To all those who assured me that my fears were groundless, and that I would surely enjoy the Harry Potter books, I have one word of thanks: what fucking crack were you smoking when you read them, and can I borrow some?
No, too harsh, let me try again
On Sunday night, I became the last person in the anglophone world to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and as such I think I have a clear and present duty to write my thoughts about the phenomenon as it stands. Because if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that not enough ink has been spilt over Harry Potter.
But this is different! This is a somewhat negative review of the series! Because those don’t exist. No sir. Don’t go looking. This is the only one. It’s unique.
And you know something? This is my blog. My culture blog, if you remember. And if I want to write about a book that everyone has already read twice in two months, I’ll do it. Don’t like it? Start your own blog! Call it www.timbraytonisapretentiouscock.com and have all the posts be about how I won’t watch any movie made outside of 1960’s France. Asshole.
After much deliberation, I have decided to go through the series one at a time, considering each book before I tackle the whole sonofabitchin’ thing. Thus, I shall tell you many things you know and don’t care about before arriving at things you don’t know and don’t care about.
I’ll assume a certain familiarity with at least the broad strokes of the books. And I should mention that I will be freely spoiling all six books. Be forewarned.
Abbreviations, in publication order: SS, CoS, PoA, GoF, Phoenix (because OotP looks weird), HBP
Philosopher’s Sorcerer’s Stone
I read this book in late winter 2001. It was two years or more before I even considered picking up the next. I hate this book. Hate, hate, hate it. It is massively, monumentally, hurtfully derivative of many books that are much better. In particular, I felt the ghost of Roald Dahl staring over J.K. Rowling’s shoulder at every plot point. Let us consider:
-The young hero lives with “protectors” whose palpable evilness is almost physically grotesque.
-The hero learns that he is exceptional, but completely by accident – he is randomly chosen.
-When the hero embarks upon his exceptional quest, he finds grotesqueries that are parodies of his home life. There is no moral confusion about who is nasty and who is good (see HBP for my full ire at this facet of the series).
-The hero uses his skills to vanquish his foes. Mortality is an afterthought.
-The hero does not grow as a person, but is just so damn happy to be a Winner!
I know that a lot of children’s literature follows that paradigm, but on every fucking page, I felt that SS was consciously designed as “James and the Giant Peach at a wizard’s school,” to such a degree that I really don’t think I would have noticed if Harry started talking to a giant centipede at some point. Hell, maybe he did. I don’t know, I haven’t read the fucker in over four years.
(Let me make it clear that I love Dahl, and I think much of my distaste for this book is my sense that Rowling is treading on sacred ground).
I know this is the red-headed stepchild of the series, but I liked it quite a bit more than its predecessor. Not enough to see what the fucking deal was with the series, but I didn’t loathe it.
I don’t remember when exactly I read it. I think it was early in senior year of college, which would make it just under two years ago (it was, at any rate, made available to me through the grace of Ms. Carol Sweeney, whom I thank for indirectly aiding this essay). I remember very little of it, but I’ll go over what I can.
The big problem with this book, in retrospect, is how much of it is laying groundwork. In order for the future books to make sense, we need to know the similarities between Harry and Voldemort, and we need to know Voldemort’s history. But as a stand-alone story, nothing happens. I watched the film recently, and was struck by how much easier it was to follow than the first, mostly because there was so little plot to it (the movie equivalent of this essay shall follow my November screening of the fourth film). I remember being bored by the book, honestly, even if I don’t remember much else.
It suffers from being a transitional book; in the first, Rowling establishes her world, and in the third, she begins The Plot Proper, but here she is inevitably trapped between, having to flesh out a world while providing heaping plates of exposition. The result is a numbing exchange of gimmicky setpieces with leaden hunks of prose. The good news is, Rowling had finally found her voice.
I only read this book after the publication of HBP, and I have to admit it was with an eye towards this essay. So my memory suddenly takes a quantum leap in quality.
With this book, I began to understand why someone over the age of 12 might (might¸ I say) want to read these books. Not why a grown adult would stand outside of Borders for two hours at midnight, mind you – but I am getting ahead of myself.
