4 Keys to Harry Potter‘s Success Missing From J.K. Rowling’s New Book
I admire and respect J.K. Rowling a great deal. It takes a lot of courage for a popular author to reinvent herself and come out with a book upturning what her readers expect. That’s what she did with The Casual Vacancy, her first published work of adult literary fiction.
The Casual Vacancy opens with the death of Pagford Parish Councilmember Barry Fairbrother, soon revealed to be the most genuinely kind, generous, well-meaning and non-self-absorbed person in town. He was also the deciding vote in a conflict that has torn the town apart: the stewardship of a nearby government housing project and the renewal of a lease for the local addiction clinic. A massive host of characters grapple with his death, their own personal demons, and the local controversy stirred by the special election to fill his council seat.
Rowling had to have known there would be hordes of readers hating The Casual Vacancy automatically just because it doesn’t have wizards or magic in it, and who would share their disappointment all over the internet.
That’s part of why I’m sad that I didn’t like it more. Because I picked up The Casual Vacancy prepared to read it as if it were the work of a first-time author, not the creator of Harry Potter. I was not going to bring the expectations that come with a fantasy young adult (YA) series to an adult work of literary fiction. But reading, I couldn’t stop thinking about what worked in Harry Potter and where those elements were missing from The Casual Vacancy – no, I wasn’t going to pitch a fit because Rowling dared to write a book in a different genre, but I was disappointed that she didn’t bring some of the very impressive writing skills that she’d displayed in Harry Potter to her adult fiction.
Here are four reasons why Harry Potter succeeded that have nothing to do with wizards — and why The Casual Vacancy didn’t live up to Rowling’s potential, even for a reader who wasn’t expecting wizards.
Casual Vacancy was gifted to me. I did not want it, & put off reading it til finally ran out of other books..Did not expect much.the cast of charactors took awhile to settle in my mind..Total result, I loved it, ending made me weep, will reread it..Reminded me of the Sripture verse; Call no man good…Also you never know what lives in others hearts…
Eh … I like Victorian-style stories myself. To quote the Bard out of context, “Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished…” There is a little good in the bad, and a little bad in the good, and unfolding a story about how it all comes out, and offering readers a little hope and the possibility of joy and fulfillment … this is satisfactory for the reader, and at least something of a challenge for the writer to create.
Unrelieved nastiness is tedius and depressing.
Far more important than being a “good writer,” whatever one interprets that to mean, is being a good storyteller. By far the greater part of a human education is conveyed in stories, whereas arabesques of device and image only impress critics and prize juries.
Story arises from the causal relations between the depicted events: the connective tissue that turns a plot line into a plot. But those causal relations must express an overarching idea — a theme — or they’ll prove insubstantial, and the events themselves unmemorable.
The great failing of innumerable “good writers” is their reluctance to tell a story with a definite theme. Today, given the moral relativism that dominates the arts, this is understandable, for the best themes have inarguable moral direction and weight. Thus, many a “good writer” is no storyteller…not because of incapacity, but because he’s unwilling to deal with such matters as heroes, villains, good, evil, and the inherent tragedy of the human condition.
Sadly, I saw little evidence for Rowling’s “deep sensitivity to the humanity in every person”; rather, I saw the contempt for suburbia and its inhabitants, and for bourgeois muggles generally, which I saw in her caustic, unsympathetic portrayal of Vernon Dursley and the like in the Harry Potter series. Most people in Rowling’s small towns are—often because of circumstances beyond their control, or even because of previous Conservative governments and the unspeakable evil of aristocrats generally—unpleasant and duplicitous and effete and petty.
