Circular Cruises/The Trouble With Harry

The Trouble With Harry

24 July 2000

I'm not wild about Harry.

I don't dislike the Harry Potter books, mind you; in fact I think they're pretty good, all things considered. But I have some problems with them. Big problems. And I have even bigger problems with the amount of attention the books have been getting - the public spectacle they have become.

If I were really keeping this essay neat and tidy, I'd stick to the latter category - larger objections which affect many more people besides myself. My personal issues with the books are, by definition, completely subjective. Given that mileage varies widely (I undoubtedly like a lot of things you hate, and vice versa), there's no real reason for me to share my Harry Potter likes and dislikes with the world.

However, when someone asks me, "So what have you got against Harry Potter, anyway?" - as I have been asked many times in the past few weeks - they generally don't mean my objections about the books' cult following or Joanne Rowling becoming a household commodity. In fact, they're as likely as not to agree with that part. They mean: What don't you like about the books?

I never have understood why people should care so much about other people's individual impressions of some entertainment. Not that I'm above the sin, you understand. I love to trade opinions on books, movies, music. I even sometimes make purchasing decisions based on what other people think. But I don't understand it, even in myself.

Here's my compromise. I'll mark this very clearly into sections. The first part is the part that I feel everyone should hear - the larger objections, having to do with the state of children's books and why this cult is a bad thing. That's the important stuff, the words I'd be willing to stand behind and defend fairly passionately.

Then, for the voyeurs, I'll devote the rest of this to telling you what I have against the content of the books, on a short-range, personal level. That way you can just leave early if you like. Or, you can read the whole thing and say you left early. No one need know if you stayed for the gritty bits.

A Public Phenomenon

As I write this, and allowing for my rather vague sense of elapsed time, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has been available for about two weeks. Our household copy has not arrived, because we order ours from the UK (the American versions have been altered in minor, but to us unacceptable, ways) and they're a tad backlogged over there - as they are everywhere. Booksellers still do not seem to have it on their shelves, no matter how much they tout it - there are simply not enough books, and the second print run has not yet been distributed. Bookstores opened at midnight of the day sales were allowed to begin, attended by lines of children and adults dressed as wizards and witches. Funny how no one ever dresses as a Muggle (a non-wizard, or what F/SF fans at conventions have been known to call a "mundane").

Joanne Rowling is mobbed by hordes of adoring children (and adults) everywhere she goes. Perhaps it is to save her sanity that she has agreed to let various companies pursue authorized lines of Harry Potter merchandise - thus ensuring that we have not yet begun to feel the full pain of this media blitz. Or perhaps she just wants the money. (That's not exactly a criticism, although I'd like to think that in her position I'd have held firm.)

In short, this is a genuine phenomenon and nine-days'-wonder. And all such phenomena are to be distrusted.

You probably think I'm being cynical. Well, I am, but not without reason. Let's start with the obvious: Rowling is good, but she's not that good. The books are adequately written, but they're not on the level with some of the classic fantasy juveniles I can think of. They're not Diane Duane nor John Christopher nor Lloyd Alexander. (I hope I got his name right. I mean the gent who wrote the Prydain books - which, by the by, I dislike ... just to show you I'm not playing favorites.) Broadening the definition of "fantasy," I'm not even sure they're as well-written as Heinlein's Boy Scout juveniles.

They definitely hold one's attention, though; even critical readers like myself end up finishing them once they start. They are accessible without being dumbed down ... and that counts for a lot, so don't think I'm underplaying it. They hit perfectly the groove between material suitable only for children and material suitable only for adults. In short, most of the books' strengths can be summarized so: They play well to the audience. They know what they have to do and they do it. In fact, they're almost calculated that way. (And as an author of books which have no audience, don't think I don't envy that skill.)

I believe that Rowling is entitled to her success. But the problem is that she has become the only game in town. And, rather than fostering awareness of a bad situation, this will only serve to make her a celebrity at the expense of other, equally talented if not better, writers of juvenile fantasy.

I need to explain the middle of that paragraph.

My local children's bookstore divides its books into "picture books" and "chapter books." This is useful because the categories are age-blind (even if, in practice, chapter books are meant for older children). Picture books are as much about the art as the words. Chapter books are all about the words. They are books to be read; picture books are to be looked at.

