After years and years to rejecting everyone who offered up their copy of the Harry Potter series(We will call it HP from this point on) I finally gave in. Sometimes it is just impossible to say no to a beautiful charming girl. The reason I fought it for so long was due to the fact that when I tried to read it years ago, I got roughly 60 pages into the first book and loathed it. Armed with a new perspective thanks to Erik telling me to read the first book like a Roald Dahl book, I ventured into it.
I have been trying to figure out how to best write my experience with this much beloved series and I am still unsure if this is going to go exactly how I want, but I really wanted to go through my feelings on the series as a whole. Going book by book would not really do the series justice because J.K Rowling managed to be pretty brilliant in her weaving the stories together. Yet, HP is so massive, I had to figure out how to best attack it. For those of you who follow my twitter (@KyleHadley) some of this will be familiar, but in 140 characters, I could not fully realize major thoughts. This will probably not follow any sort of chronological order, nor will it follow the normal "things I like" followed by "Things I do not like" order of my typical reviews. None of those worked when I went to write them. What is most likely to follow is a free flowing sense of ideas or thoughts. It is probably going to be messy and long, but I think ultimately if you can make your way through it, we will come to a satisfying end of this HP adventure.
One of the main things I could not get a handle on in twitter was Voldemort. The beginning of book 4 is when we really see Voldemort as a character not an abstract idea or concept. For three books he is really mostly just "he who must not be named", but in book 4 and then through the rest of the series, he becomes more tangible, more knowable. He has a personality and I think that works to the disadvantage of the series. Voldemort is scarier as an abstract. Part of the power of that character is his mystique. He is cloaked in this unknowable and when he is "knowable" he loses the dark magic. Now, if someone wants to argue that it was part of Rowling's plan for Voldemort to get less scary to us as he gets less scary to Harry, I will listen to that argument in earnest because I can see that point, but I think she worked so hard to create this legendary villain and then destroyed it. I enjoyed the Tom Riddle back story, so that was not my problem. In fact, I think the Riddle back story makes Voldemort that much scarier, but when he starts talking to his Death Eaters he is less scary. He becomes too much of a character and not this mysterious creature lurking in the darkest corners of Harry's mind.
My biggest issue with the series also ties to the idea of Voldemort as a non scary character. It is Rowling's way of writing death. I was first bothered by it in book 4 when Cedric Diggery got such an unceremonious death. However this trend continued with pretty much every character death in the series right down to Voldemort. You are telling me the scariest, most bad ass villain alive dies at the hands of his own curse rebounding??? He does not even get to have an epic wizard fight with "The Boy who Lived"?? Death scenes are hard to write. Fight scenes are tough to get a grasp on, but Rowling clearly had action sequences down by the time Voldemort died. The Battle for Hogwarts is one of the most exciting action scenes I have come across and it weaves all kinds of complex stories into the backdrop of this fight, however Rowling decides to side step death scenes by writing quick deaths that rob the readers of the emotional pull of a death. She redeems herself for Cedric and Dumbledore by giving moving tributes in the form of a eulogy, but that is such an easy way out. Sirius never gets that proper due and he is such an important character for Harry.
Through it all though, there is this foundation of Harry, Ron and Hermione. This trio of friends, I think, represents why these books are so well loved among all generations. The theme of friendship that is the glue for HP is something to which everyone can relate. Every time the series starts to lose focus, or get long winded, Rowling could rely on this rock to get her and us through it. However, not everything is always perfect in this trio and that is what makes it that much better. In life friends go through issues and this series gives them to us, but it always raises the stakes by throwing life and death at us. What made Buffy, The Vampire Slayer so great was the idea that teenagers were going through typical teenage stuff on top of saving the world from demons and vampires. In HP we get a lot of the same stuff. Ron is jealous of his best friend's school popularity, but he also has to help save the world. Hermione has image issues and jealousy issues and Harry cannot speak to girls. And on top of all of that, he is constantly nearly being killed. However, in the end, it is always Harry, Ron and Hermione. Yes, Harry is the chosen one, but without Ron and Hermione he never could have done any of it. This friendship and the perseverance of it reduced me to tears a few times and is the main reason I read through some of the stuff I hated.
