With the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in theaters, there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Potter fans across the world, now unable to line up outside bookstores for the latest chapter, have taken to lining up at movie theaters in order to see how badly Hollywood has gutted the books to fit into a 2.5 hour run time. And soon they won’t even have that.
That’s not to say that I’m against people dressing up for premieres and expressing their fandom. I’ve been a devout Trekkie for decades, and when I was a swing dancer in LA, I’d always be wearing old vintage clothes. I’ve always appreciated the shared experience, the camaraderie, the anticipation of something new to love with my fellow fans. So before Potter fans around the world start sending me hate mail, let me be clear: this post is not about you.
This post is about how the Harry Potter books just aren’t that good. And while their massive popularity might have tons of positive effects (especially the way it’s engaged a whole generation of new readers to crack open some massive-ass books), there are also a few things I’m not too crazy about when it comes to Potter-mania.
Let’s start with the books themselves. For starters, all three of the main characters are, at least for the first few books (and through most of the last few too), complete Mary Sues–characters with no real flaws, no interesting personality quirks (save the occasional bickering between Hermione and Ron), and–this is important–no real ability to affect action in the story. For the first three books, Harry and friends stumble through the action slack-jawed as amazing magical things happen to them, put them in danger, and finally resolve themselves without much deliberate interference from them. If they do end up doing something useful, they don’t realize what they’re doing all that much until Dumbledore explains it to them in the infirmary in the closing chapters. (Rowling’s use of Dumbledore as a device to explain all the myriad magical loopholes in the universe is one of my main sticking points which I’ll delve into more deeply further down.) The first three books all consist of the same basic plot–something crazy and weird is afoot at Hogwarts, and for the course of the school year Harry and co. figure out the mystery, save the school, and uncover a little more about the mysterious Voldemort, all while theoretically learning all sorts of amazing wizardry.
The problem is that they don’t ever actually seem to learn any wizardry. The adults in the books seem capable of doing all sorts of neat tricks, making amazing charms and potions and being wizarding badasses, but we don’t see the kind of gradual knowledge that Harry must be acquiring over time. We’re always kept in the dark about how the wizarding world works, we’re never given the information that we need to make sense of the plot until after Harry accidentally stumbles on it himself. And in one of the most maddeningly frustrating things about the books, no one ever bothers to tell Harry anything he really needs to know until AFTER he needs to know it. It’s the book version of the Idiot Plot, a plot that could be resolved in minutes if the characters weren’t all idiots. All Dumbledore has to do half the time is just sit the appropriate people down, tell them what has to be done and how it works, and you’d have no problems. Instead everything is shrouded in vague generalities and a sense of “you’ll find out soon enough,” which may work for keeping suspense in the books but makes zero sense in trying to make these characters real. And by the time the final book is finished, we don’t get the sense that Harry has, at long last, mastered all these wizarding things he was supposed to get in Hogwarts. He’s still an outside observer who kinda gets it but is nowhere near expert. He still relies on others to explain the plot to him. If I were paying tuition for him, I’d want my money back.
Speaking of vagueness, J.K. Rowling needs to work on blocking her scenes. Several times throughout the series I found myself re-reading various passages because Rowling glosses over important actions with vague flowery language. What Rowling often does is “write around the scene,” describing it in vagueness and without any real action, deconstructing it into an incomprehensible tone poem. Then in the next scene the characters converse and review what just happened, providing the necessary exposition to make up for the lack of writing in the scene previous. The first really egregious example is when Harry snogs Cho Chang (btw, most racist name ever, might as well have called her Ching Chang Chong). The way it was written I thought Harry had a fainting spell. I had no idea that anything actually happened between them until Ron and Hermione mentioned it later.
Where it really gets intolerable is when Rowling is writing straight action. Instead of clearly blocking these scenes and writing clear descriptions as to how people are moving and what they are doing, Rowling talks in vague generalities that give you no indication of what is actually happening. This was worst in the final novel, which spends so many pages on action. I had to rely on the inevitable post action scene breakdown by the main characters tallying what had happened and who had died. It’s incredibly annoying because for five or six books we bide our time waiting for Big Effing Things to happen and when they finally do they’re not given the energy and weight they deserve. Instead of experiencing the immediate moment of the scene we have to get it all afterwards thanks to a purely expository breakdown of events that happens after nearly every major piece of action. When she did it again in the final confrontation with Voldemort I ended the novel scratching my head. What the hell? What just happened? And once again I had to wait for the expository train to come rescue me. In the final book Rowling also allows several of the major characters to die “off screen,” their dead bodies rounded up at the end (most pointedly Lupin and Tonks). After investing so much into these characters, for her to just kill them in the background is a real dodge. And it doesn’t allow the characters to complete any sort of arc. In the end, the deaths are pure shock value and rather meaningless to the overall book.
