The Magicians

The young man tells Quentin his name is Eliot. Quentin notices that Eliot has “an air of effortless self-possession that [makes] Quentin urgently want to be his friend” (19). Quentin asks, “What is this place?” (19). Eliot informs him that it’s called “Brakebills” (19), adding that he (Eliot) lives here, and that the dean will see Quentin shortly. After walking through a maze of hedges they arrive at the house. Quentin is greeted by Dean Henry Fogg, who welcomes him to “Brakebills College” (20). Dean Fogg tells Quentin that Quentin is being offered a preliminary examination. Quentin decides to accept the offer.

Quentin is then taken to a “long and airy” classroom filled with “serious-looking teenagers” (21). The test Quentin takes consists mostly of mathematical questions, but there are also other, more “exotic questions,” some of which Quentin finds “pointless” (22). There are also questions that vanish after he reads them, and drawings that appear to move as Quentin draws them.

Although Quentin is not certain as to what’s expected of him, he is one of the teenagers selected to move to the next stage of testing. During a brief lunch break, Quentin meets Penny, whose real name is William. Penny is a male teenager who wears his hair in a punk style. After lunch, Quentin is called into a room by one of the professors. The woman asks Quentin to perform some magic tricks. Quentin responds by doing card tricks, followed by some sleight-of-hand tricks using coins. Quentin is surprised when the woman points out that he was able to make one of the coins disappear when performing his trick; Quentin doesn’t know how he did this.

The rest of the afternoon becomes a blur for Quentin, moving from one professor to another. After a while, each of the professors enters the room. Dean Fogg asks Quentin to perform some magic. Quentin decides to once again use the magic trick he performed earlier with his playing cards. However, before he can get started, Dean Fogg stops him, saying, “Not like that, I want to see some real magic” (31). Quentin, though, is not sure of what Dean Fogg is asking of him. Fogg continues to pressure Quentin to perform. Afraid of failing, Quentin’s emotions begin to take hold, until anger gets the better of him. The anger makes Quentin feel good: “He’d had enough of being judged. He’d been sucking it up his whole life, but even he had his limit” (32).

Quentin’s anger allows him to draw deep within himself; he begins to get a sense that everyone, except himself, is slowing down. At the same time, the playing cards start taking on a life of their own, with “the deck [breaking] apart and scatter[ing] in flight”, forming “a house of cards” (33). Quentin follows this by picking “up the stack of nickels in his fist” (33) and transforming them into a “burning sword” (33), which he holds under Dean Fogg’s nose, before pounding the sword down into the table. Moments later, Fogg announces that Quentin has passed the test.

Quentin is exhausted from his ordeal. Professor Van der Weghe, the woman he first performed the card trick for, explains to him that this is normal after “his first Minor Incantation” (35). Tired, Quentin falls asleep. The next morning, he awakens and finds a note on his desk, telling him that he’s to meet Dean Fogg for breakfast. Arriving at the dean’s office, Fogg explains he has already had breakfast, and that they can talk while Quentin eats. Fogg tells Quentin that he’s being offered a place at the “Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy” (37), a five-year program that once completed will make Quentin a magician.

Quentin initially questions as to whether or not this is all some “charade,” but the more he thinks about it, the more it dawns on him that “they were going to make [Quentin] a magician, and all he had to do was sign” (40). Quentin agrees “on one condition” (40): that he doesn’t have to return home.

The semester is set to begin in two weeks; until then, Quentin spends most of his time with Eliot. For Quentin, Eliot harbors “an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more complicating even than Brakebills” (42). Eliot shows Quentin around the campus and tells him about the secret stories that have become a part of Brakebills. Eliot tells him how “time started spinning off its axis here” (43-44) due to some old spells. This caused the weather to trail the outside world by about three months: although it’s fall in upstate New York, it’s summer in Brakebills. Eliot also explains why most people can’t do magic, shows Quentin how to navigate the “hedge maze” (45), and takes him rowing along the river, passing from the “August heat” (47) of Brakebills to the cold autumn of upstate New York.