This wizardering world Rowling created is certainly something to be admired. She clearly did exhaustive writing and thinking to create a fully realized world full of nuance, but this attention to detail falters her when the stories get too long winded. A few of these books could have been shorter and there are entire plots that I could have done without. The biggest shining example of too much "world" was Hermione's obsession with house elves. Yes, they turn out to be incredibly important to the world of HP, but so much of book 4 was spent dealing with these creatures and in all honesty, they did nothing to fully advance the story. We needed 3 of them and I understand the character of Hermione fights causes, but I knew that without so much time being spent on the idea of freeing house elves. Rowling also bends the will or personality of her characters to fit what she wants them to do. She is the opposite of the narrator in The Scarlett Letter who cannot control his characters. She has infinite control of them, even if it means having them do something out of character. My biggest example of this is the truly awful fifth book. Most people do not like it because of the angsty Harry, but my issue is why he is angsty. In order to get him angsty, Rowling decides to totally change Dumbledore's personality, just for this book. But worse than that was her easy way of getting out of it, by just having Dumbledore say he made a mistake. Everything he did was way out of the character Rowling had built for 4 books prior and I am just supposed to accept "Oh, well, I am old and some times I do it wrong." No thank you! How am I supposed to trust anything Dumbledore says in book 6 after that?
What this series boils down to is hype vs expectations. I understand why people love it and having read it once does not in any way make me an expert and perhaps some of the problems I have with this series exist because I am not in love with the world. I am distanced so I look at it in a critical sense and not with the sort of reckless abandon most do. I love that people have a true fire and sense of burning love for these books. A burning love for literature is beyond great and to be honest these books have such rich themes about good vs. evil and how love is the greatest magic of all that I would feel comfortable teaching this book to my children and having them find stuff for themselves. There is a certain childlike innocence people get when they start talking about the first time they picked up HP and THAT is more important than anything I have said today. When a book makes you feel something like that, it goes beyond criticism. I may never pick up the series again and yes, I was underwhelmed as a whole, but to be perfectly honest, when I think about these books in the future I am going to remember just all out WEEPING when book 6 came to an end. I am going to remember cheering when Neville stepped up, or feeling comforted knowing Harry was always going to have Hermione and Ron to help him when he needed them. Even as I type this now, I get goosebumps thinking of that feeling I had so many times when Harry and his friends conquered every challenge together, or how Hermione stuck with Harry even after Ron ran out, or how Ron came back knowing what could ultimately happen. Or even better, how Harry truly believed he had to sacrifice himself for the good of the whole world. How many 17 year old boys or girls would be willing to sacrifice a weekend to help people and Harry is being asked to sacrifice his life to save everyone else? And he does it with the calm and understanding of someone at least twice his age!
I think writing this out actually just changed my perspective on the series as a whole. As I sit here with my own words, I find myself warmed to the core by the love people have for these characters and how wonderful I felt reading sections. There is a power the written has always had over me, but here my own words have changed my opinion. This is why writing and reading are so important, but that is a whole other post for a whole other day!
I want to end with just some random thoughts that are mostly twitter style thoughts:
Luna Lovegood makes me happy.
Severus Snape is onomatopoetically perfect.
The predictability of Draco and Harry's conversations got old early on
I want to be a part of Dumbledore's Army
The way she wrote Harry and Ginny together was perfection
The plural of Patronus should be Patroni not Patronuses.
I bet Ron and Hermione's angry sex is amazing.
Dumbledore is, in my opinion, one of the best literary creations in years.
Quidditch did not really do anything for me. I did not miss it one bit when it was gone.
Most of the humor fell flat for me. However, George and Fred were constantly hilarious.
I could have done without Hagrid. I am not sure the Hagrid pay off was worth all the amount of time spent with him.
Lastly, I would have expected Rowling to create Wizard Holidays instead of using existing ones.
