leilukin’s Anti-Harry Potter and Anti-J. K. Rowling Masterlist reminded me that I had read these books back in the day. I had aged out of the target demographic long before the first book had been published, of course, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Not when I’m a grown-ass man who prefers playing video games to watching television. 😛
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
I was never a Harry Potter fan, but my wife liked the movies so I read the books so we’d have more to talk about. I wanted the whole story, not just the bits that made it into the movies. Also, Catherine had read a lot of the obscure shit I’m into. Fair’s fair, right? She’s listened to audiobooks of Morgaine, Elric, and the Acts of Caine, and she slogged through my ratty old paperback of Wizard’s First Rule, so it was no great hardship on my part to read Harry Potter.
Or so I had thought at the time. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books make Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth novels look like towering works of literature in comparison, rather than the didactic ideological tracts they became after Wizard’s First Rule, and Goodkind wrote like the unholy bastard love child of John Norman and Ayn Rand. I’m certainly not about to re-read Harry Potter so I can talk shit about them or their author.
What had struck me hardest when I read the books — in addition to the ‘we love being slaves’ bullshit with the house elves and the goblin bankers as walking, talking anti-Semitic tropes stacked four feet high and wrapped in Army-surplus trench coats — was the way Rowling romanticized an English boarding school tradition in which child abuse was absolutely endemic.
Think rum, buggery, and the lash
, but without the rum.
As you might be aware, this system of posh boarding schools and the abuses tolerated there have been blamed for producing a succession of dysfunctional (at best) leaders in both government and business.
public schools in the UK
There might not have been any explicit beatings in the Harry Potter novels, and Dumbledore might not have molested Harry, but the way the adults in the setting let the kids take the lead in fighting Voldemort was unconscionable. And, frankly, dealing with the Death Eaters — basically upper-crust British fascists with wands — should have been a job for MI5, the UK’s internal security service. Instead, we have Dumbledore manipulating Harry and his friends the way Gandalf manipulated Bilbo and later Frodo.
fascists in the UK
Show me a wizard in gray and I’ll show you a humbug who — to paraphrase Robert Browning — lied in every word.
I. My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.
I suppose, however, that since Tolkien may have been drawing on the Norse god Odin in his gray pilgrim aspect that this trickster archetype is almost an obligatory figure in this sort of fantasy fiction.
While Michael Moorcock originally wrote Epic Pooh in 1978 and revised it for his study of epic fantasy, Wizardry and Wild Romance, he was attacking a particular strain of conservative/reactionary thought in fantasy fiction that I had also found evident in Harry Potter. I have always appreciated Moorcock’s essay, if only because it makes my discomfort with a lot of fantasy tropes feel seen, but I’m not sure the man has actually taken the time to properly read Tolkien. If he had, his critique might be both more substantive and much harsher.
As for Harry Potter, surely there are better works of fantasy for children to read. One might recommend Diane Duane’s Young Wizards, for example. At least none of Duane’s heroes decided that they wanted to be cops when they grew up.
One might also recommend Diana Wynne Jones (author of Howl’s Moving Castle), Robin McKinley (author of The Blue Sword), Susan Cooper (author of The Dark is Rising), L. J. Cohen (author of Derelict), Ursula K. Le Guin (author of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas), C. L. Moore (author of Shambleau), or even Robert Heinlein’s juveniles (which were written before he had become immune to criticism).