I’ve been reading Twilight, which isn’t bad; I may do a review at some point next week. In poking around the Internets though, I found this quote from Stephen King:
“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
I don’t know that I think either Meyer, or Rowling, or (for that matter) King are especially good writers if we’re talking about prose style (which seems to be what King is talking about.) King has lots of good ideas; Meyer seems to really plug into something important about female adolescence in a way that’s particularly blatant, and I can see why that’s appealing.
But J.K. Rowling — I really don’t get it. The Harry Potter books are fine…but I don’t see why they should be more popular than any number of similar, and probably better, fantasy-books-for-kids (Patricia Wrede’s excellent Enchanted Forest series, for example — or the Lloyd Alexander books, or what have you.) So…anybody have a theory? I’m honestly curious; I just can’t figure it out.
I haven't read the Twilight books so I can't speak to them, but I think the Harry Potter books are great because it goes beyond the story itself to create a larger, internally consistent world. It's much like Star Wars in this regard. Anytime a writer can do that, it draws in fans obsessive enough to document trivialities and inconsequential nonsense.
I also think Rowling is great at naming characters, a very English Dickensian trait.
I don't read a lot of fantasy fiction, so feel free to correct me if I'm totally off-base here, but having read some of the Harry Potter books and seen the first movie, what struck me about them is that they excel at being pure escapist fantasy.
I mean, here's Harry, our main character, who has to live the shittiest life imaginable with his comically and irredeemably evil foster family, who hate him for no reason other than because he's different. Suddenly, he's whisked away to this enchanting world full of wonder and adventure, where he makes friends and enemies, meets really interesting people, gets to eat delicious luxury foods, visit magical shops and restaurants (which he can afford because it turns out his deceased parents left him a massive amount of money) and wow, turns out he's really special, even more special than all the other special kids at Hogwarts, because he's destined to face the ultimate evil, oh, and he also turns out to be naturally excellent at the local wizard sport. And he never has to do anything for it, he's just really special and he didn't know about it.
Just that idea, I think, that maybe someday a large hairy man will break into your home to take you away from your family… Okay, let me phrase that a little less literally; that maybe someday your boring regular old life will turn out to be a farce, that you were actually someone special all along, and that from that point on adventure will not merely come knocking at your doorstep, it will let itself in, wipe its feet and make you a cup of tea… It's a really appealing thought.
Okay, my previous post was really, really snarky, so I'd like to add as a disclaimer that I have nothing against Harry Potter, its fans or JK Rowling, and that there's nothing wrong with escapism as long as it doesn't become an obsession. I quite enjoyed the books myself, but the escapist elements always struck me as very deliberately calculated.
It's a crossbreed of Star Wars and Tolkien, isn't it. Same things that appeal about those stories/universes appeal about HP I think.
Of course, I haven't read the books and the movies are kind of mediocre….but I get the general idea.
My daughter loves them and reads them over and over…
There are lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of fantasy stories that work off of Tolkein, though, and which build obsessive worlds and so forth. The nobody elevated to greatness is a pretty iron fantasy trope as well. It's hard to see what Harry Potter has done so spectacularly better with those.
Star Wars is a kind of interesting comparison, not because it's really all that similar, but because it was also very much bricolage — lots of different popular genres mushed together. Harry Potter is sort of like that: bits from Roald Dahl, bits from Agatha Christie, bits from post-Tolkein fantasy of all sorts. The thing is, I think Star Wars was actually significantly better, at least in some ways — Jim Henson's contribution, in particular, was at a level of genius that I don't think Rowling can really compare to.
I don't dislike the books; I can see why they were successful. I just have trouble figuring out why they were the most successful books ever, basically.
They're page turners. I don't think they're better than okay, but I still read the last book in a 24 hour period.
I have only read the first two Harry Potter books, plus half of the third, but my 15-year-old daughter just read all the books in a row.
I think JK Rowling has a couple of things going for her: She's a very visual writer—as I'm reading the books, I can see the settings and the action in my head, more so than with many other books. It's very vivid. The side characters are a good distraction and a lot of fun. And she sets up a lot of mini-cliffhangers to keep you moving through the books.
Also, as mentioned above, there is something appealing about the sort of story where the underdog is whisked away from his ordinary life to something much more interesting. I know when I was a kid, I used to wish that would happen to me (through all of fourth grade, for instance). Harry actually does have special talents, talents he himself was unaware of—don't we all wish that could be the case with us, that we would wake up one day and be a prodigy or a superhero or something? It's certainly a common trope in shonen manga, among other genres. (Cf: Hikaru no Go.)
