I’m through the back half (or second installment, if you prefer) of Raymond E Feist’s Magician and boy, do I have thoughts. Some of these thoughts are holdovers from the first half that were too much entwined with what I knew was yet to come, so they’re getting added to the pile.

Let’s get into it. And, fair warning before you proceed: While I’m going to do my best not to give away the whole story in case you decide to pick this up to read later, I can’t discuss some of the high points (and pain points) without revealing a few things in the process. Sorry.

And let’s just rip that bandage off at the start: When we left our noble heroes, Pug had vanished from Midkemia entirely to parts unknown (okay, the Tsurani homeworld, Kelewan), Tomas had a shiny new pile of massively overpowered gear relative to his character level, Arutha was in charge of things at Crydee and doing a reasonably good job of it, and…

Wait, Arutha? Yeah, let’s get right into that.

The “Author’s Preferred Edition” splits out what was once published as Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master into sections titled “Pug and Tomas” followed by “Milamber and The Valheru”. This would give you the impression that Pug & Tomas grow into their heroic forms with new names and/or titles, and this is true. With that said… at some point I think Feist ran out of things for Tomas to do, or just plain lost interest in him as a character. It’s not even that he takes second billing, he’s reduced to playing third fiddle. Maybe even fourth, if the orchestra metaphor can sustain that.

Instead of the POV switching from Pug to Tomas and back, we get Pug, Tomas, Pug, Arutha (younger son of Duke Borric of Crydee), back to Pug, back to… Arutha, and sometimes back to Tomas. Along with the occasional other POV character, this makes up the cadence for the remainder of Magician. Even when Tomas gets the spotlight for a moment it’s mostly him brooding or kind of being a jerk. (It’s not really his fault, you see. There’s an ancient alien demigod inside his head. Kind of. It’s a long story. Go read the book.) The author wrote Tomas into a corner by gluing him to the elven city during most of the back half of the tale.

As a result, Arutha takes on the mantle of carrying out most of the political intrigue, military exercises, and sailing adventures. It’s all great stuff, mind you, but it does leave the reader wondering why the book was titled “Magician” when the author’s apparent new favorite character has nothing to do with sorcery whatsoever. If you think I’m joking about that “favorite character” thing, wait until you find out who’s at the core of the next two entire books…

The remainder of Pug’s journey through this tome is basically getting him to “magical badass” level so he can do some amazing things, finally get home after causing an absolute ruckus in Tsurani society, and reconnect with everyone else who’s still alive by the end of the book. It’s a fine story, to be sure, but there’s also some dense passages where we’re shown things like, oh, the entire history of humankind of Kelewan during Pug’s trial on the “Tower of Testing.” It’s fascinating worldbuilding, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the deftly layered-in quality that we were used to earlier in the story. We have an entire separate world to get to know, in a hurry, so here you go, have at it.

Actually, let’s talk about that Tower of Testing sequence a bit more. Why? Because Macros shows up. Again. In a “vision” that’s supposed to portray a sequence of events from untold centuries prior. How old is that guy? But it’s worse, because it’s also extremely obviously “hinted” that Macros is feeding Pug answers to the acolyte trials that the Assembly (where all of the magic users go in Tsurani society) is putting the future “Milamber” through. Later, and I’m trying not to give everything away but I absolutely must mention it or I’ll burst, Macros gets cranky at Tomas when the younger man doesn’t want to ask “how high?” when the mage tells him to jump. During Macros’ tirade he reveals that basically everything that’s happened so far is the result of actions he’s taken. (At book’s end there’s a letter which adds onto this.) He can do anything to anyone at any time and it all works perfectly, because all of this is by his (or someone’s) design, you see.

So when the book says “Magician” on the cover, and you get through all of this, one starts to wonder if Macros is in fact the titular figure in the story after all. Good grief. Honestly, I feel like the author realized he needed to make sense of some elements of the story, concocted Macros to take care of them, and then that character’s reach kept expanding because the plot holes would start piling up otherwise. You know that Lucy Lawless bit during that one The Simpsons cartoon episode where she’s doing a convention panel and her answer keeps being, “A wizard did it”? Yeah. That.

Let me be clear, Magician is a fine romp and overall a good fun story, but basically every time Macros shows up now I just roll my eyes. “Ah. Feist needed to slap some more spackle on the plot, I see.”

Anyway. Let’s get back to Pug for a bit.

Reading this from the perspective of an anime fan in the mid-2020s, an errant thought crossed my mind partway through the back half of the book: That boy’s in an isekai story! He didn’t die and get reincarnated, but… he didn’t entirely not do that either. He’s in a whole new world, literally. Everyone at home thinks him dead. Along the way he gets a new name, identity, and set of powers. Oh, and he meets a girl.

Forget feature film or prestige television, the true proper adaptation of Magician is as an anime. Get on this, MAPPA.

(I’m only kinda sorta joking.)

Speaking of “meeting girls” I suppose it’s time to address the part of this book that just leaves me… underwhelmed. Because other than the only love-interest-aged character we met at all in the first half, Princess Carline, the only other three female characters added to the cast (barely) are… just paper-thin love interests. Oh, the book tells us that they’re strong and interesting characters in their own right. Doesn’t show us. Just tells us. All we’re shown is girls/ladies basically hanging on the every word of our heroic boys.

And yes, that includes one particular love interest who should have been utterly fascinating. Not spoiling that one, just… oof. Ugh. Grr. Sigh.

