Harry Potter as a 7-Piece Puzzle
by Liz Rosenberg ("My Back Pages", The Boston Globe, October 29, 2000)
Harry Potter. Harry Potter. One has not encountered a fictional name with so much resonance since Winnie-the-Pooh or Huckleberry Finn, to name just two heroes beloved by young readers. This summer's publication of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (Levine/Scholastic, $25.95) marked the fourth of the Potter books in as many years. It was a Publishing Event, compoete with front-page news articles, Web sites, and readers lined up all night awaiting the book's first appearance.
Now that we have more than half of what we're told will be a seven-book series, we have also a chance to stop and think about the cycle as a whole. For perhaps J.K. Rowling's work--aside from its enormous success--is that it is one entire, connected work, already more than 2,000 pages long.
The series has been conceived and written, despite all the hooplah surrounding it, with surprising privacy. We know that Rowling was a single parent, down on her luck and finances, when she sat down at a coffee shop and began to write on scraps of paper the Harry Potter series. We have learned that the thing came to her more or less whole, and that she knew from the beginning part of the ending, and has wisely refused to reveal it. We know little about Rowling's private life, thank heavens, and less about her writing methods. We don't know to what degree her notions about the series are fixed, and how much they continue, day by day or book by book, to evolve. In short, we readers find ourselves happily in the midst of a literary Experienc, which is to say, waiting at the docks (literally or figuratively) for the next installment.
There is no question that the Harry Potter books have changed the landscape of book publishing, and especially of children's book publishing. Great Britain, which ruled the Edwardian golden age of children's literature with "The Wind in the Willows," "Alice in Wonderland," et al. , has once again--to borrow a phrase from the Potter books--reclaimed the World Cup. Harry Potter is a best-seller in his own homeland and abroad, among children and adults alike. The popularity of the books reminds us, as we have not been reminded since British authors of a still later golden age (i.e., C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien), that great children's literature is simply great literature, and that readers never altogether lose their taste for the fantastic, an appetite fed in childhood, slowly but steadily withdrawn in youth, and starved almost out of existence in adulthood.
The young Harry Potter himself, half-wizard and half-human (a.k.a. "Muggle") is perhaps the only full-fledged character in the series. That too is in the British fantasy tradition--indeed, in the history of all fantasy literature, beginning with Homer's "Odyssey." One does not ask to examine the inner workings of Cyclops, any more than those of the Cheshire Cat. Fantasy is about the world writ large. It is the invented history, not of a single character, but of an entire civilization--which is why all the great epics have fantastic elements (Aeneas's visit to the underworld, Dante's to hell, etc.) and why all good fantasies have epic elements. The underlying plot remains the same: The forces of good battle the forces of evil.
Harry is a character, complex, moody, bright and dark; his friends are types: the freckle-faced, cheerful Ron, the bookish, endearingly irritating Hermione. The great wizard Dumbledore and the archvillain Voldemort are archetypes--which is not to say they are without human interest. Indeed, all heroic and anti-heroic archetypes are only as great, in art, as they are recognizably metaphors for our smaller, human selves: think of Milton's Satan or of Tolkien's Gollum, of Hercules or too-proud Achilles. In all fantasy, goodness generally wins, for we need our children to go on and do battle with some degree of enthusiam and hope.
British children's fantasy is especially good at creating whole societies, from the top (the maniacal Queen of Hearts) to the smallest deuce card in the pack; form the aristocratic Badger to the struggling-middle-class Mole (in "The Wind and the Willows"). The one American writer for children who presented our whole society was Mark Twain, and his vision was cynical and pessimistic, especially grim in "Huckleberry Finn." In British literature the innocents are heroic, and fight on the side of good; in American literature the innocents may be the only decent characters in the book. We are better, anyhow, at the pastoral than at the epic--"Charlotte's Web," my favorite American children's novel, presents not the macrocosm of America but the beautiful microcosm of the farm.
