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A nice short post for a change

On Saturday Jamie and I had the day to ourselves (and then on Sunday he and Janet had the day, and I wrote wrote wrote like a fiend).  We went to the Penn State Natatorium, where he was willing to jump off the one-meter platform into the deep end, but the one-meter platform was closed.  The lowest platform available was the 5m, and he wouldn’t go up there (and I wouldn’t let him), but he said he wanted to watch me take the plunge.  And you know what?  It turns out that five meters is a long way to fall.  But it was good scary fun (I managed three jumps), and I’ve promised Jamie that before the summer is over I will find the nerve to go off the 7m.  “How about the ten?” Jamie says.  I cower and tell him the ten is too scary, and it is.  But he thinks this is very funny.

Then we went to buy Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I won’t reprise last year’s Azkaban blogging (as Jamie says, “we did that already”wink, but I do have a simple question, now that I’m 120 pages in:  has there ever been a children’s/ fantasy author who’s had to deal with the frenzy of anticipation induced by these books?  I know that Tolkien didn’t have to worry about this stuff—it wasn’t like people were lining up at bookstores, dressed as Gandalf, waiting for the first shipments of The Return of the King. It wasn’t a mass-culture phenomenon.  On the contrary, when The Lord of the Rings was published it was a mere curiosity, an elaborate hobby indulged by that odd pipe-smoking medieval scholar down the hall.  And though Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia picked up some public momentum as they appeared in yearly installments, I don’t believe that there were any Canadian courts issuing injunctions to embargo the premature reading of The Horse and His Boy.  I suppose we needn’t feel sorry for Rowling, whose wealth can no longer be calculated in the Hindu-Arabic numeric system, but still, the fact remains that she has written most of this series, at least since 1998, in the knowledge that about a billion people are desperately awaiting her next move.  I don’t know about you, but that kind of pressure would drive me mad.  I’d rather jump off the 10m platform any day.

Posted by on 07/18 at 10:18 AM

  1. I read somewhere--three or four books ago--that she already knows what the last line of the last book is going to be. So maybe the pressure is less that it might seem, but no, I can’t imagine it either.

    Posted by Sally  on  07/18  at  11:51 AM

  2. It makes me appreciate the work undertaken by Dickens all the more.

    Posted by Tyler  on  07/18  at  11:52 AM

  3. The only author I can think of is Charles Dickens, whom you may not want to class as a children’s/fantasy author, but certainly seems somehow comparable.  He is certainly an influence, and the popularity is an awfully similar cultural phenomenon.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  11:54 AM

  4. I’m impressed that her writing has improved over the series.  Even in # 5, she has clunkers like Harry’s saying something “fearfully” twice in a page’s length; didn’t notice anything quite so bad in # 6 (NO SPOILERS).

    The pressure on her is indeed remarkable ... especially when weighed against the potential for disappointment when you’ve got readers who’ve waited for years and then finish the book in 8 hours or whatever.

    Posted by Anderson  on  07/18  at  11:58 AM

  5. I can only compare it to the 12-15 hardcore Ann Coulter fans who dressed up like Joseph McCarthy (complete with the scent of Eau de Bourbon) outside of a Pocatello, Idaho bookstore in anticipation of the release of “Treason.”

    On a semi-related note, isn’t Sue Grafton about out of letters? I would have thought that “X is for X-citement” would have spelled the end of that franchise.

    Posted by norbizness  on  07/18  at  12:07 PM

  6. According to Donald E. Westlake (who also wrote the Dortmunder series) in the “Burglar Who ...” books, Ms. Grafton will then write books with titles like “AA is for Alcoholics”

    Posted by Leta  on  07/18  at  12:21 PM

  7. But I do feel sorry for Rowling. What if she decided that instead of hopping right into finishing book seven, she wanted desperately to write a period novella as an homage to Proust, or a treatise on earthworms and the formation of vegetable mould? She must feel horribly constrained. I pity her deeply.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  07/18  at  12:43 PM

  8. AA is for Alcoholics”

    AB is for hemophiliacs, AC is for Westinghouse

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  07/18  at  12:44 PM

  9. AD is for the baby Jesus, AE for Hitler (um, that would be A & E).

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  12:47 PM

  10. Thanks for plugging the Hindu-Arab number system, Michael. Gotta’ raise awareness that Western culture has been Eastern since way before “Kung Fu” brought David Carridine to the tube as a half-breed Shaolin priest.