i>Casual Vacancy, however, does not depict the real modern world, for, like the world of Harry Potter (wherein September 2 is always a Monday, wherein Lady Thatcher was never Prime Minister, and wherein the Prime Minister has no accountability to the Crown), the novel contains clues which tell the perceptive reader that we have a Britain of an alternative reality. As in the world of Harry Potter, wherein no living witch or wizard ever has the same first name as any other living person (perhaps because all names must be approved by the fascistic Ministry of Magic’s registrar of births in order to avoid confusion), no character in Casual Vacancy shares a first name with any other person—except, possibly, in two instances: Krystal Weedon hazards a guess that her real father’s name might have been Barry Coates; and Gaia Bawden describes her friends in London to Sukhvinder Jawanda who notices that “one of them, Harpreet, had the same name as Suhkvinder’s oldest cousin.” On the evidence that no living person in Rowling’s Britain can share a first name with any other person, and that the recently deceased councillor was also named Barry, I should argue that Krystal’s memory of her real father’s identity must be faulty; similarly, I should argue that Suhkvinder’s cousin Harpreet, coincidentally, must be one of Gaia’s friends.
Despite being repetitive, badly in need of editing, and despite (or perhaps because of) being written by a hardcore Paleo – Catholic, I have always found parts of this analysis …
http://www.culturewars.com/2002/potter.html
… to be very compelling, especially these two riffs:
1) “… Harry is living with the Dursleys, a thoroughly unattractive group of people who are quite emphatically not his real parents, his real parents being dead. This bifurcation of the family into good parent and bad parent, corresponds to the narcissist’s inability to conceive of the mother as an independent person who both gratifies and thwarts infantile desires. Rather than coming to the understanding that the loving mother sometimes thwarts infantile desire as way of leading the infant to a better understanding of reality as independent of its wishes, the narcissist bifurcates the mother into a fantasy of the good mother who gratifies his wishes and the bad mother who does not, since the gratification of desire is the summum bonum, indeed, the only good for the narcissist.
Rowling conveys this attitude by dividing the world neatly in half. There are people like Harry, his real parents, Hagrid, Dr. Dumbledore, and the Hogwarts school, all of which are good because they believe in magic. On the other hand, we have the Dursleys, Harry’s actual parents, who live in the unromantic suburbs. These people are known as Muggles and their main characteristic is that they don’t believe in “magic,” i.e., the narcissistic dominion of desire over reality. The Dursleys are “proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Mr. Dursley “didn’t approve of imagination.” The Dursleys, in other words, are … stupid bourgeois suburban types who are fat, unimaginative, selfish, consumerist wage slaves. The Dursleys, in other words, are the ideal citizen in the globalist economy, perfect examples of the narcissistic empty self, which is, of course, why Rowling has to demonize them as different. Harry, as narcissist, is no different than the Dursleys. Since the thought is intolerable, the solution is once again fantasy, the fantasy that Harry is somehow different, when he is exactly the same because his self is just as empty and narcissistic as the Muggle consumers he (or Rowling, or the reader) finds so repugnant …”
(IOW, it is rife with a profoundly hypocritical Manicheanism …)
2) “… The threat of (Harry) being immured in Stonewall High School for four years sets up the main action in the book, namely, the arrival of the owl bearing the message that Harry Potter has been admitted to the Hogwarts School of Magic and Wizardry. Mr. Dursley, being a Muggle, of course immediately throws the invitation into the fire, but the owls keep coming, and soon the Dursleys must flee to an island off the coast of England after the house is inundated with letters summoning Harry to Hogwarts. We have here one more fantasy based on the idea that education is a form of magic, namely, that the system seeks out and promotes gifted pupils. Harry’s giftedness is so overpowering, even though the Muggles can’t see it, that he is fated to go to Hogwarts. The idea that Harry might somehow not go to Hogwarts is so preposterous it prompts an outburst of righteous indignation from Hagrid:
“Stop Lily an’ James Potter’s son goin ter Hogwarts? Yer mad. His name’s been down ever since he was born. He’s off ter the finest school of witchcraft and wizardry in the world. Seven years there and he won’t know himself. He’ll be with youngsters of his own sort, fer a change, an he’ll be under the greatest headmaster Hogwarts ever had . . .” (p. 58).
