Looking back over my prior posts, I find myself startled to discover that I have not yet discussed the single most successful and perhaps influential fantasy series written since I was born: Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling.
The vast majority, if not all, of the people reading my columns will know the story of Harry, but just in case: the basic concept of the series is that Harry Potter was left as an orphan with his only relatives, the Dursleys, and raised (poorly) by them for eleven years; at that point he discovers (against all the efforts of the Dursleys to hide the truth) that he is in fact a born wizard, and is to learn magic at Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry's parents were murdered by the dark wizard Voldemort, a wizard so powerful and evil that he had terrified the entire secret Wizarding world and was not even referred to by name, called only the Dark Lord or He Who Must Not Be Named. Voldemort had attempted to kill Harry as well – but for some unknown reason the spell intended to murder the infant boy rebounded upon the Dark Lord, killing him or at least reducing him to something so wounded and weak that his power was instantly broken.
This event makes Harry legendary within the hidden Wizarding community, something he doesn't find very appealing since it's based on something he didn't even consciously do.
The series then follows Harry through his seven years at Hogwarts.
I was reluctant to write this article at first; that reluctance is probably why it's taken so long for me to get around to it. Harry Potter is one of the most widely read, widely-analyzed, and widely-reviewed series in history. It's doubtful I'll say anything that hasn't been said about it a hundred times before.
But at the same time, I can't very well just ignore Harry Potter. To a fantasy author it's like ignoring a gigantic rampaging puppy in the room with you; ignoring it might not harm you, but it makes you look kinda oblivious.
Overall, I love Harry Potter. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (called Sorcerer's Stone in America for pretty much stupid reasons) hooked me instantly, with its very Roald Dahlian setup (the Dursleys would fit not too far away from the aunts in James and the Giant Peach in the pantheon of "very poor stepfamilies") and transition to a magical world behind the real one that included a genuine English boarding school. It was, and is, an astoundingly good first novel; I've been writing for a long time and I'm not sure anything I've written is as good at what it does as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is at what it does.
In this first book of the series, Harry meets the two friends that will be his best companions for life, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, becomes a student wizard, confronts mysteries, and discovers Voldemort is not quite gone – and survives the experience, while also becoming something of a prodigy at the Wizarding sport of Quidditch. Despite there being a large number of inconsistencies of logic buried in the book, Rowling's writing steers the reader mostly clear of them by focusing on the child's sense of wonder in exploring and discovering this literally magical world.
One thing that makes the Harry Potter series nearly unique is the way in which the series grows. Rowling knew from the beginning that it would be a seven-book series, one for each year at Hogwarts, and she stuck to that plan. But what she did that was extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, is let the books themselves grow up along with the protagonist. Philosopher's Stone is written for, and targeted at, children of around 11 years old – the same age as Harry in the book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series, is targeted at young adults of about 18 years old – again, the same age as Harry is in that book.
As the series progresses, then, the world is shown through the eyes of an increasingly sophisticated, and sometimes temperamental, protagonist (for virtually all of the series, with only minor exceptions, is shown from Harry's point of view) going through the everyday stresses of growing up while also being put through extraordinary stresses of being the apparent savior of his people – a savior who must be destroyed by the forces of darkness if Voldemort is to rise again.
This allows Rowling to also slowly introduce the more complex, realistic (though see later) aspects of the Wizarding world, turning it from a nearly perfect place to one run by people just as fallibly human as the Muggle world – and sometimes just as prone to human evil. Voldemort is the Big Bad, but in some ways he pales before the sweetly-smiling, precisely organized, implacably cruel Dolores Umbridge, the living representative of the dark results of fear and those who exploit it.
This is a brilliant concept, and for the most part Rowling pulls it off well. The world of Philosopher's Stone looks a lot more simple and shiny than the world we have come to know by the end of Deathly Hallows.
At this point I must add that there will be potential SPOILERS for anyone reading this review/retrospective/analysis. I'm not going to be trying to discuss the entire series while avoiding all the important events and secrets of the series, so if you're planning on somehow reading the books unspoiled, don't go any farther!