The main character arcs are completely missing most of the time, mostly thanks to the world of obscure magical loopholes and deus ex machina devices that Rowling conjures up every time her characters are in trouble. For five books we read patiently as Harry bumbles into each solution thanks to some new magical loophole or deus ex machina that saves his ass from death and is never heard from again. No one knows why he survives until Dumbledore comes in to explain it. Every book has some brand new rule of magic we’ve never heard before that proves completely crucial to the story. Rowling is always able to conjure up precisely the loophole that Harry needs to survive. And most of the time we never hear what the rule is until after it’s done its job–Harry is magically saved at the last minute, the readers are confused, and Dumbledore comes around and explains what saved him. Harry doesn’t really learn anything or grow, he just gets lucky over and over and over again. And the final book is no different. Harry dies, only to be magically revived by a new magical loophole that can bring him back, given to him by Dumbledore, himself still ghosting around Purgatory thanks to a magical loophole that gives him and only him the ability to stick around after his death. The entire series of books consist of one deus ex machina after another. Whether it’s the healing powers of Phoenix tears, the time machine that Hermione uses to fix things, the connectedness of the two wands, the fact that Draco was the final owner of the Elder wand in book 7, the use of the Sorting Hat as a way to get the sword, all of them are just random magical devices that fix the characters’ problems for them rather than the characters fixing the problems through their own actions and decisions.
In this sense, Dumbledore is the worst deus ex machina of all. He’s always there to explain and solve all of Harry’s problems for him and to provide Harry with the path to victory. At the end of book six, Dumbledore is dead. “Perfect,” I thought to myself. “This is the perfect opportunity for Harry to figure out the solution without Dumbledore’s help, so he can grow up and finally come of age. That’s a really nice setup.” The only problem is that Rowling is so reliant on the Dumbledore crutch that she conjures up his freaking GHOST to once again roll off pages and pages of exposition that explain the newest magical loophole that gets Harry out of his jam.
These characters never learn anything about themselves or the world around them. They don’t grow into adults that are finally capable of standing side by side with their teachers; they end each book much as they began it–victims of whatever random magical circumstances Rowling chose to throw at them. It’s terrible drama and characterization. Rowling never forces her characters to make difficult decisions with repercussions that last. This is why at the end of the series they haven’t really changed all that much.
Not to mention that the world of Hogwarts doesn’t make any sense. Rowling is often praised for her world-building skills. Harry Potter, a fan once told me, is as much about imagining this amazing world of wizardry as it is about the plot and characters. Except if that were true, Rowling’s world wouldn’t be filled with these loopholes for our characters to stumble through, and the world wouldn’t be limited to just England. We get a little bit of fun from other countries in book 4, but what a missed opportunity to showcase what Chinese and Japanese and Australian and American and African wizards were like. Rowling’s world is completely anglocentric. All the major players are British, all the villains are British, everything takes place in and around England. Rowling’s myopic anglocentrism cuts off all sorts of amazing avenues for imagination and strategy. Imagine if Voldemort recruited his wizards from another continent where they had all sorts of kickass black magic that the English were unprepared for. Or if English wizards had to ally with other countries to fight back the menace. Instead we’re treated to an internal English affair that doesn’t seem to have much global significance. It’s all very domestic and rather small.
She also doesn’t organize the world she does give us very well. Hogwarts students are divided into four houses, but for all intents and purposes two of those houses might as well not exist at all. There are maybe one or two Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw characters, even though their skillsets are tailor-made for supporting characters to come in and fill in various spots. Instead, anyone who matters is a Gryffindor or a Slytherin. The other houses are just extra and you could eliminate them if you wanted to.
