Plot summary: Pug, an orphaned boy brought up in a small keep in the far backwaters of the kingdom, finds himself apprenticed to the keep’s magician. Before he really has time to learn much magic, however, strangers – apparently from another world – are seen in the lands around the keep, sneaking around, seemingly preparing for an invasion.

Indeed, a rift has been opened between two worlds, by the magicians in the other world, in order to invade this one. This gives them a great tactical advantage. In order to figure out the nature and limitations of the rift, Pug and his master join a scouting foray. Unfortunately Pug is captured and taken to the other world. He stays there a long time, learns their magic and becomes a powerful magician.

Let me get it off my chest: Magician sucks. It is described as a “classic fantasy epic”, gets overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I found it boring and badly written. It isn’t awful. I actually finished the book (unlike some). But it is bad enough that I find it hard to come up with anything positive to say about it. Even Robert Jordan is better than this.

There is no originality. Pug’s world is a standard Tolkien-slash-medieval world: we’ve got humans (check), elves in the forests (check), dwarves in the mountains (check), and some killing robbing dark elves too (check). They have a standard feudal system, and that standard kind of magic where the magician mumbles a cantrip and waves his arms and stuff happens.

None of it comes to life. There is no depth to the world. I get no feeling of history, or life outside of the story line of this book. That other world is not described vividly enough to ever feel real. The characters are flat, all average and likeable and dull (except for one, who’s mad in a very standard way).

Even the magic feels fake. While magic, and the differences between the magics of the two worlds, are crucial to the plot, we only see very superficial examples of it, and with no understanding of how it works. It is all on the level of “he waved his arms and chanted and magically created some mist”.

The language is dull and plodding. The tone is monotonous. There is no sense of humour, no beauty, no power. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, stilted and formal in an effort to make it sound medieval. It has no personality – even in the end I couldn’t keep some of the characters apart because they sounded exactly the same.

The pacing is weird, to say the least. At times, several years pass and you almost don’t notice. At other times, a single afternoon’s conversations are rendered in great detail. The siege of the keep takes 30 pages, and yet many more important and potentially more interesting events of the war are over in a few paragraphs. It seems that the expositions are only there to shine a spotlight on some particular person or relationship between persons. It is such painfully clumsy character-building that it’s embarrassing.

The story has no particularly interesting aspects or ideas. It’s hard to see what it’s about, what the point of it is. The plot just plods along, except for an occasional interruption from some very contrived scene. (For example: a commoner of no particular importance, who’s barely learned to ride a horse, gets to accompany the princess on her daily rides – just so he gets an opportunity to rescue her.)

I wouldn’t recommend anyone to read this; there are much better examples of fantasy out there. And I have no intention of reading any other works by Feist.

Amazon UK. The book was published as two separate volumes in the US: Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master.