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Issue #14/95, July 20 - August 3, 2000  smlogo.gif

Book Review

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Harry Bloody Potter

By John Dolan

Tried to stay away from those Potter books. There are few spectacles more repellent than the literate public in one of its fits of enthusiasm, and they've been coming all over Harry for months now. The enthusiasm has been feeding on itself for some time, with the books eclipsed by their latest feats of box-office boffissimo: "264 killed in Bookstore Potter Riot!", "Tots Crushed in Harry Madness!" The story is a feelgood amoeba, swelling in every direction. The success is a Forrest Gump-tale in itself: the author, J. K. Rowling, was a solo mum on the dole, but now she's the second-richest women in Britain—with a bullet, because Number One, Queenie Herself, hasn't had a hit since Di hit that wall. And what can the Windsors do for an encore? The rest of the family could kamikaze their Rolls into every overpass in Paris and not sell so much as a "Charles and Camilla: Jellied Together Forever" calendar.

We're supposed to revel in Rowling's triumph because her book has the kids reading again. This, you see, will clear their little heads of all that video gore. This notion—that print is somehow inherently virtuous, while electronic media are born to evil as the quark flies upward—is one of the more annoying recieved ideas of the Middlebrow Caucus. In a lifetime of fairly grubby reading, I've never come across anything as extreme as Sade's later novels, and to the best of my knowledge Sade did it in print—the poor old looney never wrote a screenplay, or licensed a video game, in his life.

If you sent one of these drips back in time to any American town in the late nineteenth century, he'd sigh with delight to see that nearly every stable-boy and truant could be found with their grubby noses buried in books. But if he were foolhardy enough to ask what they were reading, he'd find—well, first of all, he'd find his watch stolen and his nose bloodied—but if he wiped away the blood and took a look at the urchin's reading material, he'd find that it was a dime novel, a Life of the Frank and Jesse James or the Daltons. These, by far the most popular reading material of the young in that noble era, were veritable manuals for attaining fame by murder and pillage. Most books are, like Ash's Necronomicon ex Mortis, "inked in blood, and bound in human skin."

And that goes for Harry too, I'm afraid. Because I gave in, at last, and read the first Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. (By the way, the book was released in the US as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, since the publishers thought American readers hadn't heard of the philosopher's stone and might get the impression that Harry's encounter was with a piece of rock some tenured Phenomenologist kept in a bowl on his office window. One sees their point.)

My first impression was that Rowling was a plagiarist, who borrowed almost everything in her fictional world from the work of a much better English children's writer, Diana Wynne Jones. If you haven't read Jones's books, you should. She's been around for a long time, writing very well in a genre which, until Harry came along, got no respect at all. Jones's books mix a magical world with the world of the middle-class English suburbs. This of course is the whole premise of the Potter books. But there are resemblances in the details of plot and character as well. Consider Jones's 1975 novel, Eight Days of Luke. The story here is that a lonely English schoolboy accidentally releases Loki, Norse god of mischief, from eternal torment. The grateful Loki becomes the hero's friend, which is a bit of a mixed blessing, since Loki (one of Jones' most delightful characters) is a wholly amoral pyromaniac who favors radical solutions to banal problems, as when he sets a shopping mall on fire to relieve the hero's boredom.

Eight Days of Luke begins when David, the hero, returns from boarding school. David is an orphan being raised by his Great Aunt and Uncle, who are despicable, whining, begrudging, dimwitted hypocrites. (Like many British women writers, Jones is at her best depicting the everyday horribleness of respectable people.) David's relations ignore him while fawning over their fat, spoiled whingeing son, who bullies David with their full support. This regrettable state of affairs changes, as you might imagine, with the arrival of Loki. At the end of the novel, with David saved by his magical new friend, we learn that his relations have been keeping his inheritance from him and embezzling its income for their own ends. They flee, and David comes into his own.