Since Harry has done nothing to achieve this fame, he must have inherited it, and here Rowling’s fantasy comes full circle. Harry Potter is noble by birth, and as such he and his magic are a direct repudiation of the democratic educational policies promoted by virtually every government in England since C. S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man. Education is magic when it provides a ticket out of the penury of lower class existence or the dreariness of middle class existence, but it can’t be magic if it does this for everyone. As a result, Rowling longs for the days when education in England was a function of elite schools which could raise talented young people into the upper classes, magically, by simply having them attend those schools. Of course this system could only work if the schools were not “democratic,” and Rowling can’t bring herself to admit this any more than Tony Blair can, so she retreats into narcissistic fantasy, longing for what she dare not state explicitly.
The fantasy of salvation through admission to an elite school remains long after the reality has vanished. The Harry Potters of both Britain and the United States still sit by the mail slot waiting for the arrival of the SAT scores that will certify that they are “special,” and which will qualify them for admission to magical schools …”
I think there is something to the idea that the popularity of the Potter books says a lot more about us than it does about Rowling’s qualities, if any.
Or, it’s a literary device used in hundreds of other books. In Heinlein’s “Starman Jones”, the main character runs away from an abusive step-father to pursue the “legacy” he inherited from his uncle. The legacy was to be named his uncle’s heir in membership in a Guild, and to prove both his identity and worth, he brings along the copy of the Guild’s “trade secrets” — volumes of reference books — his uncle had left him. The Guild, sadly, has no record of his uncle naming Max as heir, but pay him for the return of the books.
I’m all for defense of the middle class against literary bufoons, but Harry is anything but a narcissist.
And shouldn’t the educational system recognize and promote gifted students? Isn’t that one of the main points of any educational system? It’s not like Hogwarts doesn’t take a lot of hard work – heck, you try writing all of your papers with a quill pen!
Rowling hates, loathes, and despises everything middle class…and certainly everything upper class, and yet at the same time, she is insanely jealous of it and has to secure all the “specialness,” from amazing talents to incredible birth, for her hero. This tension is absurdly overt in the book, and it is essentially resolved by Harry being good because he is good, and others being bad because they are bad, both because of accidents of birth that she is trying so hard and so unsuccessfully to repudiate.
IOW, a jejune, hypocritical Manicheanism pervades the story. Occasionally, she rises above it, and that makes it less uninteresting, but not often enough.
The word “narcissist” has to be one of the most misused words in the English language. There’s nothing narcissistic about it. The “wicked stepmother” character has been around for as long as anyone can remember. Many orphans have been raised good stepparents, but there have been untold numbers of people who have been raised by “wicked stepparents”. Some were truly evil, others just suffered from
There’s nothing narcissistic about the expectation that someone will follow in the footsteps of their parents. People often expect the children of great athletes to also be great athletes, sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. People often expect children to go into the same line of work as their parents or to attend the same school. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t. It is no different than expecting someone to go to Harvard just because his father did, or to be a doctor just because his father did.
This expectation may be asking too much of the children, or the children may not be able to do it, but there’s nothing narcissistic about it. There’s nothing narcissistic about someone thinking “I could go to Harvard.” (I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, so don’t bother to call me an Ivy League narcissist.) There’s nothing wrong with ambition.
That a book has a main character who is exceptional shouldn’t surprise anyone. It is the nature of stories. People don’t tell many stories about Joe Average. But stories about exceptional people, those we’ve been telling since the dawn of time.
Muggles are not portrayed as evil. Dull, but not evil. The evil ones in the book, Voldemort and his followers passionately hate Muggles and Muggle-borns. They want to rid the wizarding world of Muggle-borns, and rid the world in general of muggles.
Actually, LOTR is exactly a Joe Average story. Frodo Baggins is an utterly unremarkable member of a diminutive, parochial, uncultured and unremarkable race of what amounts to hicks. We know the name only because, in a fantasy story, he succeed where the strength of men, the power of wizards, the hardiness of the dwarves and the glory of the elves failed. And it was not ultimately on his own merit. Technically, he failed too, but as evil contains the seeds of its own destruction, it was enough that he gave it the chance to do so.