And yes, Rowling does create an interesting, internally consistent world, but it's also a child's world in which the good adults are reassuring but distant presences and the bad adults are no match for the clever kids.
JK Rowling is not a literary writer, but her writing isn't bad. It doesn't take you out of the story; on the contrary, it keeps you galloping along and you don't have to stop and guess what's going on. On the other hand, my daughter tells me quite emphatically that Twilight is badly written, and she reads it in spite of that, which I guess is a different sort of literary accomplishment.
I read the first of the novels and came away wondering what all the fuss was about as well. It was all amusing enough, but never really transcended the kiddie lit vibe (which everyone assures me is lost as the books in the series get progressively darker and longer).
I'm thinking a significant part of the Potter books' success might actually stem from conservative Christian paranoia, early on, over their supposedly soul-corrupting content. Sort of like Dan Brown for kids, that way. On the one hand, you have the forbidden fruit phenomenon and on the other, a ready badge of youthful non-conformity.
You'd think it absurd, but for a time here in the south Harry Potter was the subject of many a Sunday-morning sermon. (Golden Compass plays with the same grab bag of tricks, garnering the same sort of outrage, but is perhaps a bit too overt in its agenda? -My nephew once explained the plot to me as being about "a bunch of people who want to kill Jesus"!)
So basically, I think Harry Potter's relatively broad success is thanks to a larger shift in the cultural landscape. Might explain this tsunami of cthulhu merchandise too…
Brigid, I'd be curious as to why your daughter thinks the Twilight books are badly written. They seem fine to me; some of the dialogue is pretty bad, but, on the other hand, Bella is a much more interesting character than Harry (IMO), and the prose doesn't make me wince (the way, say John Grisham or Dean Koontz do.)
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that Rowling's success was due to the Christian right; on the contrary, I think she became a target of that group because of her success. The Golden Compass is indeed, much more blatant…and really dumb, in my opinion. Any book where you have a character murder a small child and then the book forgets about it/forgives him more or less because he opposes the church — I don't know, I guess I'm just hidebound, but I think that's pretty vile.
It is a stretch, but I can't help but think it's a factor on some subconscious strata. Twilight has the (non-)sex element of blossoming womanhood, Potter has the (non-)religious element of spiritual independence?
I haven't read the books, but somebody, I forget who, explained to me that part of the success was that the books were released in such a way that Harry grew up lockstep with the initial target audience and that with each book, Rowling changed the tone to match the growing maturity of her readers.
Sounded plausible to me.
When my brother originally told me that Stephen King line, the way he worded it was that King was responding to some reporter referring to Rowling and Meyer in the same sentence as "writers", and King interrupted and said "No, no, you've got it all wrong. JK Rowling is a writer. That Meyer woman is just a clown."
I bet he said both at different times.
I have to say, the fact that Stephen King likes Roald Dahl/Tolkein inspired fantasy but is not especially receptive to lit for tween girls does not in any way rock my paradigm.
Bryan, that was true when the books first came out, but now kids read them back to back. It's actually a bit of a problem, because the later books are a bit dark for younger readers, but that's who gets sucked in by the early books. My nephew, who is 9, started reading the series about year ago and tore through them, but I'm pretty sure his mom put the brakes on about halfway through.
They were also huge right from the start, weren't they? The aging effect may have been helpful in keeping them going, but I thought the series was gigantic more or less immediately.
Myself, I thought the first one was pretty good, and after that there were troubles….
I think Rowling is good for the same reason you mention regarding the Twilight writer, only it's tapping into a more universal tween/teen experience, or playing to desires/fears common to children of that age ( seems they stick with us, based on how many adults love the Potter universe). Think about being the special, misunderstood kid in a family that can't possibly make room for your awesomeness, getting an invite to a special school, where you will live, having a magic hat determine which kind of kid you are ( "I'm more of a Ravenclaw..") , etc., etc.,
—She manages to present it all in a really exciting way, I think.
Twilight, based on what I know of it, only really makes sense if you're a sexually awake female or gay male teen, whereas there's an incredible amount of space in the Potter-verse for almost any kid to imagine their place in it, wherein they could pursue all kinds of fantasies.
-btw, I'm not really commenting on the King quote as such. I think he probably was talking about prose quality ( maybe about imagination as well).
King knows how to make pages turn, but — and I just tried reading one of his well-regarded novels a few months ago— it's all to pretty pedestrian ends, I think.
King has (had?) a page in Entertainment Weekly in which he praises all kinds of horrible pop-culture pap.
