So, Simon and I braved the rain and the crowds (my goodness, the crowds!) to pick up the last Harry Potter at midnight last night. (We are dressed as wizards in case you didn't pick it).
A couple of thoughts about things Potter:
- Rowling really isn't a great writer and she writes with no ear for how words sound. The Potter books are really quite tough to read aloud (and I should know) compared to classics like the Narnia series. This to me is a test of the quality of children's literature. She writes in choppy uneven paragraphs and uses quite colourless bland language. But that isn't her gift: her gift is her sheer inventiveness with characters and ideas to fill the world she has imagined. Like Dickens, there is always something new around the next page, some new brilliantly conceived person or thing. Like Dickens (at his worst) she sometimes uses this technique to keep the plot going when it is flagging.
- The Potter books are incredibly nostalgic. Remember Enid Blyton? She channels Enid Blyton half the time: the private school setting, the two-gendered friendships, the resourcefulness of the child heroes and what have you. Have you ever read The Naughtiest Girl in the School? And Quidditch resembles Lacrosse, which is the game the Naugtiest Girl plays. Potter harks back to that British children's literature which deals with upper middle class children in schools that no-one can actually afford.
- I always like to ask kids 'what kind of a hero do you think Harry Potter is? What makes him heroic?' It isn't actually his magic that does anything. It is his courage. I think he is a very courageous person rather than a talented one. To me it is interesting that Harry Potter and his friends always are prepared to break the rules if circumstances demand it - and are rewarded for doing so.
18 comments:
My thoughts on DH
Actually, as Catherine points out, my point about Harry and his friends breaking the rules is a really first child thing to care about!
Touche!
Nice outfit. You appear though to be wearing a pair of pants on your head. Either that or a nappy!
Agree—Bad writer. Great story teller.
Oh, and another non-boring post, mpj. What's got into you? Time to separate the non-boring bits off, methinks, so we purists can stick around here. ;-)
Thank you for stipulating that there are no spoilers before reading. That is the only reason I read this post.
I can't read any articles, webpages or blogs for fear of revelation.
I'm on page 254, and just took a break - trying desperately to avoid spoilers!!
Slow reading Sam! My Simon (aged nine) is WAY past page 254.
Here is what won't be the last line of the book:
'...and it was all a dream.'
My Daughter Daisy and a friend and I went into the Dymocks in CBD at 7.00 to get ours, she dressed as Dobby the house elf and I as Snape. We still read them out loud, as we did when the series started, even though two of our kids are teenagers now, so we won't be done for weeks yet. I must admit I'm a sucker for the themes - redemption, talentedness, death, choices. I think the rule breaking is aligned to being extraordinary in her eyes. By imagining a class of being between us and God... a little less lower than the angels... she has them face dilemmas that we as the actual top of the creation heap recognise very well, but in a heightened way. Voledmort has built his own tower of babel, and every similarly talented wizard faces the same temptation, and must submit to be bitterness of death to be moral. Which is why Dumbledore could always look past being out after lights out.
Ah, temptation. It is a big theme in Lord of the Rings, too, and interestingly it is there put alongside friendship. The strength of the friendship bond sustains Harry, as it does Frodo and Samwyse Gamgee...in the face of severe testing and temptation.
Actually in terms of prose quality, I've always found Tolkien has far more paragraph skipping dull passages than JK for all her word by word flaws.
If her writing is so bad, why is she so very readable? What is so compelling about the books that everyone, even 9yos, reads hundreds of pages without a break?
The plot, the characters and the ideas.
Spot on, Gordo. She is remarkably inventive!
Why can't we make "educational" books this consumable? Maybe there are some that are...Sophies World comes to mind.
I HATED Sophie's World. It was dull dull dull. NOT a classic I am afraid.
I think the rule breaking is aligned to being extraordinary in her eyes
a bit of Crime & Punishment eh? Or perhaps that is, precisely, a temptation; to excuse oneself on account of brilliance, rather than to credit it with responsibility.
I don't think her writing style is actually too bad. Sometimes it appears under-edited, and she overuses ellipses (curse of the email age...) but I agree, it's the vision she casts, and, I think, the moral truth she draws on that makes it so readable.
Finished #7 late last night. Compelling, astonishing; unsure how or what to say it makes me feel.
Did you have to queue for long?
three hours
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