    Posted by bill benzon  on  07/18  at  12:56 PM

  11. My brother told me that his two daughters (aged 7 and 9 a couple of years ago) found the first Harry Potter book upsetting and didn’t want to finish it.

    They both read a lot or are read to a lot—he thinks it’s because they hardly watch TV at all (or video games), and haven’t become desensitized. They don’t just assume that it’s not real. Apparently the monsters in old fairy tales are less frightening than the more vivid Harry Potter/TV monsters.

    Thinking of Harry Potter as a text spinoff from TV is interesting, I think. It is just my brother’s theory, though.

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/18  at  12:56 PM

  12. You don’t think it would be BB for guns, CC for engine capacity, DD for blogs...?

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  01:14 PM

  13. AF is for Pilots, AG is for Runners-Up.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  01:36 PM

  14. A & F is for T & A.

    John:  “Thinking of Harry Potter as a text spinoff from TV is interesting, I think. It is just my brother’s theory, though.”

    In “The Sun Also Rises,” Jake Barnes dismisses Robert Cohn’s suggestion that they go to South America to see what it’s like by observing that SA looks just as it does in the cinema.  I’ve always thought EH counted on his readers’ familiarity with mass comm imagery.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:11 PM

  15. The Harry Potter series is significantly darker than any other popular children’s literature that I an remember.  Speaking only for up through book 5 (so no spoilers) what is the point of the books?  Don’t trust adults, they can’t protect you, you’ll have to face monsters on your own.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:19 PM

  16. Chris, you mean that “Harry Potter’s Guide to Effective Composting” isn’t next on Rowling’s list? Jeez. I thought I’d had all the disappointment I could take this year, and here you are piling it on.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:25 PM

  17. I don’t find the Harry Potter series dark at all. They’re basically boarding school stories with magic and lots of fun.Actually they remind me a bit of the Enid Blyton books I used to read as a kid but there’s a bit more depth to them. I know there are deaths but they seem like cartoon deaths—not very real. Without giving anything away I’ll say the latest death was the exception for me—I was quite distraught. The later books with Harry all broody are perhaps a little darker but for real scariness you should read The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper. Superb writing and spookiness that gets inside your head and won’t let you go.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:30 PM

  18. Arthur Conan Doyle had to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead for his fans.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:33 PM

  19. Chris, you mean that “Harry Potter’s Guide to Effective Composting” isn’t next on Rowling’s list?

    Putrerus totalus!

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  07/18  at  02:36 PM

  20. I find “The Little Matchgirl” to be considerably darker, and it is aimed at an even younger audience.  I remember reading it in first grade.  It had a long-lasting, subconcious impact on me.  Just last week, it was the subject of “Final Jeopardy”.  I hadn’t heard or thought of it in over 35 years, but it all came pouring back in a chilling rush.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:38 PM

  21. <i>I don’t find the Harry Potter series dark at all....I know there are deaths but they seem like cartoon deaths—not very real.<i>

    Well, my nieces don’t watch cartoons, so that’s the point.

    There’s a tradition of terrifying children’s books in English or German from the XIXc (Struhlpeter???) about bad children who are terribly punished. These are less popular now.

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/18  at  02:46 PM

  22. I thought the HP books took violence quite seriously, actually—and that that was something Rowling was to be commended for.  Sure, broken bones and bubotuber breakouts are par for the course and easily mended, but death is a big deal, not cartoony at all.  That’s not only true of Book 6, but of the previous two books—she makes it clear that death is very sad, and very final, not something to be passed over lightly. 

    The end of Book 6 totally slew me, by the way.  Holy smoke.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:54 PM

  23. has there ever been a children’s/ fantasy author who’s had to deal with the frenzy of anticipation induced by these books?

    Nope. And I don’t believe any have had to deal with ALL THAT MONEY, either.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  07/18  at  02:58 PM

  24. It’s an empirically-verifiable fact that the darkest--or at least the creepiest--children’s book of all time is Sendak’s *Outside Over There.”