In this newest, darkest Harry Potter volume, Rowling's Wizarding world has grown larger, to accomodate both the Quidditch World Cup and the visit of two new schoold of wizardry to the very British Hogwarts: Beauxbatons (obviously French, meaning beautiful wands) and the obviously Austro-Hungarian Durmstrang, a play on the German Romantic phrase "sturm und drang" (storm and stress, anxiety). Like most fantasy books, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is full of puns. Alas, like may fantasy books, it is also full of stereotypes; in this case, national stereotyping runs rampant. The Bulgarian school headmaster is the villainous Karkaroff: two-faced, ill-tempered, "wearing furs of a different sort: sleek and silver, like his hair"; he has "a fruity, unctuous voice" and a "rather weak chin." The genuine if rought-mannered boy wizard hero of Durmstrang is the homely Viktor Krum, who possesses "a prominent curved nosse and think black eyebrows."
The French fare no better. Madame Maxime is a haughty, proud giant of a woman hiding a dark secret. She dresses in black satin and jewels, and speaks with a heavy French accent: "'My steeds require--er--forceful 'andling,' said Madame Maxime, looking as though she doubted whether any Care of Magical Creatures teacher at Hogwarts could be up to the job. 'Zey are very strong.'" Her students--most seem to be girls--wear "fine silks" and complain about the food; the champion of Beauxbatons is at least part veela, a creature who bewitches men and makes them talk absolute nonsense.
Nor is national stereotyping the only flaw in this fourth book in the Potter series. The book is too long, too violent, too dark, too full of unresolved plot elements for my taste. The writing is frequently not only cliched, but downright silly: "'Mad, am I?'" says one villain, "his voice rising uncontrollably. 'We'll see! We'll see who's mad, now that the Dark Lord has returned.'" All that's lacking is the twirling of the black moustache, the nyah-ha-ha laugh, and piano music.
But does it really matter, I wonder, that "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is not as elegant, not as delightful or surprising as, say, the first and third volumes? It is a piece in a larger puzzle--a large, generous, ambitious piece in a very large, generous, ambitious puzzle. I can understand why children love it. This volume has more of everything--more pages, more wizardry, more pageantry, more mean tricks on mean people, more violence, more action, more clues.
In "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" we are introduced to more interesting villains than heroes, and the best tricks in this volume are the very darkest. This book marks the rise of the dark side; in fact, it also shows the rise of the Dark Mark, which is Voldemort's symbol of evil. So perhaps it makes sense that more attention than usual is paid to villainy. Once in a while it seems to me that Rowling panders to her young readers, introducing an unconvincing teenagerish crush for Harry, and a new Weasley character, complete with long hair and fang earring, who is "there was no other word for it--cool."
The novel, as an art form, has been described as "a long work of fiction with something wrong in it," and I see no reason why children's novels should be any different. Despite all the mistakes or misjudgments of any given book, the Potter series is the single most exciting new work of children's fiction in memory. It is epic in ambition and substance, it is magical in execution. Here, for instance, we see the title's "goblet of fire": "a large, roughly hewn wooden cup. It would have been entire unremarkable had it not been full to the brim with dancing blue-white flames." Or the entrance of Madame Maxime: "The front three rows of students drew backwad as the carriage hurtled ever lower, coming in to land at a tremendous speed--then, with an almighty crash that made Neville jump backward onto a Slytherin fifth year's foot, the horses' hooves, larger than dinner plates, hit the ground."
There are many writers, of all nationalities, writing for children and grown-ups, who would give their eyeteeth for this kind of light-handed swift beauty, for the energy and passion of Rowling's writing. One sees everywhere, in every corner of even this less-than-perfect book, signs of her genius, in the original and orginating sense of that word. She is endlessly inventive, indefatigably interested in this new Thing she has created. And it is an alternate world, with aristocrats and servants (the issues of which remain wildly unresolved in this volume), good and bad, past, present, and future. She has created a new lexicon, as only genius does: names like Hogwarts and Muggles, the flying game of Quidditch, magical places like Diagon Alley 9read that as one word for yet another pun: "tell all the truth but tell it slant," wrote Emily Dickinson) and platform 9 3/4--all have entered into our daily language already. Her imagination has changed my own. However much my attention may have wandered in my three readings of this large tome, my sense was that the author's never did. The greatest test of any volume in a many-volume series must be, Would I want to go on and read the rest? My answer now, as it was to each of the previous three volumes, is a resounding yes.
Liz Rosenberg reviews children's books on the third Sunday of every month. She has published more than a dozen books for young readers, and teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Binghamton.