Cave. Hic Dragones.

Have you actually read _Order of the Phoenix_? It is hardly awash with the “uncomplicated joys of childhood”, and Harry is hardly unaware of his “burgeoning sexuality”. HP is very much about growing up, coming to realizations about one’s society and making moral choices.

I can only assume the Susan Cooper books being referenced are something other than her most famous series. At least, I remember _The Dark is Rising_ as being an utterly unsexual adolescent power fantasy. Nice books which I remember fondly, but if anything, of rather less substance than the Harry Potter books.

I dunno, I’ve read a very broad sampling of the best fantasy of the last century, from Lord Dunsany, Lieber, and le Guin through Brust, Powers, and Gaiman, plus much of the standard children’s literature. No one is going to confuse the Potter books with the best of the best, but they are solid additions to the canon, particularly in comparison to the children’s end of the spectrum. (I just reread (for the Nth time) A Wrinkle in Time at more or less the same time I read the Order of the Phoenix, and Potter book is just plain better.)

Sounds like sour grapes to me. “Why on earth is that bloody children’s book author so popular, as opposed to the childrens’ authors I like?” Also — I agree that Byatt doesn’t seem to have read the fifth book, which is about as comforting as sitting up in the middle of the night listening to your parents fight. (Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book, but it was mostly lacking in the comedic elements that the previous books had, and which I speculate are one of the things that made the series so endearing, and irritated many of its critics so.)

I will also add that I loved LeGuin’s original Earthsea trilogy — which AFAIK are her only “children’s books” — but that the followup, Tehanu, I found didactic and boring (Tenar as a housewife? Sure…) full of obligatory good-for-society references to such PC concerns as child abuse and sexism. I have not read The Other Wind, so I will withold judgement on it. Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising set is also a childhood favorite; the only book that lacked something is the last one, which I think rounded up the conflict much too patly. I like some of Garner’s fantasy, but some of his novels (for example, The Owl Service) are a bit too bitter and depressing for younger children.

I have no quarrel with the Harry Potter phenomenon (doo DOOO doo DOO doo) (If you get that joke, you watch too much TV)

Would it be better if the kiddies were reading Twain or Shakespeare or someone from the Official Pantheon of Literary Fiction (and not those from the Uncouth Cabal of Genre Fiction)? Perhaps. But we must take baby steps. Remember, we’re dealing with kids that are generations removed from knowing what to do when the power goes out.

Within reason, anything that gets kids away from video monitors and into libraries is a step in the right direction.

(Side note: Why should anyone care that the Harry Potter series doesn’t address the “burgeoning sexuality” of the main characters? I’m sure some people would like to see “Harry Has Two Hogwarts” hit the stands, but I simply don’t see the rush.)

I am also reminded of critics of Tolkien who only read “The Hobbit”. It’s my strong impression that Rowling is aging the style of writing of the books along with her characters. This most recent book is an altogether different thing than the first.

Are there better books? Well, yes. Are Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” books better? Yes. (Excepting the tiresome polemical nature of the third.) Is Rowling often clumsy and is much of her work derivative? Yes again.

But I don’t understand why people embrace the philosophy of “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. I prefer to let things be what they are, to judge them by appropriate standards. After all, I’ve read most of the western canon (indeed, my education was the so-called “Great Books” education)….if this were my standard against which all other books were judged, I’d have very little to read.

In a world where very few people read books, the fact that in the USA Ann Coulter and Michael Savage can top the bestseller list should give pause to those who fear an imminent intellectual apocalypse as a result of the popularity of Harry Potter. There are, quite simply, more important things to worry about.

I’ve read all five of the Harry Potter books, and was seriously disappointed in the last volume. At the end of the fourth book, I thought Rowling had set things up for some really interesting advances in the story and characters, but the next book dropped back into the same plot ruts as the previous books. The plot continues to be driven by the fact that nobody talks to anybody else, Snape is still unremittingly awful to Harry, there’s still no war against the Dark Powers.

The only real progress in the fifth book is that Harry becomes Petulant Teen Boy, and spends most of the book in a snit. It’s a convenient excuse for the “no communication” plot engine, but not exactly pleasant reading.

The end of the fifth book looks like it’s set things up for really interesting developments in the future, but then that’s what I thought at the end of the last book…

What a killjoy Byatt turns out to be!

And her essay doesn’t pass the “so what” test – no, Harry Potter probably isn’t literature for the ages, and yes, His Dark Materials is deeper – but so what? Y’like ’em, y’dont, it’s not worth the huff. Since there isn’t much to chew on, I don’t see the point of trying to make them carry a great deal of discussion. It’s like saying Jelly Bellies don’t make a full meal. Surely someone as supposedly clever as Byatt can give us something more interesting.