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  02:59 PM

  25. Walked into Pathmark with my son Charlie (8 years old) and, lo and behold, there was the new HP book, besides the mega-packs of mini-Oreos. I’ll warrant the HP phenomenon is all about consumption and packaging, like Heinz green catsup.

    Posted by Kristina Chew  on  07/18  at  03:23 PM

  26. I do think of the pressure that rowling has to face in finishing the series and also what she can do to top it.  This connundrum reminds me of the already mentioned Dickens and Conan Doyle who grew to hate Holmes and the non literary production of The Beatles. The Recordings begining with at least Sgt.  Pepper when the American recordings began to be the same as the British were events, dates listed, sealed boxes in stores awaiting the promised date, preorders.  This was in a world without an internet and popular culture did not get major, major, major media coverage.  I do not think that Abbey Road was reviewed on the front page of the Times on the day it went on sale in the early fall of 1969. I do remember stores selling out but not stating open at midnight.  It was important but the amplitude was much, much lower than 11.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  03:29 PM

  27. Clare, I have to disagree about Susan Cooper being dark.  Almost the first thing that happens in her books is that everything becomes divorced from day-to-day reality; they may be well-written, but they are really rather like ghost stories.  The violence in Harry Potter occurs within the everyday world.  That’s been increasingly true throughout the series, but even existed in the first book, where Dumbledore explains at the end that the Philosopher’s Stone has been protected not only by Harry’s bog-standard fantasy-heroic actions, but also by its purposeful destruction and the concomitant suicide of the life-extended couple who depend on it.  Nor are the children themselves are safe against being killed.

    But even beyond that, they are dark in the sense that they actively promote a distrust of society.  It is common in children’s fantasy for the child-hero to be separated from everyday society, have to fight or otherwise behave heroically, and then rejoin it (e.g., Narnia, Oz).  In Harry Potter, the adult world is an active source of extra hazard, with newspaper writers, law officers, teachers, and governmental functionaries who all actively attack the protagonists in various ways, with a general public that is foolish and deluded, and with even the good-guy guardians ineffectual at the task of preventing the children from suffering severe violence.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  03:39 PM

  28. I think that Sendak, Dahl, and others may be writing books which are enjoyed differently by the child hearing the book read and the adult reading the book aloud. (The recent Shrek movie had a lot of that, for example a villain whose names sound tolerably close to Fuckwad.) Perhaps the Rowlings books made the threats more transparent and unavoidable.

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/18  at  03:45 PM

  29. The “Burglar Who...” books were written by Lawrence Block, not Donald Westlake. Block has slipped a bit, but is still a good mystery writer. Westlake has slipped quite a lot.

    If had as much money as Rowling, I’d write something else.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  03:49 PM

  30. Rowling is considering the use of a pen-name for her post Potter works, I hear.  That would allow her the freedom to fail honorably if her next project doesn’t quite match up.

    Posted by Jonathan Mayhew  on  07/18  at  03:56 PM

  31. Yes, here’s to Dickens.  And an extra cheer for (a) the fact that he also had to deal with serialization and (b) trying to end his career with The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 

    But I betcha Rowling doesn’t despise Harry Potter the way Conan Doyle despised Sherlock. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  07/18  at  04:01 PM

  32. I read somewhere--three or four books ago--that she already knows what the last line of the last book is going to be.

    Hmmm.  Sounds to me like someone has broken into the Hall of Prophecy.

    Posted by Michael  on  07/18  at  04:02 PM

  33. I don’t know if it’s watching cartoons, John--PK likes the old Warner Brother stuff (though to be fair he hasn’t seen much action hero comics, mostly b/c mama is anti-fighting-as-fun, which he objects to), and he’s seen videos with some fighting in ‘em.  And he LOVES Pirates of the Caribbean (it was not my idea to let a child his age watch it, take that up with his father, though in the event it turned out just fine).  And yes, Harry Potter scares him.  And he’s seen the movies, too.