I think it’s because this is the book that made it clear that not only was Rowling not an acolyte of Tolkien (a pronounced rarity in fantasy fiction, and worth praising her for. What’s that? She says she’s not a fantasist? Well, guess what, she’s wrong. I’m not saying that judgmentally. She just Is Wrong), but in fact she had a clear idea of the rules by which her world works. And I don’t mean, “ooh look at Hogwarts! Pretty!” because that was taken care of pretty well by the first two. No, this is the first book with…dare I say it?…scope. (Actually, I probably daren’t because after GoF, she chucks scope right in the shitcan). There’s a sense of a big ol’ wizarding world out there, and it’s actually kind of cool and exciting to ponder. After reading PoA, I was not dreading the next book, for the first time in the series.
And yet…it’s kind of not very good, even so. For one thing, she commits the stupidest mistake in the whole wide world: she acts like we’re supposed to find it surprising that Lupin is a werewolf. It’s not even a mystery, she doesn’t go for the easy card of “there’s a werewolf at Hogwarts! Good heavens!” She just alludes to Lupin’s “off”-ness, and then tries to hammer us at the climax. Except…Lupin. From the Latin lupus, wolf. I read his name maybe twice before I figured out where she was going. When that silver orb popped up? “Oh, that’s the moon. ‘cause, he’s a werewolf. When’s that gonna be a plot point?” Lupin. Lupine. Werewolf. Come the fuck on.
That’s actually the big problem: this is easily the most predictable book of all six. It took me well less than a third to guess that Sirius Black was innocent, although the surrogate father thing didn’t really occur to me. I didn’t figure out the Scabbers thing until shortly before it was revealed, but the book makes to big a deal out of Animagi for it to not be a plot point – a problem I have with something in every damn one of these books.
Also, and probably just because I read it only six weeks ago, but I first noticed Rowling’s lack of control over her prose. More on that later.
I liked this one. A lot. If they were all half this good, I would completely understand the love heaped on this series. For one, it takes the scope thing I noticed in PoA and runs with it. It does something that even Tolkien failed at, which is to make a book in a series have both a coherent self-contained story and further the story for which it is the precise middle (to be fair, that was not one of Tolkien’s goals: The Lord of the Rings isn’t three or six books, it’s one).
Also, Rowling is better at teens than kids: if Harry and company were a gaggle of “gee whiz!” Tom Swift wannabees for three books, here they’re actually like people. I felt all of the distaste for Harry that I would feel for a real 14 year-old boy, which I mean to be more of a compliment than it sounds. The Cho Chan plot is very well expressed, although Cho herself is such a cipher that it’s embarrassing (I’ll address this – that’s right! – later).
What’s wrong? Not much at all, and I’m not afraid to admit it. The only problem is that, like all of the Potter books, the ending is a weakness, and this might be the worst in the series. To begin, I’m not entirely sure what even happens in the battle between Voldemort and Harry. There are light beams, cloaked men, ghosts…it sounds a bit like a Pink Floyd stage show, honestly. And she really drops the ball with Cedric’s death and the aftermath, which is basically “I am sad that Cedric has died. Boohoo.” Many people are sad, but one very important person is not: the reader.
Urm…I was really excited about this one after GoF, I mean it. And I’ll remind you that back in the day, it was every bit of three years’ waiting. I had, like, five days. So the anticipation for those who anticipate such things must have been insane.
And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with Phoenix really, nothing that cutting about 60% out of it couldn’t cure.
MY GOD, IT’S LONG. And so claustrophobic! The first 500 pages (the length of 2.5 Mrs. Dalloway’s or 1.75 Lolita’s) are the slogging-est patch of narrative in the series. When it gets going, it’s fine, but it takes its sweet damn time to get going.
(Some of the people I’ve complained to disagreed with me utterly. They have not used evidence. I would use evidence for my point, as an inveterate English major, but this post is quite long enough already).
