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The stab of envy came instantly, unexpectedly. I was somewhere quite new to me: on one of the enormous ferries that run between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. As we moved westward we traded shifting clouds for brilliant morning sunshine. My wife and I had every expectation of a delightful day on the island, and had even managed to procure some surprisingly good coffee from a helpful machine. We sat at a small round table, sipping the coffee and gazing on the small islands in the Strait of Georgia; all was well indeed. But then my eye strayed to a neighboring table. There sat a ten-year-old boy, gazing fixedly upon the face of his father, who was reading in a tense whisper from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was July 16, 2005. The book had been released just eight hours earlier, at midnight, and though I had felt a slight pang when I discovered that I would be vacationing in Canada at the time—celebrating my 25th wedding anniversary, as it happened—I dismissed it immediately, and gave the matter no further thought. (Except, that is, to order a copy from Amazon Canada and have it sent to the B&B where we would be staying. With my wife's permission, of course.) I had every reason to believe that the book would be waiting for me when we returned that evening, but at the moment that prospect yielded little comfort. (I got still less when the book didn't show up at all. But that's another story.) It occurred to me that this was the first time since the first book in the series that anyone I knew read a Potter installment before I did. When the second one, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, appeared in Britain some months before it was scheduled to appear in the United States, I ordered that volume from Amazon U.K.—as did thousands of others, a practice that quickly led Scholastic, J. K. Rowling's American publisher, to insist upon simultaneous release of future volumes. From then on I read each book on the day of its publication, and even wrote an essay in praise of J. K. Rowling (one that received much critical commentary from my Christian brothers and sisters).
Harry Potter |
Why this excitement? Why would a middle-aged man—who also happens to be a professor of literature—get so worked up about a series of books for young people? Indeed, why do so many millions of people get similarly worked up, as they have about no other books? There is no real answer to this question, though every time another book in the series is released the newspapers of the world fill with speculations. The closest we can come to an answer is to note that J. K. Rowling does three things exceptionally well: first, she creates characters readers really care about—not just Harry but also Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Neville, etc.—usually because they possess some admirable trait (kindness, or courage, or wisdom) but are also somehow vulnerable; second, she writes suspenseful plots, so that you really want to know how it's all going to come out; and third, she creates a whole imaginative world that people love to inhabit, even after they already know what happens in the stories. Many writers can do one of those things; a few can do two; hardly any can achieve all three. (Tolkien is one of them, which is why he also, though a very different and much greater writer than Rowling, is equally beloved.) It's the combination that makes her special.
Critics who complain that Rowling's writing style is pedestrian or cliché-laden—Harold Bloom being prominent among them—therefore miss the point. She is certainly not much of a stylist, she does indeed fall sometimes into cliché, and in fact a key moment in the new volume, one meant to be deeply moving, is marred by the kind of grammatical error that makes an English teacher like me grind his teeth and mutter about the decline in the professional skills of editors. But the last thing I want when I'm reading a Harry Potter book is to pause and admire the felicity of the diction. This ain't Emily Dickinson, after all. And I found that grammatically erroneous passage deeply moving anyway because I cared about the characters involved, I cared about the story, I cared about the world.
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