There’s some truth to that, but both Frodo and Bilbo are exceptional hobbits. While most hobbits are content to stay home, enjoy good food and drink, and not concern themselves with the outside world, Frodo and Bilbo have adventures, which, by hobbit standards, is highly peculiar.
First, on the side, it would have been nice if you had said what you liked about the book first. I haven’t read it; it would be good to know if it is worth reading without regard to the author.
In my opinion, someone is not a great writer if they write a boring book. This comes before style or substance. After that, I value substance (story) over style (all of the other stuff, although if the other stuff is _really good_, it is still worthwhile).
Regarding items 2 and 3, I know of two movies (Apollo 13 and It Can Happen to You) where negative things were added, either to make it more “realistic” or “interesting”. Life is cornier than fiction, and nicer too. This is why cynics, as opposed to skeptics, are naive.
(Almost all of the negative things in both movies were fictional.)
I’d like to see some fiction that celebrates that “corny” part of life and is self-aware of it. Not to say that that is the only thing I’d like to see. I’d just like to see it. Nice change of pace. Although Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine may fit that description exactly.
Well, there is a lot of that in short stories, especially golden age. Early Heinlein, for example, including the first part of Future History. Or his Magic, Inc. with its small businessman hero.
All the characters in Harry Potter were either uninteresting or cliché. The plot was dull. I’m a very avid reader and almost never put down a book before it is finished but Potter was one of the few books which I couldn’t finish.
Same here. I’ve read fantasy and science fiction for 55 years and couldn’t even get halfway through the first Potter book. I suppose that the books were written specifically for children and I’m not one. I did enjoy some of the movies though- once they came out for rent or appeared on tv.
I forgot to add that I’ve no interest in reading her new book.
Agreed, they are mostly two dimensional, though occasionally some did rise above it. A little. I thought Ron and Hermione we’re somewhat realistic and far more admirable than the putative hero. Snape was interesting. I am extremely well-read, and I cannot recall a character with quite that kind of conflicted motivation, though perhaps I need to remember harder. And, for some reason, I found Lupin somewhat sympathetic.
As for Harry, I’ve never hated the protagonist hero of a story more (although Thomas Covenant is in the running.) Part of that may be because I listened to the last four books, rather than read them. Jim Dale’s talents made the story better than it was, but it also made Harry’s angst, not to mention that interminable final showdown, unbearable. It’s the narcissistic villians who get off on “monologuing,” Potter. Just blast the ******.
The difference is you’re SUPPOSED to hate Thomas Covenant. The whole series is about his slow path to redemption. Though, he has a rough start when his first act in the Land is to rape the very girl who helped heal him.
I forgot to add that why Potter is hard to like, at least from book 5 on, is because he descends in to a horrid depth of self-pity. I don’t think we’re supposed to be annoyed with it. I think we’re supposed to pity him for it. I didn’t. I just wanted him to quit whining.
Point taken, about Covenant.
I also could not get very far into any of the Harry Potter books. I tired of the juvenile, make-it-up-as-you-go, make-believe that underpinned everything. I know that these books are in the fantasy category but I recall being taught that a writer can only suspend dis-belief in one or two fundamental ways in any given work. Do it too often or at the writer’s convenience (“oops you are threatening me so, presto chango, I will turn you into a mouse”) and the reader cannot buy in to the possibility that the stories could be real or that they could live them.
To me, a great example of compelling epic fiction is the LOTR Triliogy. One can easily accept that Middle Earth could have existed and that its characters may have lived those lives and had adventures as described. Not so with HP which is just not compelling to me.
” … I tired of the juvenile, make-it-up-as-you-go, make-believe that underpinned everything.”
Yes, exactly. That’s its most profound weakness. That is the one sense in which Potter is not “for children” but outright childish. Some may think Rowling imaginative, but imagination is no great shakes. Occasionally helpful maybe, but it’s a bit like lying in that it’s tough to keep your made-up stuff straight over the course of seven books. In the case of writing, this leads to massive plotholes. You could drive a tank battalion through the ones in Harry Potter. I conclude logic isn’t Rowling’s strong suite.