Byatt: the books don’t have any counterbalancing concern with the serious things of life.

Henry: It has very little to say about the awkward in-between stages in which children become teenagers and then adults.

I think that somebody should have to prove they know what they’re talking about, before being paid to criticise it. Nobody who’d read Book 5 could possibly take this seriously. One of the central focusses of that installment is exactly the awkward, often painful, process of growing up, including everything from puberty to learning that heroes have feet of clay.

The other main aspect of the plot is how the students deal with how their lives are affected by the creeping tyranny of the Department of Magic
and its institutional denial that the main bad guy poses any sort of a threat. Not exactly shiny-happy-kiddy stuff.

I suppose that it might not be mature enough for Ms. Byatt until Harry gets into a dysfunctional marriage with Cho Chang, then has a secret, torrid affair with Hermione, which induces Ron to suicide, and leaves Hermione knocked up with Harry’s love child, which she gives birth to in the middle of nowhere, and lives the rest of her life a miserable fallen woman living on the sufferance of her Muggle family. Such silly things as a battle against government tyranny and the forces of darkness are such kid’s stuff.

What. Ever.

Not to distract from the fine points put forward in this thread (including the variation from one book to another, the somewhat more complex storytelling than Rowling is given credit for, the “growth” of the character and whatnot), but Harry Potter’s success shouldn’t be seen in a vacuum. It is, at its heart, a children’s version of Magical Realism: a very different genre than traditional high fantasy. Anybody who’s been within fifty feet of a Neil Gaiman work (or the umpteenillion awards they tend to scoop up, or the endless book signings, etc.) knows how popular the genre is. It would make sense that translating its “look and feel” to the children’s arena, as Rowling did, would be successful.

Oddly enough, by the way, the very reason I think that the series (and the genre) is successful is precisely why it was criticized above: it’s prosaic nature. Magical Realism works (in my opinion) precisely because it manages to minimize the alienness of traditional fantasy- it grafts the fantastical onto the reader’s lives. Neither Harry Potter nor the Sandman (to lift the most popular Gaiman series) are as lyrical as your typical fantasy entry, but they’re much more “plugged into” everyday life, and dangle the possiblity that there really is more to that everyday life than the reader knows about.

(That same concept is why both the Matrix and the X-Files proved so popular. the letter from Hogwarts is essentially the same thing as the phone call from Morpheus- it hints at Something More.)

To borrow Ruth’s expression, it’s “the slightly ramped up” aspect that makes it for me.

Oh, and by the way, Chad: I actually read that as not dissimilar to how a teenager would react to being “snubbed” by such an overt father figure. It got annoying, but that doesn’t make it inaccurate.

Way too much to respond to, so I’ll limit myself to a few points. Ruth – you’re exactly right – the bit about Will gaining his powers on his 11th birthday was what I was thinking of in Cooper’s work. The theme comes out much more obviously in Garner’s work – Susan in the Moon of Gomrath, and pretty well everyone in the Owl Service. Your other points are very interesting – esp. the distinction between fantasies of childhood, and fantasies of adolescence. Stephen King’s “It” is a superficially unlikely, but nonetheless genuine candidate for the first category. As is Dan Simmon’s “Summer of Night.” Andrea – I’m one of the very few people in the world who really liked Tehanu – didn’t think much of the follow-ups tho’. To the various critics of AS Byatt – fair enough if you don’t disagree with her, but she doesn’t dismiss children’s literature _tout court_. Indeed, she goes to pains to identify some children’s writers whom she really likes. And they aren’t all critical favorites like Pullman – they include Terry Pratchett, who isn’t precisely fashionable among litterateurs. In short, you’re at perfect liberty to disagree with her tastes – but they’re informed tastes, even if they aren’t shared by everyone. She isn’t dismissing an entire genre unread, as some commenters imply. And she _has_ very obviously read the fifth book; she just finds its attempts to handle adult themes to be ham-handed.

Regarding my earlier comments, “Demosthenes” writes:

Oh, and by the way, Chad: I actually read that as not dissimilar to how a teenager would react to being ?snubbed? by such an overt father figure. It got annoying, but that doesn?t make it inaccurate.

I’m not complaining that it was unrealistic or inaccurate, just that it served as an excuse to build another book around an idiot plot (in the sense of “this would be over in ten pages if the characters weren’t acting like idiots”).

Each of the books so far has revolved around a problem that could’ve been solved easily by Dumbledore intervening at an appropriate time, had anybody bothered to talk to him about it. In the first book or two, that’s excusable, but it’s gotten old.