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
SPACE for SAFETY…
Okay, here we go.
One of the key questions – throughout Harry Potter – is that of trust. Who do you trust, why do you trust them, how far do you trust them? This is an absolutely central element of the series, in which trust and betrayal are major elements of most if not all of the books. Harry makes two friends that he trusts pretty much absolutely after a while – Hermione and Ron – but is also put in multiple positions where he must choose to trust, or not trust, other people of various backgrounds and apparent worthiness of that trust.
And it's not usually straightforward, even with the people it seems to be. Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts and generally acknowledged to be the most powerful wizard alive, seems at first to be the classic wise mentor, observing and protecting Harry from the time he is very young. Yet even Dumbledore turns out to have secrets that make him perhaps not as deserving of trust as he might immediately seem, and he does make questionable decisions – though, one must admit, usually from perfectly reasonable motives.
The most obvious of these is trying to keep the truth of the Prophecy – which implies strongly that one day Harry and Voldemort will have to duel to the death – away from Harry because Dumbledore felt Harry was too young. Understandable… but also unfair, because until Harry knew of the Prophecy, he could not realize that Voldemort literally had no choice but to try to hunt down Harry. Harry represented his one prophesied weakness, and thus there was no chance at all that the Dark Lord would cease attempts to end Harry's life.
Nowhere, however, is the question of trust more starkly shown than in the presence and character of the Potions Master, Severus Snape. As initially presented, Snape is a man without any apparent virtues save, perhaps, intelligence; he is "sallow, greasy-haired", with a perpetual sneer, contemptuous of most students (except those of the House he is the Head of, Slytherin), and especially and inexplicably hostile to Harry Potter himself – alone of virtually everyone we meet; even Harry's long-term student nemesis, Draco Malfoy, originally was not hostile to Harry and tried to bring Harry into his own clique.
It seems utterly incomprehensible that someone as kindly, wise, and powerful as Albus Dumbledore would permit someone like Severus Snape to even work at Hogwarts, let alone be one of the primary instructors. Snape's behavior sometimes borders on the insane, ranting almost incoherently against "Potter's" evasions of the rules and "getting away" with things. As we learn more about Snape, the mystery deepens; there is good reason to believe that Snape was a "Death Eater" – one of the close followers of Voldemort. Why would Dumbledore trust him enough to work with him? To even bring him, later, into The Order of the Phoenix, the small group of wizards fighting the return of the Dark Lord?
There is a reason, however, and an extremely powerful one. Severus Snape hates Harry for looking like, and reminding him of, Harry's father, James Potter – a popular and at times arrogant student who tormented Snape at times when they were both at Hogwarts, and who then married the one woman Snape had ever loved: Lily Evans. Snape was responsible for the betrayal that led to the deaths of the Potters… but he had not intended it to lead to Lily's death. When he realized what he had done, Snape threw himself on Dumbledore's mercy and was given one chance to atone for his crime: protect Harry. Snape in fact volunteered to take the boy in and raise him, but Dumbledore refused; ostensibly this was because of a powerful charm of protection which could be used to keep Harry safe as long as he lived with blood relatives, but I suspect it was also because Snape, who was raised by a very abusive father, would probably have been unable to be a good father to Harry, especially as Harry grew older and looked more and more like James.
Snape is not a good man in many ways; but he is an honorable man, and sells his life dearly to complete his oath and protect the boy who is all that remains of the woman he loved.
This sort of complexity – of plot, and of character – is what carries the Harry Potter series through all seven books. Even the simplest characters often hide surprising depths and grow and change over the years (YAY NEVILLE!). I have been reading them to all of my children as they reach the age where they can appreciate them, and during the time that the movies were being released it was a tradition that my son Christopher went out to see each movie on opening day, even if it was on a weekday; I would take that day off to see the movie with him.