A good counterexample to this is the world of D&D. In D&D every type of character has a different skill set, a different set of strengths and weaknesses. It takes one of every character, combining their skills in different ways and playing to their strengths to succeed in the mission. In Harry Potter all the characters are in Gryffindor and the Gryffindors have all the pieces of the puzzle. It makes no sense that Ron and Hermione are in Gryffindor. The smarter play would have been to put one in Ravenclaw, another in Hufflepuff, and to give them a final ally in Slytherin whose motivations we don’t really trust, and to have them combine their skills from the various houses together to succeed.
Slytherin is the biggest problem with the House system. There’s no real reason to even have a Slytherin house. It’s pretty much a one-dimensional villain factory, and yet in these troubled times the administrators of Hogwarts are content to let them exist and plot and scheme and undermine everything. In the final book when McGonagall decrees that it’s time for Slytherin to choose a side, it’s pretty obvious which side they choose. And yet it’s another missed opportunity, for imagine how cool a team of rogue Slytherin badasses would be working for the good guys. The way Rowling described it at first, Slytherins could be your cunning spies, your black ops, and a Slytherin entrance on the right side could have been a great dramatic turning point in the battle of Hogwarts. Instead Rowling shuffles them into a one dimensional villainous role.
Slytherin’s characters are equally one dimensional. A bad guy and his henchmen. Are there any girl Slytherin? How cool would it have been for Harry to have fallen in love with a Slytherin instead of Ginny Weasley? Then there’d be conflict, drama, issues of trust and acceptance and loyalty that Rowling completely avoids by giving Harry the easiest path to happiness possible.
And in the end that’s the problem with these books–they have no danger and the characters never have to make tough choices. Cory Doctorow once wrote that young adult lit is one of the coolest genres to write for because all the things adults do regularly that create drama–fall in love, betray a friend, tell a lie that hurts someone–these are all things that teens are doing for the very first time, and that sense of unknown danger is one of the coolest aspects to YA literature. But Rowling never puts any of her main characters in danger. She gives them some basic token angst but she never actually puts them in serious situations that require the characters to make life-altering decisions. Their characterizations are determined for the entire series the moment the Sorting Hat puts them in a house. From there they’re on autopilot until the final book, when magically they’ve all grown into well rounded, balanced, and mature adults in stable marriages with lovely kids living happy-go-lucky lives, which they would have been had there never been any problems with Voldemort at all. Their lives are no different for having gone through this story.
This has been a fairly long post, but I want to touch on one final point about the problem with the Potter series, this time focusing on the literary world at large. As I said before, the series has done some impressive things for the world of books. It has introduced kids to the magic of books and the anticipation of having your favorite author come out with something new. It has kids following complex plotlines and serialized storytelling over the course of years. And it’s always amazing to see some ten year old sitting at a desk reading a 700 page book. In my day you could barely get college students to read a book that size. So all that’s great.
But Harry Potter has done something else to the industry of books. It has changed the marketplace in a way that’s not so great. Now instead of children’s books being filled with diverse titles from all sorts of authors, the shelves are crammed with long serialized superstories, all taking place in magical universes, chock full of auxiliary merchandising. An author trying to get their book published has a much harder time these days if their book isn’t the first in a long franchise series that can spawn off multiple novels, movies, board games, trivia guides, and so forth. And NONE of those series are about real people in the real world the way many of the beloved books of the past are. Instead they’re all about fantasy worlds where children are arbitrarily elevated into superbeings and destiny and prophecy are telling you that yes, YOU are special, really! The Potter series has made the children’s section of the bookstore a much different place, and I’m not sure it’s for the better.
Furthermore, the books as a whole don’t challenge the reader to imagine things they’ve never imagined before. The best kids’ books expand the mind of the reader and force the reader to confront ideas and concepts they’ve never thought of. Harry Potter isn’t like that. Harry Potter is safe, unchallenging literature that tells a ho hum story that crosses the familiar terrain of wizardry and magic. There are no truly mind-bending ideas like the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. There is no philosophical message like when Roald Dahl stresses maintaining the spark that makes a person truly interesting and wonderful the way he does in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s no moment in the Harry Potter books where any character has to grow up, make a choice, and solve their own problems the way Marcus has to in Doctorow’s Little Brother. Instead the characters coast in a world where prophecy has already destined their fates for them, and the magical loopholes that keep them alive also make sure they don’t have to grow at all during their stay at Hogwarts. It’s uninspiring and dull, a tale full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.