What I’d like to have seen in Book 5 is some sort of problem that legitimately can’t be solved by anybody but Harry. What we got was a new and irritating method of making sure that none of the adults find out about the problem until it’s too late.

The book was redeemed somewhat by having some of the blame for the situation fall onto the adults in the story, and having Dumbledore accept responsibility for treating Harry fairly shabbily. But ten or twenty pages at the end aren’t enough to keep the book from being a huge disappointment.

I think Ruth Feingold raises makes some very good points above. I’ll have to think about those a little more.

(I should also note that I posted my original remarks primarily because the initial responses (of the form “nobody who read the last book could possibly say such things”) were the sort of statements that are perfectly aimed to get my back up. I hadn’t intended to get into another Harry Potter discussion, but I really, really hate the “if you don’t agree with me, you obviously didn’t understand the book” school of argument.)

I think the point that Byatt is trying to make isn’t really that the Potter books aren’t original, but that they don’t come to life – they don’t have the sense of danger and mystery that the good stuff does. The magic is remarkably unmagical. And here, I think, she has Rowling dead to rights. Byatt isn’t saying “If it’s popular, it must be horrible” at all. She spends a good chunk of the piece extolling Terry Pratchett’s work – he sells millions upon millions in the UK, where Byatt is from (a single figure percentage of all books sold in the UK are Pratchett books), but doesn’t get any critical recognition whatsoever, apart from the occasional sneer-in-passing. In talking up Pratchett, she’s actually taking on the literary snobs. I think that Byatt goes too far in condemning Harry Potter fans – but I also think that she’s right on the merits of the books. They may not be derivative in the Tolkien-by-numbers sense of the Shannara series – but for me at least, they’re dead on arrival, an awkward agglutination of cliches that have no vigor or spark to them. (flame away, aggrieved Potter fans).

On the Susan Cooper/sexuality thing, read Ruth’s post up above. In fact read the comment full stop; imho it’s better than the post.

“When a book sells 5 million hardcover copies in its first day, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be someone who slams it and tells us that what we’re seeing is merely a pop phenomenon that bears no relation to literature. That esteemed gasbag Harold Bloom, in his guise as self-appointed keeper of the canon, did the honors after the fourth Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” telling us that reading should enrich us (without ever getting around to declaring whether it should entertain us) and shortly thereafter launching his own compendium of children’s lit that, in his view, did just that. Right on schedule, just a mere two weeks after the new Harry Potter release, it’s A.S. Byatt, apparently having made peace with Martin Amis’ dental work, who steps into the ring against J.K. Rowling’s books in a New York Times Op-Ed.”

That’s the opening paragraph from “A.S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile.”

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/07/08/byatt_rowling/index.html

One of the elements I liked best about the first three HP books was seeing how Rowling caught the differences in the main characters as they grew each year. Harry & co are clearly different between 11 and 12 in ways that I only barely remembered being, but was delighted to find on the page.

Some of that has gotten lost as the last two have sprawled. I think the latest would have been much better if it had been about a third shorter. I’m not sure just what I would have cut – didn’t pay careful attention as I whooshed along – but I remember a feeling of wandering in the first half, and didn’t finish with the feeling that everything along the way had been necessary for the ending.

I suspect that’s what has Harry firmly in my good-but-not-great category. Terrific fun, cleverness and humor, but not much art. Candy for the brain.

Hi Chris,

I’m reading Harry Potter because the first three were such great fun. There was cleverness, delight, light satire, and surprising stories well told. I’m also enjoying being part of the pop phenomenon – it’s good fodder for casual conversation. On the NY to London to Munich flight two weeks ago, it was neat to see how many people were reading the books, what kinds of folks were, and whether they had the US or UK editions in hand.

As for what I was reading before HP-5, I’m your basic omnivore, with weaknesses for history, politics and sf/fantasy. The last six months include To Begin Where I Am (Czeslaw Milosz), The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (Telford Taylor), The Wide Window (Lemony Snicket), Race of Scorpions (Dorothy Dunnett), Reave the Just (Stephen R. Donaldson), The Russia Hand (Strobe Talbott), Moneyball (Michael Lewis), Pattern Recognition (Wm Gibson) and Beyond Belief (V.S. Naipaul). One out-and-out kids’ book in that bunch, but a lot of crossing the alleged high-low divide.

I’m happy to come along for the ride on Harry Potter now, but I’m not quite as thrilled as I was. That’s partly inevitable, since the thrill of discovery is gone, but I do think the last two have been a bit flabby.

One last comment about the Potter series. My initial impression after finishing Phoenix was of slight disappointment. I felt it lacked some of the original imagination of the prior books. It is however the most sophisticated plot with far better character growth than any prior book in the series.