    I think this is a temperament / imagination thing, actually, and will vary from kid to kid.  The fact is, PK really *likes* scary stories.  Even as a very young child, he really enjoyed didactic narratives where Horrible Things Happen to Very Bad Children.  If you read him a scary story--e.g., Harry Potter--he will squeal and squirm and beg you to stop, but after you stop, he’ll come round a little while later and ask you to read it some more.

    My theory, from watching how he deals with this stuff, is that somehow for him these scary stories are a way of dealing with things he’s afraid of; he needs to come through the story okay, and there is much cuddling and hiding of his face and “oh no!” but then he wants to hear it over and over and over again.  It seems to be some weird kid version of desensitization through exposure, or something.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  07/18  at  04:08 PM

  34. I’m just glad that he doesn’t use the Jamie method of making me do the scary thing, come to think of it.

    Posted by bitchphd  on  07/18  at  04:08 PM

  35. Hello from a long-time lurker and fantasy series fan who is NOT ga-ga over HP.  I finished #6 yesterday (hey, it’s my job, I teach YA literature) and was impressed with #6.  Rowling does seem to be reaching for something--hard to say as yet what it is, though-- as she continues the epic.  Susan Cooper’s series is brilliant, but my favorites are Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series (including a boy wizard 25 years or so prior to the predictable Mr. Potter) and Philip Pullman’s more recent His Dark Materials series.  Both have the depth and breadth that Rowling can’t even dream to reach.  I didn’t cry--or even gasp at the end of the Half-Blood Prince, but I cried my eyes out in The Subtle Knife when Lee Scoresby and Hester (his daemon) die at the hands of the enemy.  And Pullman is channeling MILTON for goodness sakes!

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  04:11 PM

  36. I’m not anti-scary-story. I’m just following my brother’s guess that, because of no TV, his daughters learned to frame the Harry Potter type stories as unthreatening.

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/18  at  04:18 PM

  37. "did not learn”

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/18  at  04:26 PM

  38. I don’t know what the pressure is like for Rowling, but the experience of reading the books this way is also remarkable from the readers’ point-of-view. It won’t be the same for future readers who can plow through the whole series in a box set (or e-download rollable screen reader whatever). When I was in college, we (the geeks) had to wait excruciating periods for the installments of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. (They were supposed to arrive at the comic store once a month, but shipping dates kept changing and there were 2-3 month delays). The reading experience is different when you can buy it all in one cover. Having to wait encourages a minute close-reading of every detail of what came before, which can be good if it leads you to see and admire the author’s craftmanship and hidden resonances.

    For me, the darkness of the Harry Potter series is the author’s rage at conformity, corruption, hypocrisy. Her satire began as whimsical, but is moving into Swiftian territory. In the first book, an innocent child was abused by conformist uncle & aunt, then rescued into a magical affirming world. Now that world turns out to be just as corrupt, and real evil has entered the picture.

    That makes me uncomfortable, yet also makes me admire Rowling, because all of it seems intricately planned, and I have to trust her. It’s whitewater rafting where the rapids began class 2, and are getting up to 6 or 7. I do not feel we are on a safe ride—I cringe as my son gets near the end of each novel for what he might find (I get it after he’s done)—I’m wary of what messianic or apocalyptic fate might hit Harry in Book 7—and yet I can’t jump out of the raft and swim to shore. I have to trust the author even if she’s plunging us into some very scary water.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  04:31 PM

  39. Rich:  “In Harry Potter, the adult world is an active source of extra hazard, with newspaper writers, law officers, teachers, and governmental functionaries who all actively attack the protagonists in various ways, with a general public that is foolish and deluded, and with even the good-guy guardians ineffectual at the task of preventing the children from suffering severe violence.”

    Sounds like cup & saucer realism when you put it this way.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  04:37 PM

  40. Sounds like cup & saucer realism when you put it this way.

    But with thestrals.

    Posted by Michael  on  07/18  at  05:04 PM

  41. When reading about the mobs at New York ports waiting for the latest installment of a Dickens cliffhanger to arrive from London, I always wished I lived in a time where that could happen. And thanks to J.K. Rowling, I now have had that experience.