The Harry Potter series is not without flaws. The most glaring for me are those that show that Rowling doesn't think out the consequences of various aspects of her world, and sometimes forces things to go in a direction that, logically, they might not. She's occasionally admitted to some of these, the most prominent being that, some years after completing the series, she stated that she had effectively forced Ron and Hermione together as a couple (and, in parallel, Ginny and Harry) because it was sort of fulfilling her own childhood crush (Ron was based on an old boyfriend of hers); in hindsight, she realized that Harry and Hermione made a far more sensible couple. This had been clear to me in that the character chemistry seemed much stronger between Harry and Hermione than Hermione and Ron, and to an extent this failure of hers damages the books in terms of how well their relationships are executed.
For me, though, the more important flaws are worldbuilding ones. I'm a worldbuilder; I want to understand how the world I'm reading (or writing in) WORKS, so that when I have character X do action Y, the results make sense, and are consistent with other things I've had happen, and will have happen later. Rowling… doesn't do much of that, and it shows.
Perhaps the most glaring of these omissions is the fact that she essentially ignores the Muggle (non-magical) world as of little-to-no consequence, handwaving it away with the idea that the wizards simply erase memories of Muggles who encounter magic, and have magic to hide themselves and render inert Muggle technology.
On the surface that makes some sense, but it's also made clear that even the most educated wizards seem to know virtually nothing about technology; Arthur Weasley, in charge of preventing magical misuse of Muggle technology, doesn't even understand how a light switch works. Albus Dumbledore seems a bit more familiar with it, but overall the wizards seem less able to understand what modern technology is and what it can do than the average Muggle can guess and understand about magic.
Without that understanding, how could they POSSIBLY grasp the potential of satellite imaging, spy-plane overflights, and more importantly data mining and statistical analysis? The fact that the wizarding world hasn't been discovered yet is a fluke; there is no way it will remain so for long, and given the way in which they are drastically outnumbered, the sudden discovery might go poorly for them.
In the same vein, it's really incomprehensible that Hermione – a Muggle-born girl of great brilliance, who was undoubtedly top of her class in her mundane schools prior to being chosen to attend Hogwarts – not only fails to use or leverage any Muggle knowledge which could have been of use to her, but appears to almost FORGET it, replacing it with an incredible depth of knowledge about the wizarding world which she apparently gained in the few weeks after learning about her selection – and somehow even internalized, because she will often react to things as though she was raised as a wizard, which she wasn't.
There are plenty of other issues with Rowling's world; the exchange rate between Muggle and Wizarding worlds alone should be cause for concern. Sure, if you're raised in the Wizarding world you might not notice, but someone coming into it from the Muggle world, like Harry or Hermione, should notice – or at least their parents should. And such a border-straddling wizard, as they got older, could exploit that exchange rate to become LUDICROUSLY rich within a matter of days, or weeks at most.
The overall magic system is clearly not really worked out; Rowling's divided magic up into several convenient-for-her-as-teaching-subjects categories, but the way in which they work and interact isn't discussed. This is especially prominent in areas like Potions, which imply a sort of alchemical background, but aside from some scattered references to material properties, doesn't appear to have any key principles associated with it which would allow one to actually develop the potions in the first place.
This leaves magic in a very deus-ex-machina position, one that Rowling can use to perform pretty much any task that needs done without justification or explanation – but also without the ability of the reader to follow along and anticipate "oh, yeah, if they can do X then they could do Y…", at least in most cases. She posits a few basic ground rules (e.g., magic cannot for some reason create gold or food) but even these aren't as clear-cut as one might like.
For some readers, these are significant flaws. They are to me, to an extent. But Rowling's writing carries me past these flaws; she knows how to build tension, how to present triumph, how to make me care about a character who is in danger, how to make me really hate a character who's an opponent – and how to do a reveal, on occasion, that will leave my jaw on the floor. Where it really COUNTS, Rowling knows how to leave clues and indicators that will all come together one, two, or even five books later. The first few books, in fact, are honest-to-god mysteries which the reader can solve if they're clever enough.
Because of that writing skill, and her careful design and perseverance in writing the series, Rowling deserves her accolades. The Harry Potter series is truly a great achievement, and well worth the time to read and appreciate… perhaps more than once!
Your comments or questions welcomed!
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