There's been a recent Facebook fad about picking 10 books that influenced your life. Almost invariably among my friends, the Harry Potter series features heavily in, if not tops, this list. I can't argue with the popularity of this series, but it baffles me that out of all the literature ever written, a children's book should be so ubiquitous.
I've written something like this before, but it was on an older blog which I later deleted. While I've changed certain things for this piece, the theme is pretty much the same: I don't get Harry Potter. I've read them, and I don't get them.
My problem doesn't stem from the fact that these books are bad, per se; it stems from the fact that they're so popular. As a book for kids, or a book purely for entertainment, it's not the worst thing people could be reading, especially when you factor in all the Clive Cussler or Susan Donovan crap floating around. Compared to what most adults read, it's actually not bottom barrel by a long shot. However, and this has to be said, it's not exactly the best literature on the planet either.
This is a shame, because if there's one strength to the series, it's Rowling's ability to world-build. Sure, nothing in her world is particularly original, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad. In fact, the characters in and world of the Harry Potter series have a lot of potential for a decent writer, which is what makes is so frustrating that Rowling can't, or won't, tap that potential.
Let me give you some examples. I'm going to assume everyone reading this has either read them, or doesn't care about spoilers, so let's talk about the death of Fred in the last book. Death is a powerful literary tool. My understanding of Fred's death, just from reading the book, is that he was killed to demonstrate that things were getting pretty bad and that Voldemort and his followers were really really bad dudes. It was meant to introduce tragedy and drama into the book because a main character died. It's not a bad try.
There are a lot of problems with this approach, from where I'm sitting. First of all, it's the seventh book. If the feeling wasn't there that things were awful already, something wasn't done right in the last six books. In my opinion, that's actually exactly the case. Yes, Sirius is dead. Yes, Dumbledore is dead. But somehow, they fail to accomplish this sense of terror or hopelessness in the same way Fred's death fails to do so.
Death is just one of those concepts Rowling can't quite get the hang of, and this is where her issue with wasted potential comes in. In the case of the death of Sirius, where he literally falls into a realm of death, there's the opportunity for a powerful metaphor, or many powerful metaphors. She could have implied something about the transience of life, the permanence or lack thereof of death or many many other themes. As it stands, though, Sirius trips and dies and Harry is sad about it, and that's pretty much where that ends. If there's an attempt at any deeper meaning there, it's left unclear.
The same goes for Dumbledore's death. Snape kills him, and is clearly conflicted about it. Here is another huge opportunity to talk about murder, utilitarianism, and the human psyche, but it's largely not taken advantage of. Snape does what he has to do and feels bad about it, and that's pretty much it. At the time, we don't even know Snape had good reason, an aspect which she could have easily run with later to say something about the kind of psychological consequences such an action creates. This is an example of Rowling channeling M. Night Shyamalan more than Orson Scott Card.
Here's what I would have done if I had written the battle of Hogwarts: kill Ron.
Killing Ron would have had an impact that killing other characters just doesn't. Sirius' death doesn't really work because we only know him such a short time; Dumbledore's doesn't really work because we know that it needed to happen and that, in fact, he controlled the circumstances of it. If you really want to portray senseless violence, evil for evil's sake, the kind of evil that caused things like the Holocaust, you need to kill someone important and have their death be largely the result of wanton cruelty. Better yet, have Malfoy do it point blank and thoroughly enjoy it.
Think of how that scenario would play out. Think of how the death of the most loyal and largely good character at the hands of a malicious killer who enjoys killing would have played out in comparison to that of a dead clown hit by a stray magical bullet. How would that have touched you? Sure, you wouldn't be as happy, but I daresay that if you're a Harry Potter fan, that might have spoken to you on a deeper level. Even I know that, and I don't write best sellers. At most, all Fred's death does is say something about the death of comedy, which is ok, I guess, but a bit crude and clumsy.
The thing is, most of Rowling's attempts at drama or the themes it can elicit are a bit clumsy. She either lacks the ability or will to turn her world into something with the ability to say something any deeper than 'love triumphs over evil,' which, again, is a bit of a shame, because it's not like the world she's created would prohibit that in any way.
As another example of this phenomenon, let's examine Rowling's characters, who are largely one dimensional. Harry is the hero. Ron is the loyal friend. Hermione is the smart one. This actually doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, we can look at other literature that has one dimensional characters that actually works pretty well.
As an experiment, let's compare the characters in Harry Potter to the characters in Atlas Shrugged. I'm not asking you to like the latter, and I'm certainly not asking you to agree with it. It absolutely has its flaws; it's heavy-handed, overwritten, and, like Harry Potter, the characters are so one dimensional that they might as well be anthropomorphic straight lines. However, there is a difference. The characters in Atlas Shrugged are one dimensional in the same way that characters in Greek drama are one dimensional: they are literal embodiments of human traits and characteristics. In fact, they are embodiments of one trait or characteristic in particular. For instance, Henry Rearden, as a character, is Pride, imprisoned by his wife Lillian, or Guilt. Only when Pride (Rearden) is free of Guilt (Lillian) does he reach his full potential. Simple? Obvious? Certainly. Atlas Shrugged takes most of its cues from ancient Greece, where that kind of story was common and effective. Atlas Shrugged, as a book, makes its simplistic characters work for it to form a coherent philosophy. For better or for worse, and for all its numerous flaws, it is effective literature. It works.