(Off the top of my head:
At the end of book five, why didn’t Harry just use that mirror Sirius gave him for Christmas to find out if he was okay? In fact, why didn’t he use that to ask about his young father tormenting the young Snape, as seen in the Pensieve?
If side-along appartition can penetrate the Fidelius charm ala book seven, then why didn’t the Death Eaters just demand that Snape apparate someone into #12 Grimmauld Place with him?
I kept hoping an acquaintance of mine, Phil Ferrand, who wrote the Nitpicker’s Guides to Star Trek, would have a go at Potter someday. I finally got a chance to ask him and he said that intellectual property laws are such now that no publisher will go near that type of book ever again.)
Thank you! I completely agree.
I never understood the HP phenomenon (and I’m in the generation that’s supposed to like it). One of the main problems, IMHO, is that Rowling is just a weak writer, and one cannot be a good storyteller and a bad writer. Bad writers miss details, fail to properly convey character traits, have internal flaws in world development, and so on. Bad writing precludes the nuance that makes it possible to discuss complicated ideas, characterization, build a “realistic” fantasy world, or examine moral actions, and therefore renders everything a sort of morass of half-formed unreality, where nothing is exactly recognizable, and everything is slightly disturbing when analyzed on its own merits for any length of time. Anything good people found in it, I believe, they put there themselves (which is reflexive, with something this poorly executed). The vastness of the HP fandom itself is a testament to the appeal of this world, obviously, but I think the things fans find appealing are mostly fanon (which seems to have started something of a feedback loop with the later books, where fanon was becoming canon, especially with Rowling’s decision to “reveal” Dumbledore as being gay).
These books are, in a word, malformed. They are not, and never were, strong books; the only reason why these were published in the first place was because some editor realized they would sell. Young Adult fiction is the cynical wasteland of the literary world; too violent/graphic/disturbing/sexual for children, not well-developed enough in terms of content, ideas, themes, or characterization for adults. I honestly cannot understand why any rational adult can (or would want to) derive pleasure pleasure from the genre.
For all the trappings of fantasy that they put on, Rowling’s HP books can’t hold a candle to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. Just about everything in them was wrong, from a fantasy/sci-fi perspective. There is no consequence to magic. There is no internal logic to its use. The world is full of pretty baubles but it doesn’t feel like a livable place. Everything is far too convenient for Harry; the adults are useless, he is never actually challenged by their authority structure, there is no honest “hero’s journey”. He is a horribly written character, and it’s almost a miracle that any of the others are interesting at all (Harry is one of the best examples of a Mary Sue character in published literature, and even people heavily invested in the fandom will tell you that). At an age (14) when I was reading Dune, 1984, and Ender’s Game, these books disturbed me – especially starting in the fifth book, which I was only barely able to finish, I was so disgusted with it.
I can completely understand why, with her comfortable little “anything goes” world and Mary Sue character removed, Rowling can’t write a decent, uplifting story. You know why? Because HP wasn’t uplifting to begin with. Nor was it well-told. She’s not a good writer.
(…oh, and citing The Hunger Games as “good” YA literature is BS, too. Great female lead, interesting ideas, horrible execution on almost every other element.)
“… is just a weak writer, and one cannot be a good storyteller and a bad writer.”
I actually disagree with that. It is possible, though not frequent. One example would be George MacDonald’s Phantastes. Way too much prolix, and little economy of use (Odd, for a Scotsman to be so prodigal) and yet the essential goodness of the storytelling and the story itself shone through so brightly, C.S. Lewis was haunted by it, and did not understand why until he converted.
The key words are “avid reader.” Practically everyone I have ever met who loooooves Harry Potter has read little else.
Magic a la Potter is easy. What if? Wave a wand. Done. Writing is hard. Typing is boring. The Potter books, by the way, were unreadable for anyone over the age of 12 or for those who actually read a lot.
