is basically about a nerdy guy who was obsessed with a Narnia-like fantasy series who thinks he’s going to a university interview and ends up getting into a magical school. Then after he’s graduated from school and bored with being back in the “real” world, one of his friends finds out that the magical land from those books is real, and they can go there, but it’s nothing like they expected.

The problem I had with the way the book was executed was that the school may be an American university, but it’s basically Hogwarts on the Hudson. It functions pretty much like a British boarding school, a la Hogwarts (particularly as it’s depicted in the movies). In the book, the students wear uniforms. They’re sorted into Disciplines, which are kind of like majors based on aptitude, but they’re chosen for the students rather than them getting to choose them, so it might as well be a Sorting Hat. The students from each Discipline hang out together in the Discipline’s cottage, so basically a Common Room. There’s a wacky magical sport with complicated rules. The main difference from Hogwarts is that it’s a university (they age it up more in the TV show to a grad school), so we get a lot more drinking, drugs, and sex.

Meanwhile, the magical land of Fillory is basically Narnia. The author didn’t even try to hide this, since a lot of it is about the main character’s relationship with the “Fillory” books, and we’re supposed to relate it to our relationship with the Narnia books to understand his attachment to this world. Like Narnia, Fillory is largely populated by sentient talking animals. There are also all the magical creatures based on Greek mythology, like centaurs, fauns, naiads, dryads, etc. You can get to Fillory through a gateway world with various fountains, each of which leads to a different world, which is right out of The Magician’s Nephew, which had the pools that lead to different worlds. In the Fillory books, there are four siblings who travel there, and there are four kings and queens who have to be from earth, just like in the Narnia books.

I found this frustrating on multiple levels. For one thing, it felt like shallow worldbuilding that started by taking the inspiration and just barely changing it to suit the story. It would have been far more interesting to be inspired by the idea of a magical school and then starting with the idea of an American university and making it magical. Have magical fraternities and sororities that you have to rush. Have students who were recruited mostly to play magical sports that are the basis of serious interscholastic rivalries. Have Homecoming weekends with the alumni coming back.

As for the magical world, I think we can grasp the idea of being attached to the world of a portal fantasy, dreaming of going there, and being shocked to learn that you can, whether or not that world looks exactly like Narnia. The really enraging thing there to me was that after basically ripping off Narnia and expecting us to see Fillory as a non-copyright infringing version of Narnia, the author had the author of the Fillory books be a child molester. If C.S. Lewis were still alive, he might have grounds for a lawsuit because it was so obvious what was meant by Fillory, which meant the author in the book was basically him, and then he was defamed.

There’s also some weird structure to the book, with the first half being their time at school, which was mostly classes, studying, and hanging out, with no real plot, then there’s a whole section where they’re just bored and drunk, and then they finally get to Fillory. I liked the TV series a lot better. The TV series was like the writers had bought a model kit but used the pieces to make something entirely different. You can occasionally recognize a piece from the picture on the model kit box, but it’s in a different place and serving a different purpose. They moved up the action and wove it into the school stuff. The book has them graduate halfway through the book, and then they have their adventures, while the TV series has them discover Fillory and start having adventures while they’re still students, so it weaves together the magical school plot and the magical land plot.

I will confess that the initial germ of the idea that became Enchanted, Inc. was “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter,” but I never really went back to those things in building my world or my characters. It was more of a concept, adding magic to a chick lit type story, or else moving the secret magical world existing within our world into adulthood, with a magical corporation instead of a school. From there, though, I was drawing on my work in corporate America for ideas, and I was looking at chick lit and rom-coms as a whole rather than actually taking anything specifically from Bridget Jones. That was more of a pitch line to describe the vibes, not the real basis of the book.