This first appeared on Splice Today.
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I was supposed to go see the last Harry Potter movie with my utterly obsessed seven-year-old son. We got into the car to drive to the theater with our son gibbering on about Quidditch and Hogwarts and Voldemart, and then I pressed the power button on the Prius… and pfft. Nothing. The battery was dead.
Which is fairly typical of my entire experience with the Harry Potter franchise. Lots and lots of build-up followed by a big fat zilch. I don’t hate the Harry Potter books. I read the first four of them, and watched the first movie. My son’s obsession with them has moved rapidly from amusing to annoying to thoroughly oppressive, but still, it’s better than Thomas the Tank Engine or superheroes. The Potter books are at least marginally readable… especially since my son has learned to read himself and is going through them on his own.
Nevertheless, what bugs me about the series is that it should be better than just tolerable, and not just because the whole world is apeshit over it. The first book opens with a horrid family right out of Roald Dahl, and I quite like that lovely scene with the owls dropping drifts of letters addressed to our hero. The idea of a wizarding school seems pretty solid. And there are lots of excellent British children’s books series. If the How To Train Your Dragon books can be consistently top-notch, why not Harry Potter?
And the answer is: Quidditch. The notion of wizard-soccer on broomsticks is pretty clever, and I can certainly see the appeal for kids—who doesn’t want to fly? But the actual game is incredibly stupid. Most of Quidditch is devoted to goal scoring, but a huge bushel of points are awarded not for scoring goals, but for catching a special ball called the Snitch. Whoever catches the Snitch also ends the game—all of which means that, for most intents and purposes, the vast majority of the action taking place on (or above) the Quidditch field is pointless.
You can see why J.K. Rowling designed Quidditch as she did; the rules make the Seeker, who goes after the Snitch, by far the most important player on the field. Since Harry turns out to be a supremely gifted Seeker, all the matches end up being about Harry’s wonderfulness. This, observation of my son has informed me, has a huge appeal to the core under-nine audience. But for anyone else, Quidditch as repetitive occasion for transparent hagiography gets very old very quickly.
This is nit-picking to some extent. But it’s also emblematic. There are a lot of things like Quidditch in Harry Potter; places where Rowling failed to fit the pieces together right and the result is the irritating sound of audible grinding. A friend of mine pointed out that the thing that gets him is that Harry, when we first meet him, should be a volatile, unstable wreck. He was systematically emotionally abused by his foster parents, the Dursleys, throughout his childhood, and while nurture isn’t everything, it’s something. Kids treated that way have real problems; they don’t just shake it off in a few pages and become do-gooding everyboys with loads of inner resources.
The problem isn’t the scenario per se. As mentioned above, if the same story was told by Roald Dahl, you wouldn’t think about it for a second, any more than you ask questions about the actual logistics of building Mr. Wonka’s chocolate emporium. Instead, the difficulty is Rowling’s tonal control—or the lack thereof. Harry Potter comes out of the Lewis Carroll/E. Nesbit/Dahlian tradition of British nonsense, with its fantastical illogical goofiness. But Rowling also wants to create an epic battle between good and evil indebted to Lord of the Rings.
The result is a lurching hodgepodge; a magical world that isn’t internally or externally consistent, but is too concerned with it’s own inner-workings to ever really take flight into whimsy. The first book gets at some of the rush of wonder in classic fantasy… but as the kids learn more, magic is rapidly domesticated, turned into a series of recipes. You’re left with endless piles of prose explicating labyrinthine rules, most of which don’t even have the geeky satisfaction of making sense.
I know lots of folks say that the last movie is pretty good, and that the series in general becomes darker and more effective as it goes on. Maybe so, and maybe my car will work well enough to go see it. I’ve had enough exposure to the series, though, to feel fairly confident that wherever Harry Potter goes, he will go there with a pfft.
Oh-h-h, now you’ve done it, Noah. A less controversial theme would have been “Why the Bible Is Utter Bullsh*t.”
Heh. There does seem to be some interest; I kind of thought it would just disappear since there’s no real news hook….
Hey, another article where Noah shoots down something he didn’t bother to finish.
But sure, my regard for Harry Potter is definitely nostalgia tinged and if I want to keep it that way I probably shouldn’t read them again. Even back then the world itself never made enough sense to capture my nerdy sense of wonder. I loved the plot though and some of the characters.
Jeez, I read like four of them and saw two movies. Surely that’s enough to have an opinion?
YES. Quidditch is a great entry-point to what I find gross about Harry Potter, although I usually call upon the identity of the house of Slytherin. And I’m speaking as someone who did begin the series fanatically loving the books, so much so that I prayed to God I’d receive an invitation to Hogwarts on my 11th birthday… and then two years later that my sister wouldn’t receive one on hers.
I think highlighting the (failed) tension between whimsical fantasy and epic fantasy in Harry Potter is also very revealing. I think in the Miley Cyrus piece a week or so ago, you brought up the idea of the gritty sequel, or the gritty re-envisioning. I forget if you mentioned Harry Potter as a good example. So many people love the fact that the series ‘grows up’ with the reader, just the way they love a Batman franchise they feel reflects them as adults. This always makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t blame people for enjoying the way these books and films can be fun, but… agh…
Expand on the House of Slytherin?
