Saturday, July 21, 2007

My Big Gripe about Harry Potter...

... is more eruditely expressed by someone else: Harry Potter: The Economics. The author's point is essentially this: Rowling is too arbitrary in her depictions of magic, and that leads to plots that make no sense in their own terms. And I agree.
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2 comments:

Jeff Newberry said...

I have to disagree. The article you link is persnickety at best, pretentious at worst.

Rowling's books transcend children's literature precisely because they don't get bogged down in things like the, ahem, "economics of magic."

I mean, c'mon. Explain the "economics of magic" in Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

Thanks for posting this, by the way. It did force me to think through why I love the Potter books.

Cheers,

Jeff

7:15 AM
Dave said...

I'll agree that the tone of the article isn't the most politic, but I think the criticism still stands. I agree that Harry Potter is good children's fiction, particularly due to Rowling's ability to create characters we relate to and care about. But I don't think that Harry Potter is especially good fantasy literature, because of the kinds of problems this article cites.

I'm glad you brought up Wizard of Earthsea, because that serves as a good case in point. In the Earthsea books, magic is an arduous and dangerous undertaking. The true masters of magic, like Ogion the Silent, actually use magic rarely, because they understand that such actions can have immense ramifications. Learning to alter reality requires the student wizard Ged to study it closely, so that he understands the balance of nature that he could, with his magic, dangerously disrupt. When he does disrupt it, he faces immense consequences.

Certainly magic does have a dark side in Harry Potter, but I was bothered in the books by the casual use of powerful magic, such as time travel. Hermione, a third-year student at Hogwarts, has a time-turner -- a time travel device -- which she uses to take an extra heavy course load (!). Any sci-fi or fantasy geek knows that time travel is heavy stuff philosophically: can we alter the past, and if so, should we? Apparently in the Harry Potter world, the answers are "of course!" and "who cares!".

Beyond the disturbingly casual use of powerful magic by school-age children, this example also shows another problem with Rowling's use of magic: the impact on her plot. If Hermione has a time-turner, why doesn't she loan it to Harry so he can go back in the past and save his parents? They use it to save Buckbeak and Harry himself, so why not Ma and Pa Potter? And how common are time-turners, anyway? Professor McGonagall feels the freedom to dispense them to her pet students, so they can't be too rare. But time-turners, as a possible solution to a problem, are not (so far as I know) brought up again. But why not? Why should any good character ever die or suffer injury, when the time-turner exists? The time-turner, then, is a plot problem, and it's not the only one.

Am I nitpicky? Of course! But that's something convincing subcreation requires. An internally consistent imaginary world is one of the chief goals of fantasy literature. Rowling doesn't achieve that goal. Are her books enjoyable? Certainly! Are they a cut above other children's fare? Indubitably! But they aren't well-crafted fantasy literature, that's my only point of criticism.

1:41 PM

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