So much of what fills this space is leaden character-building, going over – and over – and OVER – the Harry/Sirius relationship, to make sure we “get” it. And it’s well and good that we get to see character moments, they’re nice and necessary; but they’re simply not Rowling’s strength as a writer, and that becomes increasingly obvious as the plot ekes its glacial way forward. As to the reams and reams of paper spent elucidating the wizard bureaucracy: yeah, I’m glad we had that. I remember thinking during PoA, “what would make this a great book would be a three page description of the Ministry of Magic elevators.” It’s like a parody of the sense of scope in the last two – there’s a big wizarding world, and it is fixated on paperwork. LOTR meets Brazil.
(Oh, and the plot about Harry’s trial, all 250 pages of it: imagine it was not in the book. Now tell me, in little words so I understand, how the thematic or structural integrity of the book is weakened in any way, shape or form).
I think the problem in a nutshell is this: by Phoenix, Rowling was feeling entitled. She was Britain’s most popular novelist (far, far ahead of second-place Terry Pratchett, about whom I shall write more in the near future), everyone and his dog had loved the new sense of scale in GoF, and she decided that God-damn-it, she was going to crank out something even longer! Who was going to tell Rowling The Magnificent to keep in check? Certainly not her nonexistent editor. So, let the book be long! The Acolytes of Potter shall not complain! Give us more of that luxuriantly nondescript prose!
Arrogance shows up in the narrative, that’s for damn sure. And not just because of the heft of it. All of a sudden, Potter is Christ. I hate to be flippant (no, actually I don’t) but it’s such a sudden change from “Harry Potter, boy hero” to “Harry Potter, Son of Man,” I can’t imagine why more people haven’t at least commented on it, even if it’s in praise.
I will say: I totally didn’t call Sirius dying. That was a nice touch. The stakes were kind of weird, and I still think Harry “acts” sad more than “is” sad. But I’ll take what I can get, in this inordinately self-important book.
Sex comes to Hogwarts. Really, I think “snogging” is used more times in the book than “McGonagall.”
The second book in the series that I think comes close to justifying all that hype, and if it’s not as good as GoF, that’s because it clearly serves as the prelude to Harry Potter and the Cryptic MacGuffin, or whatever she titles it. Which gives me hope.
First off, the very bad: how fucking obvious it was from the get-go that a) Dumbledore dies and b) Snape does it. I figured out a) without even picking up the book; that’s media overexposure, sure, but Psycho had plenty of hype in 1960, and most people went into the theater without knowing that Marion Crane…but I’ve said too much. Or, more recently, The Sixth Sense: I think most people who saw it on the big screen didn’t know see the twist coming (I knew the twist long before I saw the film). Seriously, though why would an author be so deliberately coy: “someone dies, someone important”…hm, Hagrid? That’d make sense. Or maybe it’s Harry! Because so many people would read Year 7: Ron Granger and the Absolute Clusterfuck. But certainly not the protector/guide whose death would throw Harry into the most immediate possible crisis.
And with that knowledge, chapter 2 (Mrs. Malfoy: “You’ll do the evil thing?” Snape: “Yes.” Mrs. Malfoy: “Huzzah!”) is condescendingly obvious, and I had to watch the condemned man suddenly become very open and friendly and good to Harry, and I was all, “dammit Rowling, it’s like broiling puppies alive.”
Next, the excessively bad: okay, the first few books had shall we say simple morality. Fine, they were for 11 year-olds. But Harry is now 16. A huge chunk of his readership is post-high school, post-college, post-doctorate, whatever. Lots of adults. So some moral ambiguity? Probably okay. Kids are resilient.
And yet, in this book, there is a very simple way to find out who is evil: does Harry dislike them? Then they are evil. I wanted, so badly, for five whole books, for Snape to be a vicious, nasty, controlling asshole, who turns out to be an okay guy, he just hates Harry. Because you know what? Sometimes okay people hate other okay people.
But no, Harry is God Himself, and therefore hating Harry is the sole province of the Satan-worshipping baby eaters. So Draco and Snape go over to the dark side. Not one element of the whole goddamn series has pissed me off so completely. There is no such thing as the moral arbiter of life. Harry is not responsible for who is good and bad. Some of his antagonists should be allowed some damn dignity. But no. I can imagine ways to get around this, but they all involve a crappy Return of the Jedi style ending. Actually, I just realized while writing that sentence, that Snape helping to kill Voldemort and then dying redemptively is a depressingly likely ending. Because Rowling loves her Star Wars.
