It’s the Harry Potter weekend here: Carl and I are going to see the movie (gasp) in a couple hrs (gasp) on a date (gasp) without babe (gasp). First movie I’ve seen in a theatre since Noah outgrew Movies for Mommies shortly before he turned 8 mos.
And yes I read the book – speed read, so will want to reread later, but I wanted to get through it.
I found it very satisfying overall. I’m not a rabid fan but I think the books are great and the characters and world amazing, and I hoped for a good conclusion and got it. That there were obvious nods to what I will vaguely call the “basic Anglo-Saxon epics” doesn’t bother me in the slightest; it fits the genre wonderfully.
Most amusing thing I have read: that Rowling is a big fat heteronormative nasty and should have at least allowed for a gay Sirius/Lupin or something relationship. As a non-heteronormative writer, I have to shout out to you people: no one is required to write gay storylines into their books any more than I am required to write ones about say, post-partum depression. Write your own goddamn books.
The last sentence is actually also a shout out to anyone who is going to say “X should have happened.” I do think that as in a lot of the HP books, there was a bit more exposition than there had to be, and the way she kept the point of view tight around Harry and didn’t do something spiffy with communicating to Hogwarts or something really weakened the Snape development – but these are overall understandable choices, especially given the rush she’s had to finish the series in the amount of time she had. (Creative ways to show rather than tell can take years to appear in the brain.) I’m fine with discussing the technical aspects of the book.
But I hate the fan tendency (in myself as well, which I have had in the past) to get fussed about what the characters did, etc. That’s non-writing writer talk; if you want to have the privilege of deciding what characters will do you have to write your own books.
As an editor this has been a hard lesson for me but I have come to learn it – there is a world of difference between saying “this wasn’t written in a way that I understood where this character decision was coming from” – fair – and saying “this character would never do that!” – unfair. Okay I don’t edit fiction, but the point is you can question the writer on clarity, structure, etc. – but if you are starting to rewrite the whole thing, something is not on.
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I also read a kind of amusing/annoying discussion of whether the HP books are “good” for adults. They are not adult literature exactly – in today’s marketing/audience-driven classification they are solidly YA, I’d say. So evaluating them against Robertson Davies’s coming of age tales is really stupid. But really I think they’re actually an epic, and I don’t see any reason to make epic an age-specific category. It’s just that you can’t find “epic” as a shelf category at Borders/Chapters.*
So I thought it was funny that people were trying to defend them as adult literature or denigrate them as a children’s stuff. And sad too.
This was going on under a discussion about Michael Moore’s truthfulness as a film maker and how he lies and George Bush lies too! And I thought – how crazy our/American culture is, that the difference between lying in a film (or exaggerating) and lying in order to go to war and kill people is erased into some kind of moral blank like: Liars are bad neener neener!
Maybe we need more epics around, I dunno.
* As a side note of interest, up here Raincoast Books, which was a small press until it happened to buy the rights for this little book out of Britain called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (we still have philosophers and queues up here in Canada, you see), publishes the HP books in two covers – the regular ones and the “adult” ones that are more somber.