I normally don’t reply to comments on my own blogs; after all, I’ve already had my 2,000 words of say in the matter, so I like to let everyone else have their turn. However, every time I hear someone say that writing fantasy is easy (or “writing fantasy like author x is easy”) I have to ask: have you ever tried to do it? I mean, tried to do it really well (or at least of a quality surpassing the author you’re mocking)? It’s one thing to say “I don’t think this author is very good,” and an entirely different thing to say that writing what she does is “easy.”
To clarify: everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and you don’t have to be an author yourself to say whether you thought a book was good or bad (in fact, many reviewers are not authors and it doesn’t lessen the authority of their reviews). But that’s different from saying a particular kind of book is easy to write. That’s not an opinion, it’s a claim, which you shouldn’t make without trying to substantiate it.
For example, I’m not an accountant. I can tell when an accountant is doing his job poorly (taxes aren’t filed on time, money is missing, calculations are wrong), but I wouldn’t walk up to an accountant and say, “Your job is easy — you just punch stuff into a calculator!”
As you noted, writing is hard. Don’t claim that writing fantasy is easier — even writing what you consider to be bad fantasy. There are a small number of things you can reasonably assume are easy to do without having to try it first. Writing any manner of book, good or bad, isn’t one of them. (As the authors who so famously struggle to churn out something — anything! — to fulfill their multi-million-dollar contracts could probably attest.)
Okay, one last thought. I don’t like this practice of claiming that a book is bad, and then saying anyone who liked it must be poorly-read or juvenile (literally, or mentally).
I think my posts should stand on their own merits, which is why I don’t throw my qualifications around. But since a lot of commenters are claiming that the fact that they’re “well-read” and didn’t like Harry Potter is proof that it’s bad and anyone who likes it can’t be well-read, I’ll tell you a bit about myself. I’m a graduate of an elite university, where I studied writing and literature and graduated with flying colors. I am a voracious reader, well-read in literature and philosophy spanning from the ancients to the most respected and trendiest authors of today. I’m a professional book reviewer for several outlets, including this one. I run a small publishing company, my day job is at a larger one, and I’ve freelanced as an acquiring editor for others. And I’m a published novelist. I also like Harry Potter. So please put to rest this claim that only juveniles and poorly-read people like Harry Potter. If you don’t like it, try to defend your opinions in a different way.
“I’m a graduate of an elite university… and graduated with flying colors. I am a voracious reader… I’m a professional book reviewer… I run a small publishing company, my day job is at a larger one… I’ve freelanced as an acquiring editor… And I’m a published novelist…”
You’re right, you probably shouldn’t comment on your own blog, especially three times in about an hour. Calm down.
Thomas L… is just saying Rowling’s use (abuse) of “magic” is lazy, sloppy and contrived. Deus ex Machina. Conflicts are suddenly resolved, rules “magically” change. This weakness is especially evident in the earlier “Potter” movies, where Chris Columbus could only do so much to dress up Rowling’s laziness.
“writing fantasy is easy (or “writing fantasy like author x is easy”)”.
But I didn’t say that, did I? I didn’t include all fantasy. I found Potter unreadable. I find the, poof, wave-the-wand type of magic a little too easy and without weight. Although I read the books a long time ago, I enjoyed LOTR partly because the magic is not easy and has consequences when used. As for Rowlings, quite frankly, Tolkien she’s not.
I’ve been called … yikes … a muggle for my opinion on the subject. Fair enough. I find Potter fans juvenile (nothing wrong with that if they are young) and, if over 12, mostly poorly read. You may be the exception. The new book apparently proves she’s not really much of a writer. I already knew that. I salute Ms. Rowlings on her success, however. Personally, I don’t care what you read.
OK, you didn’t like it. Some of us enjoy juvenile fiction.
