Sorry for the lame title. You would be lame too if you spent all week reading about the American Revolution (and I still don’t know the difference between Bailyn’s formulation of Republicanism vs. Gordon Wood’s. I feel dumber by the page).
I wanted to buy a card for a member of my cohort who is getting married next month (in the shmancy Mormon temple!), so I made my way to Borders about 2 hrs ago. Little did I realize that the Harry Potter premiere was tonight of all nights! The place was swarming with people in Potter garb, and their bedraggled parents/friends/spouses. Really quite festive. There were balloons, streamers…I could feel the electricity in the air.
I wish I could share in the fuss. But I have never gotten into Harry Potter, which is peculiar because I am a big fat science fiction/fantasy aficionado. And I’m not a terribly picky scifi consumer; along with the classic Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, I also read Dune, all things Tolkien, even the novelized Star Wars series. I think I even read the Anne McCaffrey series about fire-breathing dragons. As for juvenile scifi/fantasy, I adored the Tripod trilogy, and all of Lloyd Alexander’s books. I was and still am omnivorous when it comes to fantasy and science fiction.
I encountered HP in high school, when I read Harry Potter A L’ecole Des Sorciers–the very first Potter book–for AP French. It was OK, but didn’t capture my interest in the slightest. A few years later, shocked at all the hubbub, I borrowed a friend’s copy of…the Goblet of Fire, I believe…to see if I had made a mistake, and to see if I could blame the French for my indifference. Alas, I was simply not into it. Luckily I read the His Dark Materials series immediately after, and my faith in children’s fantasy was reaffirmed. Philip Pullman is bitter about the Harry Potter success, and rightly so; His Dark Materials is just…mind-blowingly good, echoing Paradise Lost with humor, fantastic characters, and a wide imaginative scope. I wept at its end.
I admit to being in the minority in my feelings toward Harry Potter. But in all honesty: I felt the narrative was weak, the characters thin, and the prose too full of cliches. The emotional development of the characters was akin to a Sweet Valley High book. However, Sweet Valley High with wizards is just that: Sweet Valley High with wizards. And the little shiny things like the Bertie Bott’s Beans! and FedEx owls! and wizard shopping mall! made it feel hackneyed and forced. In good fantasy, I want to be seduced by wondrous things; J.K. Rowling tried to bribe me with fluff and clumsy whimsy.
That said, I appreciate how much this book means to so many people. I loved being around those Potter-ites, and love hearing about my friends’ plans to be among the first to read it. It’s just so…exciting!
I do think swollen academics like Harold Bloom need to de-bunch their panties about the whole affair. This review from 2000 certainly echoes some of my own dislikes about the series, but I’m not sure Potter-mania is associated with the dumbing down of American civilization.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a pretty badly written piece of popular fiction, but still significant and worth a look for all that. And we still had Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, etc. after Harriet Beecher Stowe published her piece of mediocre blaxploitation. All is not lost. In any case–and I am glad for it!, Potter fans are not going to pay attention to me or a mumbling professor that looks like a depressed Grouper. Unless his name is Dumbledore, or whatever.
*edit: one thing that makes me extremely happy about HP is that a children’s book author is richer than the Queen of England. All hail J. K. Rowling!