    Though I’ve not read this interpretation anywhere else, since about Book 3 ("Prisoner of Azkhaban") I can’t read the series without seeing an allegory involving the evil Bush/Berlusconi/Blair/Ratzinger, etc. administrations that we have been living through over the last five years. They are all Death Eaters, and their power is increasing, and the resistance is increasing too. I don’t think Rowling is necessarily doing this purposely, but it is definitely a part of the zeitgeist she is plugged into.

    Posted by sfmike  on  07/18  at  05:14 PM

  42. Hell, I get a little freaked out just having to write a small comment on some blog. But I tell myself only children see these posts and it becomes easier. Bwaaahaahahahaa!

    Seriously, could she possibly write a flop at this point?

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  10:36 PM

  43. Rich you make some interesting points about the darkness of the Harry books. They have just never struck me that way. I’ll have to do a closer reading some time. Mina, I think Rowling takes the deaths seriously but until this last book they just didn’t affect me. They just felt like a plot device. Years after reading The Dark is Rising I still get the shivers thinking about the crows in the trees. Also, in the last book in the series there are shape shifters and when the children realize that people they trust were really evil it was truly frightening.

    Like Kim, I’m also a fan of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. It’s a brilliant trilogy.

    I do think that in HP6 Rowling has written a better book than the last two. She’s set Harry up nicely for his quest and managed to make me eager for the next book already.

    Posted by  on  07/18  at  11:17 PM

  44. Yes, the books children want to read and books parents would choose are often very different.  Children like dark stuff. I know I did.

    Meanwhile, a 76-year-old member of my family has been tetchy, nail-biting during the two-week run-up to the latest Potter book going on sale.  Don’t know if he’s spoken to anyone for the past couple of days…

    As for Dickens and Trollope, theirs were books I read every one of several times starting when I was about twelve and then cursed the fact that they’d died and wouldn’t be writing any more!  Remember that?  Reading everything a writer wrote and feeling a tremendous letdown at the end of the last one?  John MacDonald!  Eric Ambler!

    Posted by PW  on  07/18  at  11:22 PM

  45. I think it’s worthwhile to check out Rowling’s own website. It’s technically elaborate (a number of puzzles and flash effects), but the content - her personal history and how she became a writer, her commentary on the back-and-forth of composition, perhaps most of all the respect she gives her (often very young) readers - is a model of tact and fair-dealing.  She may know the last line of the series, but getting there is still being hammered out. 
    I had a Norton edition of “Bleak House” that included Dickens’s plot diagrams, and he’s a very apt comparison (they’re like flowcharts) - I’d almost forgotten how much great stuff used to be serialized, especially when the talking heads, asked about the Potters, leave out any mention of that publishing tradition. 
    Loved the packaging on my copY from amazon this weekend: “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL JULY 16!” - if only the threat of penalty for literary disclosures matched our own national security breaches, it might be a more serious world.  Rowling taps this often - self-deception, official lies, cover-ups have been part of the HP world for years. 
    “You know, for Kids!”

    Posted by grishaxxx  on  07/19  at  12:17 AM

  46. This is slightly tangential, since I’ve yet to read H-BP, but am I the ONLY person in the world who really didn’t like His Dark Materials?  All I ever hear is how extraordinary they are, when I thought they were dull and pretentious.  Guess I’m just a philistine.

    Posted by Frank  on  07/19  at  01:50 AM

  47. “According to Donald E. Westlake (who also wrote the Dortmunder series) in the “Burglar Who ...” books, Ms. Grafton will then write books with titles like “AA is for Alcoholics””

    You’re confusing Westlake with Lawrence Blok, who did the Burglar books (H is for Preparation, IIRC).

    Posted by  on  07/19  at  07:50 AM

  48. Grafton should start using the letters from *On Beyond Zebra*. “Yuz is for Yuz-a-ma-tuz.” I’d read them.

    Posted by Rob Helpy-Chalk  on  07/19  at  08:45 AM

  49. Or just switch alphabets: once the homophones are taken out, the Cyrillic script could supply another ten or so, although some of the letters are never used at the start of a word. Then on East, with Aleph is for Infinity and so on…