The pretty good: it’s still claustrophobic, perhaps even more so than Phoenix (which at least expanded the wizard bureaucracy a bit), but I enjoyed the touches bringing in the Muggle world (the chapter with the Prime Minister is perhaps my favorite in the series, because I am a tool, and I was enjoying a cartoonified version of Tony Blair in my head).
Also, it was nice and tight, maybe even moreso than GoF; very little time was wasted commencing the plot, very little time was spent on subplots, it was all rising action (I do not begrudge Steve Kloves, or whomever it ends up being, the task of adapting this particular beast). And the plot was pretty good, although this book is less self-contained than any other in the series.
And the sex…wow. It was pretty unnecessary, although I agree when one is sixteen, hooking up is at the forefront of one’s mind. But, it was very obviously a middle-aged author trying to remember what teenage lust was like. It ended up becoming amusing, especially with her robotic insistence on using the word “snog.” It was self-parody, really. Snog, snog, snog, snogsnogsnogsnog. Not since I Am Charlotte Simmons and the cavalcade of “mons pubis” have I giggled so often at the written depiction of carnality. Happily, all pretty easy to ignore, because the passages were pretty short. But if Harry Potter and the Summary Resolution ends with Ginny Weasley giving Harry a blow-job, I’m going to kill someone.
The Whole Series
Confession: snark though I may, I do like the books. Except the first book. I really hated the first book. But they do give me some amount of pleasure, otherwise I don’t imagine that I would have slogged through them all. GoF is one of the best kid’s books I’ve read since I was, myself, a kid.
What perplexes me is that people love these books so much. I don’t mean kids; they’re pretty great kids books. If I had kids, I would be perfectly happy to see them reading these books. But kids aren’t for the most part, the ones hanging outside bookstores at midnight. They’re not the reason all of these books have topped the fiction bestseller charts. (I am always reminded of the anecdotes about hordes of people at the New York docks, eagerly awaiting the new chapter of Dickens’ latest serial, crying out to the crews, “Does little Nell still live?” And to be honest, I don’t understand why The Old Curiosity Shop engendered so much love, either – it’s probably his least readable book.)
Why do adults love these books so much?
They tell a good story, it would be asinine for me to deny that. But there are a lot of books that tell good stories, and some of them are actually designed for post-adolescents. Certainly, I never once throughout the series forgot that I was reading a book designed for people half my age. It didn’t seem condescending, because I knew that I wasn’t the target audience. And I’d be a fool to deny that there’s a simple pleasure in reading children’s literature – not for nothing do I still have all of my Dr. Seuss books.
That doesn’t mean I enjoy Fox in Sox more than Les Misérables.
I hear stories about grown men and women who have read the extant series multiple times (prior to the publication of HBP, anyway). You don’t do that just for fun, you do it because there’s something in the book that really, really appeals to you. I support anything that makes more people engage in close reading, but it seems strange that people would waste so much of their time on such minimally challenging books. (Yes, I said waste. And I cringe to do so, awaiting the angry wrath of humanity).
I have no answer. I expect no answer. And given that I clearly stand against the bulk of the book-reading public, I deserve no answer. Instead, the burden of proof lies with me, if not to convince anyone that the books are bad, then at least to explain why I don’t particularly love them. So I shall attempt.
(Full disclosure: I read books 3-6 in alternation with books 1-4 of À la recherché du temps perdu. It’s profoundly unfair to the Potter books to compare them to another 7-volume bildungsroman, especially given that it is regarded in many corners as the supreme achievement of 20th Century literature. I promise not to refer to these books, but I felt you all should know that they were on my mind as I was reading.)
The Characters
There has been great literature written with nothing but flat heroes and stock characters. But in general, I think we can all agree that the default state of things is that full characters are preferable. This is something that the Harry Potter books suffer from, greatly.
There is, of course, Harry himself. I know that Rowling has been praised recently for brining a realistic sense of teen angst to Harry – he is no longer a simple hero, having grown arrogant, short-tempered, etc. – but that doesn’t make him a round character. He tends to have traits rather than characteristics, if that makes any sense. When he is angry, or depressed, or whatever, it is usually because the plot requires him to be so.