And what becomes of Carline? I think it’s time for our pull-quote of choice for this half of the tome:

Laurie shook his head. “No, Pug. There are many ways to love someone. Sometimes we want love so much, we’re not too choosy about who we love. Other times we make love such a pure and noble thing, no poor human can ever meet our vision. But for the most part, love is a recognition, an opportunity to say, ‘There is something about you that I cherish.’ It doesn’t entail marriage, or even physical love. There’s love of parents, love of city or nation, love of life, and love of people. All different, all love.”

[…]

Laurie lay back, a friendly chuckle escaping his lips. “Aye, it’s well I’ve known that ache. And I must admit your taste runs to interesting women. From what I can see, Katala’s a prize. And the Princess Carline…”

A little snappishly, Pug said, “I’ll make a point of introducing you when we get back.”

Laurie ignored his tone. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Laurie, here, is a recently-arrived slave from Pug’s homeworld who befriends our young not-yet-magician and tries to talk him through his romantic difficulties with the benefit of his several more years’ worth of worldly wisdom. It’s a nice enough speech, and handles the topic of that classic Haddaway song as well as anything else I’ve read. But it’s that “point of introducing you” that I want to zero in on, because… well, you’ll never guess what happens during the denouement of the story. And that leaves me wondering how far into the plotting process did Feist decide that Pug wasn’t going to get the princess, and the various decisions that are tied to that change? Because “Pug and Carline” was so obviously where things started.

With that said… I want to say something nice about the subversion of that trope. The orphaned keep boy becomes a powerful wizard and wins the heart of the plucky princess! That’s what we all expected going into this, right? And yet… what we get instead is vastly better on nearly every level than just following the standard story route. While I have a whole skeleton’s worth of bones to pick about the paper-thin characterization of (most of) what few women appear in the tale, I feel like we collectively dodged a magic missile by the story having swerved in this particular fashion.

In the end, though, this is dudes having manly adventures. The women are, in a word, irrelevant. How off-putting you find the prospect of reading the book based on that knowledge is entirely up to you, and I don’t blame you for giving it a pass if need be.

Speaking of dudes having adventures, there’s a really weird echo of the first half’s grand tour of the Kingdom of Isles in this installment featuring completely different characters from the last go-around, but with much the same result. I kind of wonder what the point was. This section could’ve been trimmed and cost the reader almost zero understanding of the political situation.

Before we wrap this up, a quick side-note: Fairly early in this part of the story, Pug and Laurie are part of a journey through the Tsurani homeland (so we can add more worldbuilding details, of course) and at one point the man in charge of their traveling group stops off to meet with someone described as “the Lady of the Acoma” (which is one of the prominent families) while Pug and Laurie chat with “a recently captured Midkemian slave” and if you haven’t yet read the “Empire Trilogy” that may seem like a random, meaningless moment in the story but if you have and you’re revisiting Magician afterward… well then.

At the end of everything we get one last massive bit of (thinly-justified later) meddling from Macros (of course), then the heroes get their victory parades and rewards, everything’s nice and tidy, just the way a proper adventure romp should be.

So let’s say you make it through Magician. Where do you go from here? I have some recommendations:

First, keep going and finish the “Riftwar” books, which means going onward to Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. Get used to spending a lot of time with Arutha as well as Jimmy the Hand, boy thief extraordinaire, who more-or-less picks up the mantle of “the author’s favorite character” almost immediately. Also, Pug shows up and does stuff.

Then, read the Empire Trilogy, starting with Daughter of the Empire. It’s a co-written effort with Janny Wurts, it’s centered entirely on Kelewan, and it’s absolutely thick with court intrigue and such goings-on. Plus the lead is a woman. The aforementioned “Lady of the Acoma” may not make up for the lack of interesting women in Feist’s main-sequence stories but it’s not for want of trying.

Once you finish (or if you bounce off of) the Empire trilogy, it’s time to move on to a couple of books which are more-or-less paired, Prince of the Blood and The King’s Buccaneer. Think of them as focusing on “the next generation” of adventurers. I mean, a bunch of our known figures show up but it’s not about them, mostly. Each book heads into a different region of Midkemia and I think they’re both fine reads. Also, Pug shows up and does stuff.

Then, if you’re not done yet with all of this, read the Serpentwar set. It’s four books, starting with Shadow of a Dark Queen. We’re further down the timeline now. Many of our familiar names are dead or close to it when this sequence begins. And here’s where the writing gets as close to proper “grimdark” as it ever will, I think. It’s kind of brutal. Not bad, I still more-or-less like the books, but there’s definitely a sense that these were written in the 1990s rather than the early 1980s and are trying to be more “mature” or “adult” or something. Your mileage may vary.

Also, Pug shows up and does stuff.

And… provided you make it this far? Honestly, it’s up to you, but I recommend that you stop.

There’s a set of Krondor books that are almost literally transcripts of video games. I’m not making this up. And the first one especially reads like a series of fetch quests in a game. They’re… very skippable unless you’re desperate not to miss any potential lore.

There’s another later trilogy (“Conclave of Shadows”) set a ways further down the timeline and… honestly I don’t remember much about it other than there’s a boy who’s trained to be an assassin to get revenge for his slain people and… eeehhh. Also, Pug shows up and does stuff.

After that you get things like Pug fighting demons across dimensions of reality, you get Pug crashing a moon into its planet to… do something, I don’t remember why he did this and I’m not going to name the planet, it’s just that at that point I realized the power creep on the Pug storyline just kept getting more ridiculous and I had to “nope” out.

And so I have.

With that said, Magician delighted me yet again, even after this long break, even after my sensibilities have changed somewhat. I’ll almost certainly continue onward through the rest of the Riftwar in the near future. I’m just not sure if I’ll do that before or after I start reading the next book for this writing project.

Which I’ll announce… at some point. (Yes, I already know what it is. Ha.)