    Posted by  on  07/19  at  10:43 AM

  50. Here is a scary-story anecdote that has been weirding me out for the past couple of weeks: Sylvia and I read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster back in February and enjoyed it greatly. Then in June or so, she asked to hear it again. So we started, every night for bedtime stories. But around the middle of the book she started asking every night, in a worried voice, “Are there demons in this chapter?” (For those unfamiliar with the story, the hero Milo travels through the kingdom of Wisdom to the mountains of Ignorance where he does battle with demons to rescue princesses Rhyme and Reason.) So I would tell here there are not, and we’d talk a bit about the plot of the story before reading that night’s installment. But once Milo got to the mountains of Ignorance, she did not want to hear any more. I was like, “Well Milo has to get past the demons if he wants to rescue Rhyme and Reason,” but did not (of course) press it and picked up another book. But why was she scared the second time around but not the first? I don’t really get it.

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  07/19  at  10:47 AM

  51. WRT Grafton—if she would just use Chinese ideograms she would be set for life.

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  07/19  at  10:48 AM

  52. Frank, I concur on vol. 3 of the Dark Materials.  A huge disappointment.

    And wasn’t Pullman channelling *Blake*???

    Posted by Anderson  on  07/19  at  11:25 AM

  53. But why was she scared the second time around but not the first? I don’t really get it.

    Because this time around, Jeremy, she realizes the full horror of the faceless Terrible Trivium.  That one takes two readings to sink in.

    Posted by Michael  on  07/19  at  12:15 PM

  54. Ah the TT is not so scary… kind of cute if you ask me…

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  07/19  at  12:22 PM

  55. Jeremy, I’ve read that there’s a developmental stage when (roughly speaking) fearlessness changes into fearfulness. Somewhere between 2 and 6, but it’s only a vague memory.

    Posted by John Emerson  on  07/19  at  01:45 PM

  56. "Jeremy, I’ve read that there’s a developmental stage when (roughly speaking) fearlessness changes into fearfulness. Somewhere between 2 and 6, but it’s only a vague memory. “

    I wish that would kick in with my daughter.  She’s 9 and is almost completely fearless.  Her response to what little she fears is always to challenge it.  I live in vicarious terror.

    Posted by  on  07/19  at  02:31 PM

  57. Njorl, I’m always looking for interns at Earth Island Journal. Send her my way in fifteen years.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  07/19  at  02:33 PM

  58. Okay.  Here’s someone who has a theory about people who read Harry Potter. Read at your own risk.

    Posted by PW  on  07/19  at  05:26 PM

  59. Harry Potter, as a saga, started out as a children’s book.  J.K. Rowling says so herself. Dragging tens of millions of “children of all ages” at a rate of one Harry-year per novel, it is now rather dark Young Adult fiction.  If she can pull it off, Harry Potter 7 will be, in some sense, an Adult Novel (no, not in THAT sense, you weirdo).  This is Bildungsroman with a vengeance.

    I can’t fully disagree, either, with the characterization of Susan Clarke’s astonishing “Jonathan Norrell and Mr. Strange” as “Harry Potter for Grownups.” It is intentionally, I believe, what Jane Austen would have written if her editor had insisted on High Fantasy. The chronology of the novel are precisely the years in which Austen was publishing.

    It is also, arguably, the greatest Fantasy about England, as such, in 70 years, since Hope Mirralees’ “Lud-in-the-Mist” which I don’t speak enough languages to fully follow, but which I can just tell is frightfully erudite, even by Joycean standards.

    The big question to be resolved in Harry Potter 7: is that muggle world different from our reality, and if so, based on what past event?  Harry Potter 6 has a nice focus in the first chapter of the interface between Muggle and Magical Britain, but, you know, we never see any Royal Family (a point suggested by an argument about why there is no actual “prince” wizard).

    Posted by Jonathan Vos Post  on  07/20  at  01:14 AM

  60. I thought that the first chapter of HP 6 contained a dig at Bush.  With this one, in particular, I felt there was a lot of political resonance.

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  09:54 AM

  61. Betsy:  Let’s see. J. K. Rowling shows us a covert war which has broken out in baffling murders and destruction at home.  There is a new administration (both Prime Minister and Minister of Magic) which, after misleading the public, responds to public pressure to do something, by arresting a number of innocents. Yup, sounds familar—but skewers Blair as well as Bush, I’d say. Oddly enough, Bush would agree with Rowling that there is true Evil in the world.  Not a Children’s Book, in any case.