While I may not be a fan of Harry Potter, I do appreciate how the series has brought people together (especially in the way parents read the books side by side with their kids). I hope that the legacy of Harry Potter is that people who grew up on the books find new books to share with their friends, books that challenge and inspire them. I don’t expect to convince anyone who’s a die-hard fan of my opinion, but I do hope that Potter fans can transfer their passion to books that all of us can appreciate, and that the fandom for Harry Potter eventually turns into a fandom for reading and writing and sharing stories with each other. I may dislike the books, but for every lifelong reader and learner that Harry Potter has created I am eternally thankful.
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One thing that drives me batty with the HP books is something you alluded to with the “latest rule of magic” or whatnot – in the third book, they make this big deal about how summoning a Patronus is SO FRIGGIN’ DIFFICULT, etc, etc, but by the seventh book, it’s like anyone can do it (except Hermoine), and they are so easy that people just use them instead of cell phone. Weak.
I don’t remember exactly when the Unforgivable Curses are introduced (could also have been the third book), but again – at first, we are meant to understand that using any of those Curses will get you locked away in Azkaban for the rest of your life, and your very soul will be destroyed, it makes you so evil, right? I could even buy the FIRST time Harry uses one, at the end of Order of the Phoenix, because he’s so very upset about Sirius. But by the last book he’s just tossing them about as if they were nothing worse than shoplifting.
Also, re: female Slytherins…there’s at least one, Pansy Parkinson, who exists mostly just to be a screechy bitch.
.-= @mattstratton´s last blog ..Wordless Wednesday – Project 365 =-.
Good heavens, I’m glad to see in print what I have always felt in the depths of my heart. A joy that reading is being embraced by the young again, yes, but at the same time a despair that the tired drivel of the Harry Potter series were the vehicle. It is like the proliferation of graffiti being praised as bringing about an increased participation in the graphic arts among the young. Certainly, but it is still vandalism.
The elements, indeed the overall philosophy of life, within the series which you outline in this excellent commentary perhaps present an insight into their most troubling undercurrent: success through entitlement. Harry Potter, as you so clearly argue, does not succeed through his actions, but rather by his birth (as the Boy Who Lived) and the reactions this entails in the denizens of the secret world who acknowledge his lineage and importance. He is, entirely by no act of his own, special by birth (a wizard) and by circumstance. This entitles him to success. Whether this is in fact a biting commentary on the perpetuation of the class system in modern Britain we may never know, but I hazard a guess that it is not the case.
Aside from that, what an excellent website you folks have going here. First time reader, and very much enjoy it. Three cheers, and all that, from an old friend.
“a tale full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.” Thanks for paraphasing MacBeth. Pretty much sums this whole treatise up.
I really like your comment on the provincialism of the HP books. It echoes something I thought while watching the opening of the latest movies. As the Death Eaters are swirling around London, I thought, “Cool. It looks like the magical world is in danger of being discovered by the mundane world” only to watch that possible plot point totally fumbled. (Caveat- I have not read the books, so I don’t know how Rowling handles things, though I suspect she doesn’t really address this all that much.)
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And here I thought that I was the only person on earth who thought that Harry Potter was lame. Thank you for not being a wannabe wizard.
.-= Rachel ´s last blog ..In praise of Frank McCourt =-.
I’m one of those Harry Potter fans that probably annoys you so much!! Though I do disagree with you, I do not have any intention of debating with you or arguing my points. I just wanted to say thank you for sharing in detail why. I have often heard people say they don’t like the books, but the reasonings have been insubstantial or shallow. You, on the other hand, have given the details, spoken so well, and I appreciate that!
.-= Tif´s last blog ..Poe Fridays: The Devil in the Belfry =-.
Tif – Sorry for the late reply. I don’t get annoyed by HP fans at all. Like I said before, I totally get fandom and why it exists and how valuable it is. I’m glad you liked my post.
I think what annoys me is that I can think of a million little changes that would have made the story so much more interesting. Like Harry dating a Slytherin instead of Ginny. Or even better, what if Ginny WAS a Slytherin? What if she gets sorted into the Slytherin house even though all her brothers and friends are in Gryffindor? What if she starts going goth with her Slytherin friends and becoming possibly bad? What if Harry likes that about her? SO much opportunity for great characterization, questions of loyalty, making Slytherin useful to the good guys, and Rowling dodged it completely for something easier and more boring.