Picture books have experienced something of a renaissance in the last few years, with people like William Joyce and Lane Smith and David Small and Chris van Allsburgh and David Wiesner contributing brilliant vision, and people better known for adult books, such as Neil Gaiman and Dean Koontz, more than willing to moonlight in this field. But chapter books have been on what I see as a long steady decline. Especially the ones with fantastic elements.

The other day at this same bookstore, I was heartened to see a window display of "If you liked Harry Potter, try these ...." In it were such joys as Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, and so forth. But it struck me, looking at the ten or so authors in the window, that only two were contemporary - Diane Duane, bless her, does not neglect the juveniles in her prodigious output, and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and its sequel are being hailed as good things by everyone I know ... who's heard of them. I myself hadn't heard of the book and its sequel (with a conclusion for the trilogy yet to come) until I saw them in that window. [2007: My reaction to those Pullman books is mixed at best, but for reasons wholly unrelated to the rest of this.]

So is no one writing fantasy juveniles of merit these days? Or is no one promoting them? The answer is probably a little of both.

The thing is, there is a perception - and to what extent it's true, I can't say - that elementary school kids don't read books anymore. They watch TV. I'm inclined to distrust this. R.L. Stine's books aren't the greatest thing in the world, but by god they sell - someone has got to be reading all those Goosebumps books and it isn't me. Scholastic is still acting as a middleman to thousands of kids and doesn't seem to be bankrupt yet. Reading is reading. A kid that'll read Sweet Valley High may not be reading quality prose, but is reading - and is probably willing to take a chance on something else that looks interesting as well.

And when I hear these stories about how kids sit absolutely rapt with Harry Potter - silence and peace descending on otherwise unruly households - I can only think, "Yes, but wouldn't they do that for other books as well?"

It's true that the people who talk the loudest and fondest about children's books tend to be the older people, the ones who read them as children. But this doesn't necessarily indicate a new Dark Ages in children's reading habits. When I was a kid I read prodigiously - I'd love the free time to be able to read like that now - and I never talked about what I read, because talking lovingly about how good a book was marked you as a nerd and outcast for life. That is something I'd like to see change, but I don't expect it to.

But isn't the public phenomenon of Harry Potter empowering, you may ask? Isn't it great for these kids to see that other kids love the books too, that it's okay to take joy in a book? Oh, sure, it's plenty empowering - until they get back to school on Monday and the class thug-in-training beats them up, same as ever. That type never changes - and it doesn't read. Never has and never will.

Being a group is empowering only until the group breaks up and everyone has to go home to face their tormentors by themselves.

But maybe that's a bit too metaphysical for this essay, so I'll try to ground it again. If Rowling's success provoked a renaissance in children's lit - increased awareness of the other good authors out there, and made it easier for new authors to sell fantasy juveniles to skeptical publishers ... if the books increased awareness that reading is sometimes a hell of a lot of fun, and got more kids to do more reading year-round ... I would have nothing bad to say about the phenomenon at all.

But none of that is going to happen. Because it is a phenomenon. And phenomena like that are perceived as being special exceptions. What will happen is that the fuss over Goblet of Fire will slowly die down. All the kids will plow through its seven hundred pages and then they'll stop reading until the next book. And no other authors will get any more attention than they do already. Until the fifth book, when the fanfare will begin again, and we will have learned absolutely nothing.

Except, of course, by then we'll have been so saturated by Potter merchandise that the bloom will be off and the backlash will have begun. Some kids, the smarter kids who are the perfect audience, won't read book five because of the hype. Many adults won't either. There will be the inevitable comments that Rowling has peaked and there can be only diminishing returns from here on. The book won't sell as well. Everyone will look back at how they reacted to book four and shake their heads at their own fanaticism. Gradually books six and seven will trickle out, and the series and Rowling will be forgotten - until some day, much later, someone will be able to look at the set with an unjaundiced eye and see that, while it wasn't always great literature, on the whole it was above average.

Oh, yes, I'm cynical. Over the years, I have almost completely lost faith in the collective good sense of the public. But I admit my cynicism - and I'd be happy to have time prove me wrong on any or all of the above.

Let's wait and see.

A Private Assessment

When I first got my hands on borrowed Harry Potter books, the third book had only recently come out. I read the UK versions of the first two. I felt that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (note stupid change in American title) was a truly wonderful book, the kind of book worth rereading at periodic intervals just to remind yourself how much you liked it.

The second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, made me wince. I must have really given that book short shrift when I read it, because I just finished rereading it and it read like a completely new book. I didn't remember Floo powder, the Whomping Willow, the mandrake plantings, Moaning Myrtle, Riddle's diary, Parseltongue, or the final confrontation. In fact, I realized, I didn't remember the book at all. Nonelvis insists that I abandoned the book the first time, stopped reading around the point where Harry and Ron decide to get to Hogwart's via car. Given the evidence, I suppose I'll have to believe her.

I remember looking at The Prisoner of Azkaban to see if it still had Dursleys at the beginning. That was enough for me. (I will re-attempt it soon, and I have every intention of reading Goblet of Fire when we get it.)

While I may have been rash about the second book - after all, I enjoyed it no matter how much it managed to irritate me - I'm still going to hold it out as an example. I'm going to compare it to the first one a lot, because I feel that in many ways the second book fails the promise of the first one. Whether the later ones recapture that promise remains to be seen.

[N.B. Nonelvis read this essay after I finished it. She says that a number of my complaints are addressed in the third book. Nonelvis is usually right, so I would like the reader to take everything below with a largish grain of salt. Maybe I'll be eating my words in a week or so ....]

I've been speculating for a couple of days on how to best organize my venom here, and I believe I can consolidate all my tiny complaints into four broad ones.

1. Who wants to read about boarding school? A lot of people seem to be under the misapprehension that these are books about magic. They are not. In fact, the rules of Harry's universe practically guarantee that any time there is magic in these books, Harry will be a victim of it or a mere observer. Magic exists only as a plot device; Harry himself is rarely permitted to use any of it, and when he does, he generally gets punished for it (save in the climactic event which ends each book, wherein the normal rules are apparently suspended).

Magic is a red herring. In fact these are books about life at that peculiar British institution, the tradition-bound and sadistic boarding school. I have never understood the strange enthusiasm that the British have (usually later in life, after the pain has faded) for the boarding school. There was never an institution more perfectly suited for pitting schoolmate against schoolmate, stifling any traces of individuality or creativity, and for teaching that no one, utterly no one on earth, is to be trusted when put in such a situation. Monty Python have adequately conveyed that nasty the-axe-could-fall-any-moment attitude such schools foster; so have Pink Floyd. These latter groups, both British, understand something that Rowling is apparently missing, so I know it's not just a US-vs-UK cultural issue.

There is nothing the least bit entertaining about life in these schools. If the books concentrated more on the magic, more on the friendships and cameraderie the students build as a defense against this environment, the environment would be more tolerable. But magic, as I've said, is merely a prop ... and as for Harry's friends, my next complaint is that

2. Harry has too many enemies. Really, only Ron Weasley, who is almost a nonentity, and Hagrid, who often cannot give his confidence to Harry because of conflicting loyalties, can be considered true friends. At various times all the other Weasleys turn against him, as does Hermione - generally because of the stupid "house points" system which is one of those wonderful boarding-school devices for pitting friend against friend, where an entire group gets penalized for one student's mishaps.

Among the adults (Hagrid is not really an adult), even the kindly teachers - McGonagall and Dumbledore - are not usually to be trusted. Harry could solve some of the problems in the books in an instant if Dumbledore could be taken into his confidence, but Dumbledore is not exactly approachable and Harry is not the kind to do so. (I'll come to that in a bit.) McGonagall is too much of a disciplinarian to ever be entirely sympathetic. Most of the other adults at the school range from cranky to downright evil.

We will not mention Harry's foster parents, the Dursleys. When I noted to some people that I found the opening portions of these books difficult to read because of the Dursleys' cruelty, I was surprised at the number of responses I got agreeing with me. I'm glad to hear I am not the only person who has a real problem with this. I understand the need to characterize them as bad guys, but was it necessary to make them outright abusive?

In fact, the problem in general is a matter of degree. While of course you need conflict to make a novel interesting, I don't understand why Harry has to have enemies at every turn.

Oddly, this may be an area where I am too old for the books. The children who read them seem to take the vast amount of nastiness and pain that befalls Harry in stride. They don't notice it, they're not frightened by it - it just seems to bounce off them. I'm not sure if this means that the kids are such innocents that they're immune, or they're so cynical in the way that children can sometimes be that they assume this is par for the course and automatically look past it. But I know for a fact that when I was a child I did not believe there were any adults who could act toward children the way Snape does. Maybe I was the innocent.