This series is very different from every series that has been ponied up for comparison in that the characters are not rapidly changing within a book, they are slowly growing up and as they become more sophisticated understanding the world better. The Ministry of Magic was just as political and nasty an environment in book number 1 but Harry at 11 years old was too young to understand this. If you don’t get this, you’ve missed entirely what Rowling is doing.

As he has grown older the sophistication of the plot lines and the reduction of adult wizards from heros to flawed mortals demonstrates far better control over characterization than any other author of children books that I have ever read, and certainly better than any mentioned by Byatt!

After reading the posts here it became apparent that some readers were looking for a book that Rowling wasn’t interested in trying to write. It also is obviously apparent that some posters need to read the book again (or read it for the first time). I do appreciate the differences in taste that exist and understand that a reader can prefer one writer over another, but the reader needs to try and understand what the author is doing with a book, or in this case a series. The books have nothing whatsoever to do with fantasy or science fiction and increasingly less to do with children’s literature. Rowling is telling a wonderful story that increases in sophistication as her characters have the ability to understand it. It is a pretty unique series.

Byatt not only defends Pratchett, but judging by her own novels – _A Whistling Woman_ most recently – she thinks Tolkien is valuable. She is not an automatic pop-loather.

The charge against Rowlings that sticks hardest is that her magic isn’t an enlargement of the world; it’s a lot more like next year’s consumer electronics, or a game of Pokemon. It should at least be as gripping as research electronics, for heaven’s sake; but that’s much harder to write. Think of the difference between bad and good nature writing. (Similarly, it may be impossible to film the exaltation of computer hacking, so we get third-water kung fu instead.)

So, if they aren’t really books about magic, they’re boarding-school stories, and they aren’t that far from other boarding school stories: I think the more-complex-as-the-characters-age is not unprecedented (Camp Fire Girls?).

I find them mildly enjoyable, though I think I enjoy them mostly because so many other people are reading and writing about them. I read some of the better fanfic first, and the diffraction halo of wildly conflicting interpretations makes the simple originals a lot more interesting.

But I can’t say they’re unusually good; say I broke my knees and wept like a woman, but I will not swear. There’s a lot of everything that isn’t very good but still justifies its existence by bringing people happiness. Only if one lies about it and claims that it must be just as good as anything else anybody likes is it dangerous. I know there are arguments for that last claim; a lot of what’s hitting Byatt is not argument, but the fretful belief that anything that does not echo one’s choices is a personal attack.

I think Byatt’s article is flawed for a whole bunch of reasons, not least of them being the unnecessary psychobabble–ironically followed by the truly insane assertion that the Tolkein books are devoid of sexuality. She needs to look again at the Frodo/Sam/Gollum triangle. But I do agree that something is oddly lacking for me about these books.

I would write all this off as a matter of personal preference were in not for the near-religious devotion that these books have inspired.

I think part of the reason why these books are so insanely popular with some people is that they are primarily derivative not of fantasy children’s novels like the Narnia series but of a body of literature, boarding school novels, which many people, especially in America, aren’t really familiar with. So perhaps it seems them like an extremely clever, “magical-realist” approach to the child’s fantasy novel, where to me is seems like a relatively pedestrian boarding school novel with a Saturday morning cartoon sort of magic grafted on — the game they play (forget the name), for example, is really just the obligatory cricket match on broomsticks.

The magic in these books also seems oddly…technological. The broomsticks have even have brand names. This may be a clever attempt to appeal to a generation that associates magic most closely with their Playstation, but it leaves me cold.

Two of the things I like about HP:

1. Harry inhabits an absolutely Godless universe. No one has ever attended a religious service of any sort at any time, nor taken a deity’s name in vain or otherwise. Why have I not seen this remarked upon elsewhere?

2. ‘Magic’ isn’t. It’s technic. It’s accessible to anyone with a basic knack, and can be learned. Not unlike C++, I suppose.

I suffer from an overdeveloped need to know what happened, so I zoom through books driven to uncover plot. So I read them again, more slowly, to see who happened, and where it happened, etc. Harry Potter is rewarding in this way.

JC

Another good read for those not overcome by the hype is Philip Hensher’s review in the Spectator.

I’ve only read the first two Harry Potter books (review of the first), but I think Byatt (and Hensher) are reasonably balanced and pretty much spot-on.

AS Byatt in the Guardian last December on fairy tales, magic, and the deficiency of the modern imagination: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,865620,00.html

She covers the same territory as her HP review.

Despite being the mother of four, I think she doesn’t spend much time around children.

