Harry Potter and the Humongous Hype

This is not a Harry Potter-bashing post. My copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pre-ordered around Jan., came Saturday and I've already finished it, so count me among his fans. Still, as Marc Antony, via Shakespeare, once intoned, "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", even as his speech goes on to remind the Romans why Julius wasn't such a bad bloke after all. What kind of bloke is Harry? Why does the whole planet seem to care so very much?

Tolkien, like Rowlings, was also once vaulted into an instant spotlight, but even he had to have a specific movement and time--the drug-addled sixties--to explain his sudden popularity. Rowlings barely had time to blow her nose before her first novel started disappearing off bookstore shelves in droves. Potter also has Frodo beat on another score: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has sold more copies alone than all three Lord of the Rings books combined, and Tolkien has been hanging around a lot longer than "the boy wizard". I know these stats won't exactly shock anyone--the Harry Potter Hype Machine has been in full bore since the first book rounded up kids and adults alike into one big cult of four-eyed magic mania--but can anyone explain them? Modern Library's list of 100 Greatest Novels isn't short for science fiction/fantasy writers--it has Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, even Ayn Rand--but J.K. Rowlings fails to make it. And that's not just the Board's list, that's the Reader's list, too. TIME Magazine's list is similarly Potter-less. So why are these tales of a scar-faced, wand-waving adolescent squashing all but a handful of religious tomes as the best-selling books of all time?

Greater minds than mine have attempted this question and it's probably better suited to some comparative lit's Ph.D. thesis, but I can't help but wonder. On the face of it, Rowlings' writing is solid, but hardly splashy and she slides a bit in the later books, probably because no editor dared touch them. She occasionally attempts to use a simile or metaphor when she's actually describing the real appearance of something--in this book she says the ground-up shards of a mirror were "like glittering dust". She overuses a pet plot device--having Harry overhear details crucial to his mission from unsuspecting antagonists--all too often, culminating in the near constant mindmeld Harry shares with Voldemort that endangers Harry only once, but ever afterwards gives him an easy, constant update on Mr. Name Unspoken's whereabouts and activities. She also can't resist the "all is revealed" moment, either, where characters get together to rehash in clunky exposition what's happened and how it all fits together, especially the cliched bad guy "monologue" ending--"Before I kill you, Harry, here's how I did everything prior to this point!"

But wordcraft is not enough to sustain a book--and its lack isn't enough to condemn one, either. The book I finished prior to picking up Harry Potter was a much more literary sci-fi called Life by Gwyneth Jones. Jones' writing slaps Rowlings sideways. It is beautiful, poised, provocative, and requires careful attention. Her characters are sharply and poignantly drawn. The plot is driven less by adventure than by, well, life as her title indicates and it has some uncomfortable and challenging things to say about gender in a modern world. Still, a few weeks out of it and it's mostly slipped my mind. Nate and I had a similar reaction to a movie called The Fountain which we saw because Nate is a big fan of director Darren Aronofsky. The Fountain also has a lot of very pretty packaging--it's a very visual arresting film. But we were strangely unmoved at the end, despite the fact that characters spend most of the film wracked with grief. "Bloodless" is how I described it to Nate and he agreed. We simply didn't care what happened to these people.

And on that score, I think Harry Potter gets a punch back in at its more literary counterparts. Even if many of Rowlings' peripheral characters are more caricature than real (the Dursleys in particular come to mind), Harry, Ron and Hermione, a classic heroic triumvirate, have enough personality for all of them. Through seven books, they've grown up and the magical wonder of the first book is appropriately mirrored in the grief of the seventh book as they (and we) see the things we found so amazing in childhood take on deeper and darker meaning when viewed from adulthood. Rowlings isn't afraid to let them fully experience adolescence, either, even in front of a backdrop--evil maniac torturing and killing his way to triumph--that seems too serious for explorations of young crushes, hormonal-induced depression, and--for Ron--suddenly discovering your childhood girl friend has breasts. In the final book, the three of them are finally of majority and they strike out on their own together, trying to do what they think is right without the reassuring guidance of better-informed adults. The thing they realize is that adults are not especially well-informed either. Every decision is wrought with peril, and often, regret. Courage has been described as not the absence of fear, but going forward despite fear. Rowlings proves that courage is really the going forward despite doubt. Because of these things, the characters endure, grow large in the mind of the reader. We want them to win. We wish we could help them--we read voraciously alongside them as if we could.

And what Rowlings might lack in wordcraft, she more than makes up for in storycraft. I read the first book several years ago and dismissed it as so much fantasy fluff. It wasn't until after the first two movies had come out that I decided to try them again and from there, I read books two through six in a few months' rush (rather dumbly, I didn't wait until all seven books were out, so I was forced into the position of waiting restlessly for its debut, after having rolled my eyes at all the hype and giddiness that accompanied earlier books to stores). Small nuggets in the first few books that had seemed out of place, or too easily come by grew with meaning in each following book. By the seventh book, a carefully laid heroic arc for Harry becomes shockingly clear, building on these little dropped hints across what now amounts to thousands of pages. It reminded me, not favorably, of some other fantasy series I have read where the writers start out clever and smashing in the first few books and then you realize by the third or fourth book that they shoved all their great ideas in early and are petering out now (Robert Jordan, anyone?). Rowlings seems to have infinite patience. Something laid without adequate explanation in the first book might not reappear until book six or seven and to find it again is like a treasure hunt, like discovering on Antique Roadshow that ugly old painting of grandma's is actually worth $30,000. How she managed to keep track of it all should be made required study by all writing students.

Some people have complained that her later books have too much filler surrounding the center action. Maybe so, but the Tolkien that everyone admires suffers the same complaint on re-inspection--clearly the man was more interested in the literary and historical aspects of his own novels than the driving plot (Frodo's destruction of the ring comes very early in the last book and comes off as anti-climatic. Tolkien really needed an editor like Peter Jackson). It's hard to blame Rowlings that she has grown to such mammoth proportions as a writer that editors are loath to harass too much change out of her (would you complain to your money cow that her milk is too creamy?) Tolkien's "filler" was a lot of droning place descriptions and non-sequitor singing. Rowlings maybe spends too much time worrying what Harry is thinking about in between the moments where he's actually doing something. She is invested in him. So apparently are millions of other people.

I'm pretty sad to see Harry go. The seventh book is the best of the series, invested with real emotion and a well-executed bang-out ending--if anyone was worried. It's been a little disappointing for me to emerge back into the real world, where the chance to participate in an epic battle against evil is pretty slim. Here's hoping that some bright young writer is just waiting in the wings to emerge as the next grand storyteller and give us all a reason to stay home on Saturday nights, curled up with a good book.

Sidebar: While reading Harry, I was thinking of the idea of being the protagonist in my own story--how absorbed I am in my own concerns and how narcissistically my own world seems to revolve around those concerns, as if other people are the bit players in my drama. In Harry's world, several characters make the ultimate sacrifice and their deaths get varying levels of attention, but hey, this is Harry's story and Harry triumphs, so it's all for the best, right? I'd be interested in hearing what people think about being the bit player--would you be okay with being a footnote on the way to glory, fighting your tiny square of the fight, if a Harry Potter-like hero needed your minuscule help to accomplish his/her goal? I'm not talking about soldiers in an army, necessarily, but ordinary people who hear the news, decide for themselves what they think they ought to do, and suffer the consequences of those actions, maybe without much acknowledgement either. What do you think?