Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary. A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult – until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it’s thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it’s something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren’t students worn out after practicing spells?
{snip}
Perhaps, as some friends have argued, I am expecting too much from a children’s book. But I don’t think that is right. Children are great systemisers, which is why they watch the same shows and read the same books over and over again: they are trying to put all the details together into a coherent picture. “I could do things no one else could do!” is a great thrill; but so is “I know how this works”. You can’t say that about Harry Potter, because Rowling doesn’t seem to know herself. To the extent that there is any system at all, it is the meanest sort of Victoriana, the fantasy world of a child Herbert Spencer. There is a hereditary aristocracy of talent, and I am secretly at its apex. There is an elite school almost nobody can go to, and I am one of the chosen. People fall quite neatly into the categories of good, bad, or clueless, we are the good ones who get to run things in the end. That’s powerful fantasy stuff, which is why it’s so common.
Via Gerry Canavan.
She’s not wrong. There are considerable charms to the Harry Potter books, but as an internally consistent and fully realized world, they do fall a little short.
It’s like they’re not even rolling a skill check and subtracting the casting cost from their magic pool!
I’ve never read the Potter books, but my inner nerd would have trouble dealing with a magic system that isn’t quantified.
Tolken had a bit of the same problem, but he was developing a whole world over the course of his lifetime. In an earlier book, some great Elf kills 5 Balrogs before dying and by LotR it’s an unstoppable bohemoth. I was watching a video on youtube of Gaiman talking about Lovecraft, and the thing he says that resonates throught history about his books is not the writing itself, but the world-view which he created. It’s similar with Tolken; his writing was boring, but nearly the entirity of fantasy sits in its shadow and lives in the world he created. Undoubtadly, Rowling is a more skilled writer, but I don’t think she’ll last the test of time because she didn’t fundamentally change anything. Spell names borrowed from Latin? A freaking bag of holding? The magical equivilant of super powers for children? Yes, wizards had to have been young at some point. She’s very imaginative, or at least clever and inventive, but in a good role-playing game sort of way. