Firing the Potter

Anti-Spoiler Alert: Though I'm talking about the latest and (Please, God!) last Harry Potter book, I am not going to make any startling revelations about it. Okay, one: I managed to stay awake. Barely.

I don't care for young Potter, but my beef isn't with the innocent fan. Rather it is with those who put J. K. Rowling on the same shelf with far better writers and call the Potter books "classics" or who think writing for children excuses bad writing. That does not, however, mean that the books cannot be enjoyed for what they are on their own merit. If you enjoyed and love the Harry Potter books and if they speak to some part of your soul that no other book has, then more power to you. I would not dream of criticising your pleasure.

I am not a Harry Potter fan. That function at Chez Szondy is taken up by my wife, who regards J. K. Rowling's series about the schooldays of a young wizard as a charming and magical coming of age tale that is worth reading over and over. I see the books as an overheated and transient cultural phenomenon that in half a century will be looked back upon as the turn of the millennium version of the literary hula hoop.

But if I dislike it so much, why did I slog through seven books and five (and counting) films? Three reasons. First, I take an interest in my wife's hobbies. Second, it is a major phenomenon and is worthy of study as such. And third, it is such a jaw-dropping example of bad writing that it is actually fun to read a Harry Potter book while growling and waving an imaginary blue pencil over the page. It helps even more if you have the cardboard cutout of Mike and the 'bots that comes with the MST3K DVDs to prop up in front of you while reading.

Since there aren't any decent Internet connections to the bottom of sealed coal mines, I'm assuming that you already know who Harry Potter is, the basic rules of Quidditch, the essentials of the House Elf Question, Voldemort's hat size, Hermione's Swojollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll.

Sorry. Fell asleep at the keyboard.

I'm no going to give away the plot of the last book, if you haven't ploughed through it yet. I'll leave it at saying that if you've read the last six, you've read this one. Like all except the first book, which, as a work by a then-unknown, was the only one properly edited, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (wretched title) is a 200 page story crammed into 750 pages. Chronicling Harry's final journey to his confrontation with Voldemort, he must look for things. And then he has to look for other things. And then he has to look for still other things until it becomes less like a quest and more of a scavenger hunt. Along the way there are the usual deductive leaps that wouldn't have been tolerated in an old Batman TV script, the maddening tendency of characters to withhold vital information for no good reason other than that the book would be over in one chapter if they didn't, and Rowling's inability to resist the temptation to over egg the pudding at every opportunity. To this is added a climax that is less a battle royal than old home week. If you encounter any surprises here, it's because you've seen dramatic possibilities that went over J. K. Rowling's head and can't believe that she missed them.

It is stunning that after seventeen years, seven books and so many pots of money that you'd think she could afford to take a class or two, J. K. Rowling is still such a staggeringly bad writer that she couldn't scribble her way out of a paper bag, though it would be fun to see her try. She has no love or command of the language, handles adverbs as adeptly as a vampire cooking with garlic, spends most of the later books frantically back filling the gigantic plot holes and inconsistencies left by previous books, has the pacing of a wheel-clamped glacier encountering a sea of treacle, must have bought her cliches at a wholesale warehouse, rips off bits from Star Wars (And the bad bits at that! Read the last book and try not to shout "Obi Wan" at particular moments), makes her characters act in particular ways because It's In The Script, has no concept of dramatic necessity, and, unlike proper writers, such as P.G. Wodehouse, Rowling does not have the logic or discipline needed to keep a complex plot together. And on top of this is her infuriating habit of having her characters constantly talk about what they're going to do, talk about what they're doing, talk about what they did, and then tell someone else what they did-- all the while punctuating it with Harry's impenetrable, indecisive whinging that makes Hamlet look like Howard Rork.

About now I can hear the standard rejoinder that "it's only a children's book," to which I reply that so were the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien-- except that the latter knew that writing for children is no excuse for writing badly. Indeed, Lewis believed that writing for children is harder than writing for adults because you have to write as well as you would for an older audience while taking into account a child's lack of experience and vocabulary.

But mentioning Tolkien and Lewis in connection with Rowling is like bringing the Portland Vase to a flea market. Rowling pales to insignificance when compared to Tolkien, Lewis, Grahame or Carroll (not to mention Terry Pratchett)-- all of whom can not only craft a sentence and understand pacing, but actually sat down and thought their mythical worlds through so they are consistent and plausible rather than a hodgepodge of cute but contradictory ideas (i.e. wizards use steam trains, but don't understand brakes) that mesh together like iron filings in a Rolex.

Even Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels are better than Rowling. Heinlein had his own faults (don't get me started), but he understood the word "duty", the importance of self-discipline in maturity and always saw the man inside the boy. He also knew how to craft a tight, economical plot and if he erred it was in being too logical in his thinking. Rowling could have done with a strong dose of Heinlein to counter her perpetual vacillating. I would have loved to have seen a Heinlein "old man" character giving Harry a kick in the backside or pointing out to Mrs. Weasley (and Rowling) that sixteen-year old "boys" die in battle more often than she thinks. There is even a little argument over a sword in the last book that Rowling takes what seems like a hundred pages to (unsuccessfully) conclude, but which Heinlein would have resolved in three paragraphs by having Harry coolly pointing out that neither he nor the other person has legal title to the article in question, so the point is moot.

Rowling's shortcomings is brought home most tellingly in the Harry Potter Films. I saw the latest one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, last week and was impressed by how superior it was to the book. Inside that bloated tome was a simple little story that had been buried under a mass of distraction and trivia. The script writers took an 870 page doorstep and trimmed it down to a lean two-hour film. Characters, subplots, quidditch matches, and all those annoying enchanting details were chopped out like dry rot from a hull and to the betterment of the finished product. What struck me was not how much better the plot flowed with so much taken out, but that the script writers could have taken out even more and trimmed the film down to ninety minutes that would have raced by. The basic plot was a compelling little tale of the power of friendship that needed no embellishment. The only real gripe I had was that in the final battle I kept expecting Voldemort to tell Dombledore, "Now the circle is complete." If Rowling understood what a blue pencil is for and had been ruthless in killing her literary babies, she might be almost readable.

Still, the Harry Potter books are more than books, they are a cultural phenomenon that has a life of its own. Harry Potter the fictional character may have come to an end, but Harry Potter the franchise has at least two films and a theme park left to go. In thirty years he may be swallowed up by Disney and enter the modern pantheon with Mickey Mouse and Finding Nemo, but will the books survive? Physically, of course. There is such a glut of Harry Potter novels that you could build a replica of the Great Wall of China with them. As nostalgia for aging fans, yes. There will be Potterheads to join the Trekkies and their ill-begotten kith and kin. But as beloved classics of children's literature that will endure? I sincerely doubt it. There are too many good books on the shelves for them to compete with and when the flashbulb of Pottermania dies down, the strong, steady glow of the Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Swallows and Amazons, and the Chronicles of Narnia will long outshine the cheap bulb in the Authorised Collectibles-Edition Harry Potter^TM plastic wand with Snitch-Seeking Action (Made in China, batteries not included).