Anyway, whether you think the cruelty level is acceptable or not, it causes a problem at the plot/structure level, which is that

3. The books never stop to breathe. Harry is so harried that I feel like he is given no stable place to stand (and therefore the reader suffers as well). It's not enough to have a big, o'erweening mystery to work on; no, he must also deal with Malfoy's jibes and Snape's cruelties and the fact that Hermione's pissed with him this week and, oh, yes, there's a Quidditch match this weekend to contend with.

Especially in the second book, I would have preferred more attention on solving the central puzzle of the Chamber of Secrets, and less of the sort of everyday harassment that seems to be Harry's lot in life at Rowling's hands. I really could have done without the publicity-seeking Lockhart and Harry's personal groupie Colin Creevey, neither of whom added anything to the book except empty annoyance. In fact, I really wanted Harry (who is a sharp kid, despite everything else, with a well-honed bulls**t detector) to tell Creevey to stop bothering him. But Harry wouldn't have done that. Because ....

4. Harry has no spine. And that is my central, most important complaint. We are continually told what a powerful kid this is, but since he's not allowed to do magic in most circumstances, we have to go only on the character he exhibits. And other than seeming to be quite intelligent and very much a nice guy, he exhibits no character at all.

Harry is a hugely passive hero. The events in the book happen to him; not until the book's climactic sequences is he allowed to get a grip and take control of events (usually fretting about the trouble he'll get into the whole time). He won't stand up for his rights under most circumstances. He often refuses to give information that could clear his name or tell the adults things he knows.

(This is not character; it is the symptom of an Idiot Plot; that is, where the events wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't been an idiot. The second book would end nearly a hundred pages early if Harry had just told Dumbledore his suspicions when specifically asked in private, by a kindly and well-disposed Dumbledore. I'm in favor of those extra hundred pages, but the author has to give us a better reason for Harry's reticence. Even putting Dumbledore in a bad mood would have been justification enough for Harry to keep mum.)

This guy is such a doormat that he won't even tell Creevey politely to go away. There was a sequence in the second book where Harry uses an incantation to snatch his property out of the hands of Malfoy, who has taken it and refuses to give it back. I wanted to stand up and cheer, but it was almost too little, too late. Even Little Nemo (a passive character if there ever was one) was allowed by his creator to finally reach his limit with Flip and slug the latter a good one. When is Harry going to get to punch out Malfoy? When does he start becoming the stout-hearted fellow the author keeps assuring us he is?

I follow a comic book called The Books of Magic. They concern a young man Harry's age, bearing a marked resemblance to him in many ways (including physically). This boy's name is Tim Hunter, and we know (because we have seen his future) that one day he will be the most powerful and most dangerous magician the world has ever produced, and if he's not careful about learning a better temperament in the intervening years, he will bring destruction down upon everything he loves. Tim's saga has the same problems as Harry's - too many enemies, too many minor anguishes, and he's never allowed to find a stable center to call his own. But Tim has more of a spine, all told. He can only be pushed so far before he says, Wait a minute, am I a powerful magician or aren't I? And then he uses his abilities ... and often makes the situation worse, but the point is that he tries. I am not convinced that Harry is even trying.

Am I reading too much into two children's books? Well, perhaps. But then, most children's books don't receive this level of hype, so it seems fair to subject them to a greater level of scrutiny as well.

The problem is that the first book really was magic. It was escapism of the purest kind. It worked because thousands of nerdy little girls and boys could look through its lens at a world that treated them like dirt and say, "Well, those Muggles don't know I'm actually a wizard." It worked because children and adults alike could daydream of buying a wand in Diagon Alley and then waiting on platform 9 3/4 for the Hogwarts Express. And it's worth noting that the first book takes a sharp dip in the middle, when it suffers the same problem as the second one: Too much process. Too much reality. Too much pain.

We had hoped that the magical world would be better than the Muggle one - without all the petty politicking, without all the in-fighting, without all the abuse. We hoped that it would be more fun, more joyous, more welcoming. Instead, Rowling has shown us that it's just as bad, just as monotonous, and often more dangerous to boot. Allowing us to see a few special effects and a monster every now and again is scant consolation for that disappointment.

Copyright © July 2000. All rights reserved.