Fillory and Further

The clock cabinet is a book cover. Grossman says as much, and then spends three novels making the reader sorry he wanted it opened.

Quentin Coldwater is the catalogue’s implied patron: a person who loved a series too much, who wanted the door to work, and who is given exactly that wish. Fillory and Further is Narnia as it would be if the Pevensies had had to explain themselves to a neighbour in Cornwall, and if that neighbour had published. The books are charming, slightly off, and — once you are standing in the place they describe — incomplete in ways that are not charming at all.

This is the Neverending Story problem with the kindness stripped out. Bastian is asked to name things and then to stop. Quentin is asked to live inside the remainder. The Chatwins’ holiday was not a holiday. Plover was not only a novelist. The series that got a generation of readers through childhood is a bowdlerised deposition.

Grossman has been asked, often, to write the Fillory books themselves. He has written a chapter and declined the rest. The correct instinct. A pastoral of Fillory would cancel the novel that is about wanting one.

On the readability rating. Plots, titles, and the texture of Plover’s prose are described at length; a chapter of The World in the Walls exists as a promotional fragment. The five novels do not. That is the point of Quentin, and of this entry.