This is one of the most pervasive problems with characters in the books – they do not drive the plot, the plot drives them. One of the great innovations of Renaissance and Romantic fiction was the development of stories that happened because of how people acted. The movement from one situation to the next was founded on how the characters responded to the situations. The older tradition was to have a plot whose development dictated the characters’ actions. If a story needed a character to be angry at a certain point, he would be angry, regardless of whether or not it made sense for him to do so. This is the way in which the Harry Potter books work.
For example, the entire plot of Phoenix depends on Harry not being told certain information, by a large number of people. But this comes at the expense of characters acting like themselves. I maintain that it makes effectively no sense for Dumbledore to decide now that he needs to protect Harry from harsh scary truths, because it has certainly not been a huge priority for him up to this point. All those hundreds of pages, just because one wizard apparently had a stroke over the summer.
And I’ve already registered my unbridled hatred for what she does to the character of Snape in HBP.
The secondary characters are largely stock figures, but this is not necessarily a sin, especially in genre fiction. But the tertiary characters…oh, the poor tertiary characters…
The most egregious example is Cho. She exists purely as an object, popping from one emotion to another solely for Harry’s benefit. She has no personality, she has seemingly no autonomy, and once her role in the plot is spent, she drops off the face of the earth. Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield is a more credible romantic figure than Cho.
(Explanation: among Dickensians, Dora Spenlow is almost certainly the most hated of all his characters. She is awful and underwritten and annoying. She comes perilously close to ruining a pretty good book).
This is the case for most of the non-major characters. They exist solely to shuttle the plot forward, and mostly have one trait. I haven’t mentioned Charles Dickens in about 30 words, so I will pull him out again: he is famous for making characters who appear in five pages of a 600 page novel as fascinating and round and colorful as the protagonist (more, actually; his protagonists are usually intolerably dull). Most of the Potter characters are useful for nothing but getting from A-B.
The Prose
I noticed first in PoA, and more forcefully in Phoenix: people in the Harry Potter books “say” a lot of things. They rarely-to-never cry, sniff, whine, grumble, snort, declare, murmur, sigh or reflect. Sometimes, they “say adverbly.”
This is symptomatic of a great flaw in the style of the books: Rowling has no command of the English language. She is a very proficient craftsman, if we view words as tools; but what if we don’t? The great authors, even when style is not their aim, use words as a painter uses colors (betcha never heard that metaphor before). Take Nabokov, in the opening of Lolita:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip on three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
And Lolita is not at all about pretty language. It is heavy on the plot and character and symbol. Pretty language might be the last reason to read the book. (Fun fact: despite what is usually said, Nabokov was technically a native speaker of English, having become fluent in the language as a small child). So a good command of the language isn’t just for showoffy poets.
This is roughly the point at which I am told, “they’re books for kids! They’re supposed to be easy to read!” Invariably, the person saying this is not a kid. There is a word for this, and it is “incongruity.”
You don’t need to tell me the reasons why a grown adult would rather read Harry Potter than Lolita. But a lot of books are easier to read than Nabokov, without being so easy that there’s no point. Tom Wolfe, for example; Michael Chabon, John Irving. None of them particularly hard to get through, none of them so smart as to make you feel like you’re in a lit class, but all of them able to wield a sentence.
Rowling’s prose is very workmanlike. It reads like large concrete slabs that she sets the story on top of. There is no personality, no sense of play in the words. Never once, in any of the books, did I feel the desire to reread a sentence that had moved me, or surprised me in its eloquence, or teased me with a sly wit.
I realized between GoF and Phoenix what the writing puts me in mind of: the only genre of writing in which the whole point is to be as unexpressive as possible; to provide an style-less framework for the story; to use words as inelegant tools, instead of delicate brushes.
J.K. Rowling is a natural-born screenwriter.
The Plot
An issue I raise just to dismiss from consideration. It’s epic-lite and it knows it, which is a huge step up from the vast fields of Self-Consciously Epic fantasy writing. And mechanically, it’s solid: internally consistent, with clever foreshadowing and callbacks. But to me, plot is an element, not an end, and people who praise the book for its construction remind me of people who thought Memento was the best film of 2000.