I loved reading it; his enthusiasm for all that stuff (The latest ACDC and the latest Lindsay Buckingham albums: two of the best albums of '08..) is sort of endearing in a way I can't really explain. He's like everybody's dorky , passionate fanboy uncle..
While I'm at it, he did revitalize horror fiction in a major way. I just can't read it…
I really like some King books. Salem's Lot is pretty fantastic, I think; it's really scary and deeply mean-spirited satire. Lots of good ideas and plotting too; he's excellent at pulp plotting. His prose is mostly eh, though, and he benefits from editing, which he's been able to abandon as his careers taken off. And I think he's kind of running on fumes these days.
Which novel did you read?
I think there's room in Twilight for straight guys too — the whole scared of sex/fascinated by sex thing works for my high school experience. But, yeah, Harry Potter is clearly more easily accessed by both boys and girls.
"The latest ACDC and the latest Lindsay Buckingham albums: two of the best albums of '08."
Good lord, I can't approve of that!
One of the worst books I've ever read was "The Rock Bottom Remainders," an account of how a bunch of famous authors like King and Dave Barry and Amy Tan formed an oldies cover band and went on tour. It was written by the participants of course, and it was pretty much a hideous embarrassment to everyone involved. King's contribution was pretty pompous and self-important…but nothing compared to his wife's essay, which made her seem incredibly shallow and awful. And then there were the rock critics…Dave Marsh I think? Ugh.
Why did I read that? Admittedly, at the time I was trying to read contemporary poetry, so maybe it just fit in, but still. Ew.
Did you read London Review of Books on Twilight? It's still up for free, I think, and probably the smartest thing I read so far about that series (dear lord at least it's better than Hitchens on Harry Potter).
Hey Anon. Thanks for the LRB reference. That Twilight article is interesting.
I found the Potter books serviceable, but not spectacular by any means.
Twilight I haven't read, though I'm considering it, largely to (a) understand the fuss and (b) snark about them, as I understand they are rife with opportunities to do just that.
But the REAL reason I am commenting is because I love the Enchanted Forest Chronicles so. damn. much. And I was excited to see someone else mention them.
My daughter, 8, read them all by the time of her 8th birthday (although, oddly, she left the 1st and 7th til last). I suppose this makes me a bad parent…but I can't stop her.
"King knows how to make pages turn, but — and I just tried reading one of his well-regarded novels a few months ago— it's all to pretty pedestrian ends, I think."
Hi, Uland. I really liked his stuff from the late '70s/early '80s. I thought a lot, not all, of the prose was very good: unobtrusive but well turned.
The odd thing is that I very much liked the pedestrian side of his work, though possible we mean different things by "pedestrian." I liked that he wrote about people who graduated from little colleges in Maine and that he wrote about day-to-day small-town life along with all the horror/whatever.
For instance either Dead Zone or Firestarter has a few pages where the psychic hero, who's on the run, settles in a Pennsylvania town and sets up as a diet consultant. Actually he's using his mental gifts to relax his clients' various frustrations over their lives. I thought it was neat that somebody, in the middle of writing a psychic thriller, would find himself imagining a situation like that.
I think that has to be Firestarter. The dad there has the ability to influence people, which would make him a useful diet consultant, I guess.
The Enchanted Forest is great…though I thought the end there too fell off a little bit….
Why I like Rowling:
1) She's funny. Genuinely funny. I frequently laughed out loud while reading the Potter books and there's not many contemporary prose authors that can do that to me these days. I think her sense of humor is really one of the best things about the books, especially early on, and I think it's one of the things that gets overlooked the most.
2) Her ability to surprise. With the exception of the first book, I was completely taken aback with the big villain revelations in the rest of the series (HP is part murder mystery after all). I can't stand it when I can see a major revelation coming a mile away, nor when the surprise twist is awkward and inconsistent with what's come before. She never cheats.
3) The characters. Yes, they're archtypes, but again, Rowling imbues them with enough personality that they have the ability to surprise the reader.
4) Her imagination. As someone else already said, she's a very visual writer, and I think this plays to her strengths on a series like this. I find a lot of her inventions, like the Sorting Hat, to be inspired.
I agree with all of that more or less…except that I think she absolutely cheats in terms of the mysteries. She's like Agatha Christie; the twists are surprising because there really isn't any way to figure them out (the Scabbers thing I remember particularly as reminding me of the way Christie stacks the deck.)
I haven't read the Potter books (saw the first movie, didn't much care for it) but here's my theory in why they are successful, especially given the fact we live in a society where a lot of people don't really like to read for pleasure:
Harry Potter pretty much has the best tag line ever.
"It's about a boy who attends a school for wizards."
