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By Ben Patrick
Johnson
LOS
ANGELES, 12 November 2001 - The film version of best-selling
novelist J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
opens in the U.S. on 16 November and the inevitable advertising and
publicity blitz is underway. Reflecting Potter’s status as a
cultural phenomenon, the popular periodical media gush with stories
about Rowling’s fantasy world. So, this seems like a good time to
regain a little perspective, and examine what made Rowling's Potter
quartet so engaging to readers in the first place. And who could
better offer such a fresh look than someone yet unexposed to Rowling's
work? (I'm speaking, of course, of myself: if young Harry were on
trial for some heinous crime, I'd be a perfect tabula rasa juror.)
I decided to approach my task by comparing the first Potter
tome with the work of Rowlings' literary forbearers. This meant buying
two books at the local chain bookseller.
"Wait, you
mean you've never read Harry Potter?" shrieked a pudgy,
bespectacled ten-year-old boy (who would fit in very well, I would
later discover, among Rowling's cast of appealingly-awkward
characters.) He stood next to me in line at the store. I glanced at
him, then back down at the garishly jacketed hardcover copy of Sorcerer's
Stone that lay in my hands. I had been scanning Rowling's
biography on the rear flap—single mother, lives in Edinburgh,
started the book on scraps of napkin in a local café—but
now shut the book quickly, the kid's incredulity leaving me
self-conscious.
I shook my head 'no'. (No, I am not one of
the one hundred million readers wowed and seduced by the
peculiar-looking protagonist whose likeness I can no longer avoid.)
"Oh my heck, you'll love it," he assured me. "You'll
start reading and then just lie in bed and turn page after page all
night!"
I offered a conflicted grimace of a smile, as
if someone were stepping on my insole. I then slipped the book, along
with a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea,
behind my back where presumably other sophisticated, grown-up
customers wouldn't notice either as I approached the register.
How
could I have avoided the Potter phenomenon for so long? For the past
four years, I've put up with friends gushing about Rowling's engaging
story, while I, as a self-styled literary elitist, refused to go
anywhere near it as a matter of principle. They carried on about how
delightfully Rowling's characters had leapt out of the genre of youth
fantasy and found a home with adults. I worried for them. They told me
they'd read her books several times, and I smiled vacantly or, if the
conversation was on the telephone, theatrically held my nose and
rolled my eyes.
It turns out, however, that most of my
eschewal was unwarranted.
At its worst, Rowling's writing is
harmless, droll fantasy fiction that doesn't diminish the genre or
rouse controversy with thematic sharp edges. While I tend to get
bogged down and go a little blurry on witches and warlocks—in
reference to Anne Rice, a bookish friend once confided to me over a
double espresso, "I just can't do goblins," and I nodded my
emphatic agreement—Rowling gives these kiddie-pleasers just
enough snap and human foible to make them viable.
She seems
quite pleased with her invention of referential, onomatopoetic terms
and names: in the shadow of headmaster Dumbledore, Potter attends the
sorcerer's school Hogwarts where he plays the soccer-like game
Quidditch and is taught to fly a broom by Madam Hooch. While this
cloys after a while, a measure of slack is due Rowling. She is, after
all, writing for children, who are fond of words that tickle your
mouth when you say them. And I suppose mouth tickling is a better way
to keep readers' attention than stooping to scatology.
In
her stronger passages, Rowling's writing is clean, letting her
well-crafted, archetypical characters do their thing unencumbered. At
these times, the narrative unspools elegantly. Her humor is dry and
typically Scottish, which serves the material well and gives adult
readers fuel to push forward through repetitious descriptions of
lavish suppers and drooling, three-headed dogs.
While
Rowling has broken sales records, she's hasn't exactly turned new soil
thematically. This is far from the first coming-of-age yarn about a
young man with supernatural powers, the concept stretching back to
ancient mythology and having been successfully exploited by a number
of writers in the twentieth century.
Most notable among
these, as a point of comparison for Ms. Rowling, is the aforementioned
American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. A literary-minded mom like Rowling,
Le Guin sat down in 1968, thirty years before Harry Potter's debut,
and turned out A Wizard of Earthsea, the first of a four book
fantasy series which, like Potter, is centered on a young wizard and
his powers.
In place of Harry, Le Guin gives us Sparrowhawk,
whose name suggests many of the stylistic differences between the
works of the two novelists, and may hold a clue not only to Potter's
success, but to why Le Guin never achieved Rowling's astonishing
readership with her own series:
While Harry is a mousy
product of familiar, modern-day suburbia, Sparrowhawk hails from the
mythical island of Gont in the Northeast Sea (an illustrator was
employed to create some not very useful ink pen maps for Le Guin's
1991 reprinting), a bleak, craggy place, in an unidentified,
medieval-feeling “time of legends.” A loner and, viewed from
a distance even by his author, Sparrowhawk is hard to get to know. His
powers separate him from us, whereas Harry's invite us closer.
Both
books find their young protagonists uncomfortably bound in small-town
environments, and with the help of mid-level magicians, they are each
transported to schools for wizardry, where their precocity leads them
into trouble.
Harry is easily the more likeable of the two.
He's someone you'd have to dinner (though a hot meal is probably the
last thing he'd need after the umpteenth button-bursting banquet at
Hogwarts.) Sparrowhawk is elusive and darker. He'd less likely have
washed recently, and I don't imagine he'd be very good at telling a
joke (humor not being Le Guin's long suit either.)
But while
noble Harry involves himself in the investigation of a sinister plot
at school, Sparrowhawk is the creator of his own woes, his predicament
born of arrogance and immaturity—reaching beyond the grasp of his
imperfectly developed powers, he conjures a dark spirit which he will
spend the rest of the book hunting, lest it take over his own body and
will and use his gifts for evil.
Sparrowhawk is drawn with
greater complexity than Harry—and is certainly more conflicted—which
makes him better fodder for literary dissection. But a conflicted
protagonist is clearly not what drives book sales in this genre and
this market. (What does this bode, one wonders, for
George Lucas’ Star
Wars films? Can star-crossed Jedi moppet Annakin Skywalker
slide towards Darth Vader-dom in the upcoming Attack of the Clones,
without losing his universal appeal? No wonder Lucas told
light-hearted Luke’s story first.)
And, for the record,
the kid in line at the bookstore was right. Unlike The Wizard of
Earthsea, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone kept me
up, laughing out loud and turning pages, until well past my bedtime.
A
Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Trilogy)
by Ursula K. Le Guin,
Ruth Robbins (Illustrator)
Bantam Spectra; Paperback; 182 pages
Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1)
by J. K. Rowling,
Mary Grandpre (Illustrator)
Scholastic Trade; Paperback; 312 pages
Ursula K. Le Guin's sixth book in the Earthsea cycle,
The Other Wind, was published in September 2001 in a hardcover
edition by Harcourt, Inc.
The Other Wind
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Harcourt,
Inc; 256 pages
$25.00
Photo © Copyright
Warner Brothers
Related: Star
Wars: The Phantom Menace
Ben
Patrick Johnson is a writer and free-lance journalist in Los Angeles.
His novel, The Valley of Smoke, will be published by Palari
Press in 2002.
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Nouveau: Books