The Themes
Genre fiction, like genre films, is a magical thing: it looks cheap and pulpy, so you don’t pay attention, but then it goes ahead and has brilliant moral or political import. It’s a cliché that the best science fiction is about the time when it was written; but like most clichés, it has the benefit of being true.
Much fantasy literature fails to achieve this. In the wake of Tolkien and The Lord of thee Rings, seemingly endless waves of writers decided that they could achieve his success by hewing to his formula: quest, elves, dwarves, orcs, swords. Which is like saying that newspapers were the key to making Citizen Kane.
Tolkien’s book, of course, is about the two great wars of the 20th Century. Whenever somebody says this, some tedious fanboy will always rejoin that Tolkien denied that the book was a WWII allegory. First off, history is littered with hundreds of artists who had no idea what their work was really about. Secondly, I didn’t say “WWII.” I said “wars.” The Lord of the Rings is the fantasy novel of a man who hadn’t recovered from the war traumas of his youth before the war traumas of his middle-age. It is about a Europe that had just seen a millennium of history end in blood forcing itself to fight, yet again, a new war with even more blood and destruction.
The book is also wrapped up in the moral schema of a very Anglo-Catholic man. The theme of good and evil, and the moral choice between the two, runs through every moment of the book. The Lord of the Rings is about moral agency in a world which seems to reject goodness. It is about the price that knowing evil extracts from a person, with the acknowledgement that knowing evil is a prerequisite to knowing good.
(Now’s as good a place as any to say that Peter Jackson apparently thinks that the book is about elves, dwarves, orcs and swords).
I don’t know what the Harry Potter series is about. It’s not about moral choice, whatever it seems: Harry isn’t the agent of his fate. Things happen to him, and he reacts, but he is not capable of rejecting his duty.
It could be that it’s about duty; about accepting what you must do because you must do it – but that’s not particularly satisfying, as Harry never seems to falter in his resolve. “Getting scared,” at any rate, is different from “faltering,” and I can’t think of any situation in which Harry actually considers letting the world go hang itself.
That’s the problem – Harry is too damn good. Rowling tries hard to underscore the similarities between himself and Voldemort, but Harry seems constitutionally incapable of being a dark figure. I already mentioned, in the section on HBP, that the moral universe of the Potter books is offensively simplistic (offensive, because there are moral grays, kids should learn that, and adults should already know it). I hate to bring it up again, but it’s an important thing: these are programmatic books, and they have a simple status-quo enforcing view of right and wrong. It is this sort of mentality that leads to things like invading Iraq; or for that matter, to things like flying airplanes into skyscrapers.
Ultimately, it’s this issue that I think keep the Harry Potter books from being great literature. They are not “about” anything. They are not “about” morality, nor do they describe the way the world works, and despite the accolades heaped on the last two books, I don’t even perceive how they are satisfactory coming-of-age stories. Harry doesn’t do a whole lot of maturing, he just grows to resent authority figures. I’ll give Rowling the benefit of the doubt, and assume that in book 7, there will be a shift to Harry-as-young-adult, but it hasn’t hit yet, and it doesn’t justify the series to me, as it stands.
None of which would matter – not all writing has to be High Art – if everyone didn’t love it so damn much. People obviously see something in these books, and for that I’m happy – not nearly enough people read, and anything that gets people into the bookstore or library is a good thing. But why stop with Potter? I wish, with all my heart, that people would realize that Literature-with-a-capital-L doesn’t have to be scary. Take Ulysses, one of the most notorious books ever written, and also one of my favorites. I sincerely mean that: I like the book. And I’m not an elitist about it – I can think of no reason why everybody shouldn’t read it. It’s not hard and scary, it’s a good book about interesting people. It has a reputation for inaccessibility that is simply not true, if you’re openminded.
But that’s as may be. The books give a lot of people a lot of joy, and I respect that. They don’t give me anything but a momentary amusement, but it is certainly a fine amusement. I’ll read book seven, and I’ll probably never thereafter touch any of the books again. I don’t begrudge those who will. I wanted to say my piece, and I said it.
I’ll say no more.
That should safeguard my English degree for another year.