And now, the plot of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Harry Potter, an orphan, is being raised by his horrible aunt and uncle, who exemplify suburban stodginess and meanness. They force Harry to live in a closet under the stairs (Rowling tends to overdo things a bit), incessantly scold and belittle him, and fawn on their son, a fat, spoiled, whingeing brat who torments Harry with impunity. Harry's salvation comes when he is taken up by magical friends and summoned to a magical boarding school, learning in the process that his relatives have been keeping his fortune from him.

The Potter books borrow heavily from several Jones novels. Harry Potter acquires a hulking, magical biker bodyguard who bears a troubling resemblance to the Goon in Jones' 1965 novel, Archer's Goon. Harry Potter learns of the powers of dragon's blood as an ingredient in magic potions—as did Cat, the hero of Jones's novel Charmed Life. Like the first Potter novel, Charmed Life (1977) deals with a pubescent orphan's adventures at a magical boarding school.

There are very clear differences between Jones and Rowling. To put it bluntly, Jones is a much better writer, which may account for her relative obscurity. Jones' magic-steeped plots usually involve family dramas raised to epic stature. She teases out the implications of her magics in a way Rowling doesn't even want to do. For example, in Charmed Life, the hero, after hearing about the power of dragon's blood, actually meets a baby dragon orphaned by poachers. And the baby dragon is...not cute. Not cuddly. It hypnotizes and wants to eat anyone who comes within range. But it's a delightful character anyway, wholly beyond suburban morality.

That's the biggest difference, really: Jones has heart, and doesn't love every pustulant tradition of the Eton- or Rugby-style English Public School; Rowling, unfortunately, thinks that horrific world of cold baths, bad food, terrorizing prefect and homosexual rape is just dandy. Both novelists have created magical versions of the English public school, but Jones' school, Chrestomanci Castle, is a small, homey place, with only four students and the most lax of routines. When Rowling borrowed the magical-boarding-school convention, she transformed the Castle into Hogwarts, a sort of Eton with magic wands, celebrating all the sickest features of the Public School, even to the scorn for those unlucky enough to be denied entrance (the celebrated "Muggles"—isn't that a cuuute word?). Rowling's Hogwarts features the rule of prefects—that is, the terrorizing of younger students by older ones as the basis of order—and the division of the school into "houses" which compete with each other in games and are taught to despise each other. The students sing school songs at mass assemblies, and are expected to support their houses in the continual games of "Quidditch," a sort of polo played on flying broomsticks.

This is "school story" as P. G. Wodehouse wrote it four generations ago, in early hackwork like The Gold Bat. And like the heroes of those stories, Harry Potter turns out to have unmatched talent as a Quidditch player. In fact, Rowling teaches the horrible old rules while telling the horrible old stories. For example: brains are dangerous. Better to be brave and good at sport. Harry Potter undergoes magical scrutiny on his arrival at Hogwarts. He is found to have "some brains" but is assigned, not to Ravenclaw House, home of the clever, but to Gryffindor House, "where dwell the brave at heart." Pluck, my lad, that's what counts, not a lot of swotting! All's right with the Etonic world, in Rowling's books. The headmaster is the very British Professor Dumbledore, who is "particularly famous for his defeat of the dark wizard Grindewald in 1945"; when there is evil, it comes from sly, brainy foreigners like the wizard Voldemort. This is very different from the world Jones made. In her novels, the fault is mixed, a family matter. There are no shouted school songs, no prefects, no Quidditch. In fact, when Jones alludes to topical matters, it's always with a striking courage. In her novel Dogsbody, written during the worst of the Thatcher years, the heroine is an IRA man's daughter befriended by a dog who protects her from the racist taunts of the jolly local schoolboys—Hogwarts lads all, as it were. That took courage, the real kind, not the public-school variety. Many a Hogwarts semester will pass before Rowling can even imagine that sort of lonely courage.

It's never quite clear enough to take to court. Rowling doesn't quite plagiarize Jones; Rowling isn't a bad writer. It's just sad to see the lesser writer swimming in fame, money and adulation while Jones, who's been writing wonderful novels for almost forty years, remains a name known mostly to children's librarians. It raises a question which has no happy answer: was it just random—did Rowling just happen to come along at the right moment? Or is she more successful BECAUSE she's not as good as Jones?



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