Immediately, based on that one short sentance, you see why the story could be exciting, relatable and fun. It's summarized more easily than pretty much any work of fiction, ever.
Even works like Spider-man, Superman, Star Wars and Twilight (not entirely sure on Twilight) and the like probably need a longer explanation if you are trying to convince someone to read the book.
Are there any American characters in the HP series? I've never heard of any, but Rowling seems to go to some lengths to include French, Germans, Chinese, and also Brits of various races.
tom,
as far as i recall, there aren't any chinese, in the sense you mean, in harry potter. cho chang would fall under the category of "brits of various races" as she is probably a uk citizen whose family immigrated.
that's one of the reasons i actually found the harry potter worldbuilding shoddy compared to other fantasy universes i've read… they say there are wizarding communities & wizarding traditions all over the world, but in every crisis it comes back down to england, the english wizarding ministry, & hogwarts. what *were*, say, the chinese wizards doing during book six? obviously, you only can fit so much into a book, but i'd find wizarding geopolitics a cool & interesting sidenote, at least.
as far as why harry potter conquered the world: one of the reasons i found the first book so lame is that it really built the magic world step by step, rather than immersing you in it from the first, & making you try to catch up with the rules & reality of the universe at the same time you have to follow a suspenseful plot (like my favourite fantasy author [who happens to mostly write ya] diana wynne jones does). the whole book was, look, he's a *wizard*! he can *fly*!
but what it does for kids who can't/don't want to put puzzle pieces together while reading, is lay out the whole universe slowly (yet engagingly) before you have to follow a plot. by the end of the first book, you have a firm handle on the rowlingverse, & can follow as plots become more complicated (or write your own).
star wars doesn't do that (before the prequels came out, you had to read reams of officially-sanctioned fanfic to understand who "the rebels" & "the empire" are & what their beef is with each other… i haven't done that or seen the prequels, so i still have no idea). lotr does establish setting before setting plots in motion, but the setting-establishment is so thorough & boring i never lasted long enough for the plot to presumably kick in.
but rowling's great strength as a writer (it sure isn't character, dialogue, or internal logic) is to make exposition exciting, & visually rich, as others have said. i had an anti going for harry potter from the start, being a veteran fantasy reader & especially a diehard fan of diana wynne jones, who covers a lot of the same ground (you want a great book about magic at an english boarding school? witch week. seriously). but i've read every book, & all in one or two sittings, through my bitching. they are page turners like a bastid.
I just read Wynn Jones Howl's Moving Castle, which wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be…the movie really was better, I thought. Still, it is more thoughtful than Rowling, and there are really good ideas…and the prose was good. Is there one you'd recommend especially, you think? Or is Witch Week the way to go?
The shoddiness of the Harry Potter world really irritated me, and was a big part of why I didn't finish the series, I think. The logic of how wizards and muggles fit together and how magic works and so forth just doesn't work at all; even the boarding school bits — why do people keep sending their kids back there when there are these horrible crises every year? Why don't people believe everything Harry tells them when *every damn year* he saves the universe? Instead of getting richer and more nuanced, the series got more ridiculous and unbelievable the longer it went on. Finally I just gave up.
The Harry Potter stories are good, solid stories. I think JK Rowling's strength as a writer is writing characters, personally. Even those characters who just have bit parts seem to have a life of their own.
I can't speak to what made HP so popular initially (probably a confluence of a number of factors), but I think a big part of it is that it has cross-generational appeal. Kids read it, teens read it, parents read it, it gets people talking about them.
There's also a great deal of detail put into the world. It's not always consistent, mind you, but as a reader you get the sense that it is a real place that could just be lurking around the corner. Another element is the "you're special" element, which I gather comes up in Twilight, as well as something like the concept behind X-Men. An ordinary person who finds out he's got an extraordinary gift, and subsequently gains access to a whole new world. Unlike Twilight, though, Harry has more obvious faults than just clumsiness and low self-esteem.
Harry Potter, in comparison to Twilight, didn't completely revolve around romance, either. There were bits of romance in it, but it mostly centred around adventure and mystery. Most importantly, I think, is that it tended to be relatively realistic and truthful about relationships and friendships.
The movies have surely played a big part in the books' popularity, getting it out there, even if the movies aren't that great themselves.
Bottom line for me as a reader was: between my interest in the plot and my affection for the characters, I was always dying to know what happened next.
"they say there are wizarding communities & wizarding traditions all over the world, but in every crisis it comes back down to england"
Ain't that the way of it.
'Cause it combines Cinderella, the archetypal (almost) girls' Fantasy, with superhero-ish superpowers?