Clarification– I didn’t actually believe in Hogwarts, as much as want to cover my bases with the highest power I felt I had access to at the time.
Just FYI, quiddich all but disappears in the final three volumes, and Harry himself is persona non gratis for most of the last volumes, too. He even blows a quidditch match or two, if I recall correctly. I really think that Rowling wrote the books in such a way that the reader would age a year between books. The first volume is great for an eleven year-old, but maybe not so much for a seventeen year old, whereas the seventh volume would be inappropriate for an eleven year old but a seventeen year old wouldn’t be able to put it. If your son is plowing through those books at age seven, you might want to slow him down and force yourself to read them through to the end, then think about how best to proceed. If you think the content and style of the first volumes are representative of the whole series, you might want to rethink that preconception. Just saying that as a parent whose son was (is?) close to Harry in age.
This was written a couple years ago, so my son is nine now. And he actually got bored with the later books; I think he stopped at four or something, though he saw all the movies.
“I really think that Rowling wrote the books in such a way that the reader would age a year between books.” Wait, that didn’t come out right. Obviously Rowling has no control over the manner in which her readers age, unless she is more intimate with witchcraft than she lets on.
Sorry, I was half-joking. You’re perfectly free to give up on the series after four books and even write about it, I did kind of agree with you even. I don’t think the later books would change your opinion anyway.
I would be very interested in reading an iconoclastic examination of the whole series by someone more invested in it though.
While I have mixed feelings about the Harry Potter books, I quite enjoyed them for a time (and I am person who read them unapologetically as an adult with no children), but they did get progressively in need of an aggressive edit (not unlike the Song of Ice & Fire books, which are like Harry Potter for adults who like sex, descriptions of food and beheadings – but I kind of like them too).
Anyway, while I think your point about Harry’s abuse and trauma (growing up with crappy foster parents) is not off base, I do think that Harry’s consistent distrust of the motives and understanding of adults could be seen as emerging from that experience. Sure, it is a typical adolescent attitude, but for Harry it becomes quite pathological after he is repeatedly shown that Dumbledore (for example) is quite a compassionate and understanding guy, and when it becomes clear the fate of the world is on the line.
Quidditch is shit, however.
I quite liked the fifth movie, as far as it goes. It’s the one film where the kids have some agency, and I found the opening scene genuinely exciting. It’s also the first of those films that I felt wasn’t all about, as you put it, Harry’s wonderfulness. Still, “best of the Harry Potter films” is a low bar to clear.
Anyway, the real HU-provocateur part of this article is that you own a Prius.
China Mieville’s book Un Lun Dun is a good, explicit smack-down of that whole Chosen-One-exceptionalism genre of fantasy. It also features a clever idea on every second page or so, just to highlight the banality of Rowling’s imagination
My 7-year-old daughter finished the books this summer, and is now rereading them haphazardly. I read the first 3 with her and her 3-year-old sister, editing out a couple of bits (mostly having to do with the masochistic house-elf) for the 3-year-old.
I steadfastly avoided the books when they came out, even as everyone and their brother insisted they were “not just for kids” – whatever the hell that means. The writing is dull, the plotting is unimaginative and obvious, with the odious overarching feeling of Rowling saying “aren’t I clever?” on every page.
The Quidditch thing always bugged me, too, especially the rule that catching the snitch ends the game, and Harry’s apparent lack of awareness of the score at crucial moments. I agree the game seems to be created entirely to give us a sporting analogue of the series’s main “Harry as saviour” narrative trajectory.
I watched all of the films in a weekend (!) to make sure the later books would be appropriate for my daughter, and “best of the Harry Potter films” is indeed a low bar to clear. I do think there’s something interesting to be said about the dynamics of adaptation in a long series of films based on a long series of books, as every decision in the earlier films dictates what aspects of the books can and can’t come into play in the later films. That doesn’t make them good, only an interesting test case.
The fifth Harry Potter movie is pretty good. That’s the book where Rowling wanted to share the pain of having teenaged kids, so she had Harry speaking in ALL CAPS and being engrossed in teen melodrama and making bad decisions. The movie dials back on almost all of that because you can’t put unlikable characters on screen and expect the audience to overlook it the way book audiences do.
(For the same reason, some of the really horrific scenes in the last book had to be cut short for that movie – it’s scarier to see a person peel off their skin and turn into a snake underneath than to read about it.)
Besides the likability edit, the fifth movie is also the best one because it’s the first one to balance the endless non-essential schoolbuilding and the bigger ultimate evil plot. And it has Evanna Lynch in it.
The books never stop being a hodgepodge of genres that undermine each other, but the writing does improve. The first couple chapters of the last book are a little mini story about the wedding of two minor characters, for instance, and they’re well-written and pretty funny.
Rowling is good at creating different speaking patterns for different characters – even without seeing the name of the character, you can generally tell who’s speaking from the dialog. Some very good writers aren’t able to do that – they write every character the same way, as an extension of themselves – and I think it’s a pretty big part of why the books are popular.
My main problem with both the later books and later movies is that I could never remember if I’d read them or seen them. Read them quickly, felt it enjoyable enough in a cotton candy sort of way and then within a day or two pfft, gone completely. To my mind the first couple books are actually a bit better than that. Sometimes wonder if part of the problem is that Rowling got edited less and less and she quickly became the messiah of young adult fiction.