The characters in Harry Potter, however, are tropes. They are cliches. I'm not saying there isn't some crude meaning there. Harry embodies love; his parents saved him by sacrificing themselves and, in fact, he dies to save his friends. (Of course, he comes back to life, which has its own set of problems, which I won't get into here; if I got into every literary issue I have with Harry Potter, I would be here for a long long time.) It's actually a good theme, and a simple one. Voldemort is evil. He is the embodiment of evil. He kills and tortures for little to no reason. Again, fair enough, and a decent theme.
Here's the problem though: through tools like internal or external dialogue, Rand's characters put forth a philosophy. We understand what they represent because we've felt it. When Rearden feels successful because he's accomplished something, but is made to feel guilty about it, or simply fails to be recognized for it, that's something we can relate to. When Taggart's life work is destroyed, it's something we can understand, because we've all had something important to us taken from us, and risen from the ashes anyway. This allows these one dimensional characters to work. However, it's hard to relate to Harry because very few of us have lived under shitty parents and then found out we were super famous and had a shitton of money in a bank somewhere, and, oh, also are the prime target of the world's foremost mass murderer. Yes, we can relate to him as a good guy who sometimes is conflicted. Yes, we can relate to him as a child learning to grow. Those things are only so useful however, and, to be honest about it, if you want a story about growing up and feeling uncertain despite being fundamentally good, I have a book for you that will do the same thing in fewer pages and in a more novel fashion written by a certain Mr. Sallinger.
Harry is the main character, so it's a bit troubling that relating to him is something you have to take an effort to do, rather than having the book make you relate to him by virtue of its writing. The problem is that Rowling's primary strength is her characters. It's actually what she does best, despite herself, and yet, somehow, she doesn't do it that well. This same issue with flat characters and her failure to use them correctly plagues the entire series. We have what could be a fantastic villain, Voldemort, who has no internal dialogue, very little backstory, no real indicator of what makes him tick. We don't even get the sense that he's just evil for the sake of being evil, like a magical Hitler, because his end goals aren't really ever stated. He's just bad and we're supposed to understand that because he does bad things. The potential for either depth or representation of real world evil is there, but it's not properly used.
That last sentence is the fundamental issue I have with most of Rowling's work: it could do so many things and does, in fact, do a lot of them, but without doing any of them particularly well. It puts forth some ideas, but not particularly strongly. It has potentially decent characters, but doesn't do a lot with them. It's not as efficient as it could be. Any way you examine Harry Potter, from a literary aspect at least, it's just kind of mediocre writing. Going back to our earlier comparison, Ayn Rand has her own books that aren't particularly great, which is exactly why I'm using her so heavily as an example. Like Rowling, she's a best selling author with fundamentally flawed works. For instance, We the Living comes to mind. However, even that book, while heavy-handed, at least kind of works. It's an example of a fledgling writer with raw skill writing a bad book, but making it work to make a point about a real world circumstance, as opposed to a bad writer trying to work with good themes and ultimately coming up with less than she could have. What I'm trying to highlight here is how two different best selling authors make or don't make fundamentally problematic books work based on their comparative skill at writing.
I'll say what I've always said, at this point: none of this is bad on its own. Harry Potter is a kid's book. It is a book for children. As such, it's far better than a lot of things kids could be reading and I commend it for that. I really do. But saying that your life was influenced by it is a bit like saying that your life was influenced by Walt Disney: you're essentially saying that your life was influenced by something trite, designed to be easily digested by preteens, and just a tad racist. What are you saying about yourself? What are you saying about the wealth of literature you could have chosen? When you think about it, really think about it, is it a good thing that Harry Potter influenced you so much? If that's true, are you as well read as you should be? If you are, isn't that kind of a slap in the face to literature that actively tries to say something about the world and the nature of man, and does it in a technically sound manner?
I'm not saying you can't be influenced by Harry Potter, but I question whether it should be that influential as a work of literature when there are so many fantastic and meaningful books to choose from. I've mentioned a few here, and guess what? They're by no means the best. Not by a long shot. There are literally millions of books in the world that say so many things in so many languages. I am not urging you to stop reading Harry Potter. I am urging you to take advantage of those millions of books and perhaps pick up one that isn't a kid's book with, and there is no way around this, clumsy, mediocre writing. Harry Potter isn't bad, but unless your age is lower than a school zone speed limit, you can simply do better. There's an entire world out there. Take advantage of it.