    Jeremy Osner: because she imagined demons the first time, and can’t clearly recall if they came from her imagination or from the book.  I happened to know Norton Juster in Brooklyn Heights, where I grew up, and then again in Amherst, Massachusetts.

    grishaxxx: “Rowling taps this often - self-deception, official lies, cover-ups have been part of the HP world for years. 
    ‘You know, for Kids!’” I presume that one becomes more skeptical of governments from living in a welfare system, and more aware of self-deception after a divorce.

    Michael: “I betcha Rowling doesn’t despise Harry Potter the way Conan Doyle despised Sherlock.” Surely true.  Though Herminione is the character closest to her own self-perception, and she wept while writing the chapter in which, in Book 6, someone important is killed. The key question is whether she will kill Harry in the apocalptic Book 7, now that she has tied him even more closely to Sauron/Darth Vader, I mean Valdemort.

    Posted by Jonathan Vos Post  on  07/20  at  11:14 AM

  62. And the Prime Minister is waiting to hear from the “President of --,” a faraway land, who is described, I believe, as a horrid man. 

    I think Rowling would say that there is Evil in the world, but given that she spends time in this book giving some explanation for it--and given how compassionately she ends up portraying a certain “evil” teen wizard--I think her ideas about evil are ones that liberals would find more amenable than conservatives.

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  01:17 PM

  63. Betsy:

    (1) J. K. Rowling has explained in interviews why she does NOT want to ever show the USA in a Harry Potter book.  “The president” may be a clever loophole.

    (2) The role of Draco Malfoy does get a deepening in Harry Potter 6, but the issue of “mudblood” and “halfbreed” are explicitly deconstructions of racism from a kind of hyper-Conservative position.  There is perhaps a Liberal bias in J. K. Rowling, but she has also tried to give a legitimacy to certain aspects of Conservatism—Hogwarts being an inherently conservative institution, and the families of its 4 founders having a valorized position—hence there is an implicit critique of Conservative versus Neo-Conservative, in Magical terms.  Draco is suffering, alright, but how much is from pressure from his NeoCon father, how much from said Dad being in Azkaban, how much from his position in the hierarchy under Voldemort, how much from what he is tasked to do, how much from his Slytherin position, how much from his relationship with Snape, are all rather intricately plotted, with no resolution possible until the final novel.

    Posted by Jonathan Vos Post  on  07/20  at  02:27 PM

  64. PW, it seems to me the author of that Asian Times article has discovered, to his shock and horror, that fantasy novels have a large helping of escapism in them.

    Imagine that.

    Posted by  on  07/20  at  04:36 PM

  65. I gather that L. Frank Baum had quite a following waiting on the delivery of his next Oz book, but not to the extent of Dickens or Rawling. He didn’t really enjoy writing them and tried at least once to officially give it up, but it was the only thing the public really wanted to read.

    Posted by Geoduck  on  07/20  at  08:15 PM

  66. Firstly, what is it with the meters? Isn’t the USA officially obscurantistly rods, poles, perches, feet, and inches? Or is that a homage to Derrida that I haven’t picked up?
    Secondly, while Westlake is not now that strength
    which in old days moved earth and heaven, he is still eight times as good as Lawrence Block.
    Thirdly, I wish somebody would actually take the trouble to write that “Billy Bunter on broomsticks” parody.
    Fourthly, at this rate of increase number seven is going to sell something like twenty million copies on the first day. Wow.

    Posted by Chris B  on  07/21  at  03:00 AM

  67. There are others who don’t like Philip Pullman (though i am not one of them) - and i think he was channelling both blake and milton, and probably a few others.
    HP is good enough and all but there’s other fantasy “for kids” that I think is smarter, better-written and more enjoyable (Please see: Diana Wynne Jones). I study children’s lit as my specialty, and i don’t think there is much disagreement that HP has radically changed the children’s lit world (the disagreement is whether it’s changed for the better...).

    Michael, I love reading your Jamie stories. He sounds like an awesome kid. More of this and less of that “literary theory” crap - i get enough of that at school.

    Posted by kbryna  on  07/22  at  02:52 AM

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