“I enjoyed LOTR partly because the magic is not easy and has consequences when used …”
Another crucial weakness in the Potter World. Not only does Rowling not come up to Tolkien, whose characters, speaking in stilted declamation, are nearly as 2D as Rowlings (LOTR has other great strengths,) she does not come up to C.S. Lewis, whose Merlin, in The Cosmic Trilogy, used magic at a time when it was just starting to be “wrong” and suffered consequences even then, and who, looking very withered now, dies while using it in the 20th century to destroy the N.I.C. E. / Belbury.
Without that cost, magic is a code word for the narcissistic desire to bend reality to your will with no consequences. Indeed, it bears a close resemblance to political Progressivism.
^this
All good fantasy must have an element of risk or personal consequence involved in the use of magic. I’d use the Shannara books as another example here; magic extracted a high price from the user, and damaged the world around the user if not properly controlled, and therefor, may only be used sparingly. That kind of conflict (either central or peripheral) makes for far more interesting stories and characters.
But the Potter books are not *about* magic in the same way as LOTR and other fantasy writing.
The Potter books certainly address the morality of wielding power – but through a thinly-veiled retelling of the rise of Nazism/fascism in Europe, and what personal choice and coming of age meant in that political climate.
Magic is just a theatrical prop.
The books are fun. They are light-hearted (well, except for the last two, which I didn’t like nearly as much as the others). They made me laugh at their crazy world.
By the way, although Rowling is hostile to the drab suburban middle class, she quite likes entrepreneurs. Fred and George created their small shop from Harry’s investment, and I believe he made a nice pot load of money from it. I didn’t see any hostility on the part of Rowling to the private economy within her books.
I am sad that Rowling felt a need to remove the joy from her new book. In my opinion, the joy and fun of Harry Potter is what made them special, and what made me stick around through the end.
A lovely review and I’ll be sure to pick up Rowling’s new novel now and give it a try. She’s a very young writer, remember, with many years of writing to go. (God willing!)
The Harry Potter series is immortal. His tale will be taken on spaceships to other planets, along with iconics like Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. People who declare them books for children show their own shallow understanding of literary fiction and the power of the world these authors created.
“… show their own shallow understanding of literary fiction …”
As do people who think calling something “books for children” is necessarily pejorative.
Power? What power? The Potter books are living proof of Chesterton’s dictum that “fiction is the product of the human mind and is therefore congenial to it.” Step out of the comfort zone now and then. Harry Potter is like a roller coaster ride: minor thrills, no real risks. Now if Harry had died at the end I would have thought much better of the story.
“The Casual Vacancy is joyless. And joy is what I missed most.”
Art, in a morally, spiritually and culturally intact setting like Victorian England, rejoices in and celebrates the coherence. It’s what makes Victorian England attractive. In what of current day England should we rejoice?
In the case of a dysfunctional society, art can, at its best, serve as diagnosis, à la the novels of Walker Percy or perhaps, Tom Wolfe.
I forgot to finish here, and say that if any part of the Potter Series was “diagnosis” is suspect it was accidental. The pining for the Victorian Era when education set you up for life is there, I think, but I doubt the unwed mother Ms. Rowling wants to go back to everything in the Victorian Era, like, say, Victorian Morality: just the parts that are self-gratifying and non-judgemental.
She was an unwed mother? I thought she was a divorcee?
Pretty sure, but if someone wants to check, go ahead. I only brought it up to make a small point in which either would serve just as well.
I could name other successful authors (musicians too) who encountered rejection when they tried something new, and agree that the public shouldn’t expect them to continue jumping through the same hoop. Experimentation is a big part of artistry. That said, a writer venturing into new terrain must know what works and what doesn’t. Even JK Rowling has to observe the rules of good narrative, and if she doesn’t it’s only right for her to face the same consequences as any newbie. Too many big names are getting a pass for publishing garbage as it is.
I love the four characteristics of the Harry Potter series you articulate. These are what I love in fiction and try to create in my own writing. Thanks.