Given the now-complicated set of nesting posts, I’m not sure which context “ruth,” above, is talking about (my comment? Sol’s comment? Henry’s post? Byatt’s article?). Just for the record, I want to make it clear that I didn’t take a position on whether the Rowling books are sexual or asexual (or, more precisely, whether they do or do not link magic in any way to sexuality/potential sexuality). And yes, the fact that Harry’s chronologically on the cusp of adolescence when he gets invited to Hogwarts does seem like an indicator that Rowling may be following the puberty=magic line; at any event, she’s certainly not reserving magic for children alone.

Actually, given the real-world parallels Rowling creates in other areas, one could probably make a convincing argument for magic as being a metaphor for sexuality in her books: they start making you learn about it in school when you’re old enough to understand it, but you’re not allowed to actually USE it till you’re an adult — and if you rebel and do dabble in it, even if you have good reasons, they prosecute you for practicing while underage. Sound familiar?

This doesn’t exactly tap into the mysterious powers of sexuality, and puberty’s associations with change (a la Mahy’s Changeover, for example) — but it sure as hell fits in with Rowling’s overall take on the power structure.

Thank you Henry,

I don’t know you, but I like you all the same.

” Byatt isn’t saying “If it’s popular, it must be horrible” at all. She spends a good chunk of the piece extolling Terry Pratchett’s work – he sells millions upon millions in the UK, where Byatt is from (a single figure percentage of all books sold in the UK are Pratchett books), but doesn’t get any critical recognition whatsoever, apart from the occasional sneer-in-passing. ”

This what I have been waiting and praying for someone, with a louder voice than my own, to say. Byatt has clearly read the book. She’s also written a few. Even if you don’t like her work, she’s still a respected academic with the creds and the chops to make the criticisms she does. She has no reason to look at her Booker and think, “I wish I were Joanne Rowling”. I am sure she doesn’t lack either praise or cash.

The fact that many have dismissed Byatt’s comments as literary snobbery made me worry that none of these readers had ever even heard of Terry Pratchett. Did they just skim over that name and think “must be some boring high minded tripe”? I admit I’m not much of a fantasy reader in general, but I do know who he is. Any reader of fantasy would. Good Omens is hardly considered Ivory Tower Library material. But it is hilarious. So if the only fantasy (magical realism or otherwise) that you have read is Potter, then how can you judge what fantasy can be?

So thanks for saying what has been bugging me since I’ve started reading reactions to Byatt’s article. She’s not jealous. She’s not against popular books. She just wants us to start thinking again. Order of the Phoenix was enough to get me thinking again. It got me wondering why I even liked Potter.

The answer – Byatt was right about one thing. I liked it because it was mindless entertainment. However, that being said I like mindless entertainment. I think for a living and it nice to have someone else entertain me for a while. . But Phoenix attempts to be so much more which is why it fails. It fails because underneath the boarding school romp there wasn’t anything more important to tackle. So yes, Phoenix deals with sexual feelings, government control, mortality and the media. But it doesn’t do any of those things well.

There are few good scenes. The one with Molly over her dead children is good. However, to get those one or two good moments (not great mind you) I had to slog through hundreds of pages of preachy, uninspired dreck of teenage melodrama and one-dimensional political musings. Those adult themes are simply ham fisted in the extreme.

You see the trick of a great book is that after thinking up relevant themes (adult or otherwise) the author has to then to write about them with insight. Rowling hardly ever achieves anything even passable in her latest. When she does, it is not enough to garner praise for the book as a whole. This book shrank rather than expanded Rowling’s secondary world by having it be duller than the real world (enchanted paper airplanes are nothing when you’ve seen oldfashioned communication tubes at work – that is magic!) and having her experienced adults behave as though they had received lobotomies over the summer. The magical world has become as dull as Rowling’s literary style always was. The thestrals (and no I am not capitalizing it because I don’t capitalize ‘dog’ either) both say nothing and symbolize even less. They are exactly what Byatt means when she claims the world is only dangerous because Rowling says it is. Rowling has tamed her wild beasts as used them as carriage horses. In addition, they say nothing about how death changes a person who sees it. That is because Rowling isn’t a particularly subtle or insightful writer (I’m tempted to say ‘thinker’. But I really don’t know her. Bad writers can also be incredibly intelligent and insightful people. She is probably both.). That is fine. She’s not into the darker mysteries of life. But if you aren’t able to conceptualize the profound, don’t try to write about it. Be the Candace Bushnell of kid’s fantasy. Stay shallow.

Rowling I suspect has nothing to add to the myth and reality of the teenage landscape. Will I keep reading? Maybe. But I am not going to pay for the privilege.