I really enjoyed the first three Harry Potter books, but from there on the books became meandering and desperately needed an unflinching editor with a heavy pair of pruning shears. I have re-read the first three several times, and have read “Prisoner of Ashkaban” in French; the other books I have no desire to read again, and the Epilogue was nearly as bad as the tacked-on ending to the original release of “Blade Runner.”
My immediate take on Harry Potter was kind of a “St. Elsewhere” view: that is, I thought, if I were living with the Dursleys and locked in a closet under the stairs every night, what fantasy world would I create for myself? Hogwarts, that’s what. My sister and I made up the joke that we had been left on the doorstep by gypsies, and one day our real family would come swooping along in their caravan, our real father playing his violin, and would whisk us off to a world that contained nothing of the Susie Sorority from the Silent Majority world in which we were suffocating. (It was the Sixties.) Everything Harry got to do in the first three books would have been included in my fantasy world — totally removed from the Fifties world of John Robert Powers, the subdeb look and the pressure to be the debutante who marries the day after she graduates, to the son of her Jewish mother’s best friend (who bore a rather hilarious similarity, now that I think of it, to Mitt Romney.) Most of all I would have discovered my parents had a bank vault piled to the ceiling with GOLD! You folks are taking the whole thing too seriously. Harry Potter was a kidhood fantasy world. That’s pretty much all.
Harry Potter lifted an incredibly successful plotline and gave it a slightly fresh twist while being approachable. It was NOT successful as a series–in fact, it was amazingly UNsuccessful as a whole piece of fiction. It just appeared to work because it more or less had the shape of a story that has worked for hundreds of years.
Harry Potter is supposed to be a coming-of-age story, but it is a coming-of-age story in which the main character never grows up.
Harry Potter is supposed to be an underdog story, but it is really a Mary Sue fantasy. Harry Potter is the wildly popular quarterback and Ferris Beuller, all wrapped into one.
Harry Potter is supposed to be a story of “good vs. evil,” but while we get a pretty good idea of what evil is–murderous, coercive, and racist–we never get any type of idea of what good is. Harry has no moral compass. He cheated through all his years of school and should have been skewered by Voldemort, by all rights, the first time they meet. The “good guys” are rule breakers because the rules are vaguely “bad” (whether it be curfew or Muggle interactions, or whatever), but there is no moral standard of behavior for any of the heroes that is held up as an answer to Voldemort’s assertions. The enslavement of the house elves is maybe “bad,” but 99% of the “good” characters have no problem with it because they really have no real moral standard for anything.
Finally, Harry Potter fights Voldemort because he has no choice. He never makes a decision that, choice or not, if he is the only one who can stop him, then there is a duty on him to do so. That is because there are no duties in Harry Potter. Harry is cornered, so he fights. The end.
The entire set of books outlines a quite spectacular failure to fill out the story-shape that was promise. People who loved it were either duped into reading things that most clearly were not there or simply ignorant of what good fiction–literature or not–does.
Not only does Harry Potter never grow up, hardly any other character grows up in the entire series; even the supposedly wisest wizard of all time, Albus Dumbledore, plays at being wise and good, but—like his creator, perhaps—confuses being clever and proficient with being wise, and confuses being kind with being good. Casual Vacancy, in this respect, is much like all seven Harry potter books; the adults play at being adults but have not matured past adolescence. I suspect that this is, despite some trials when she was a poor, single mother, and despite her having additional children and a happier second marriage, the author has not developed much past adolescence.
As you rightly suggested above, good and bad characters are good or bad by birth, by predestination, in the world of Harry Potter and in the world of Barry Fairbrother. Perhaps, then, Casual Vacancy could be part of the Harry Potter series, and the town of Pagford, with a population of muggles only, is so dire because no witch or wizard ever visits.
“… Harry Potter lifted an incredibly successful plotline …”
The one from Star Wars as Ms. (Mrs.?) Sternberg’s fellow PJM contributor “Spengler” points out here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GG20Aa01.html
Give her a break. Ms. Rowling isn’t yet used to writing in the real world.
“Ms. Rowling isn’t yet used to writing …”
You could have stopped right there.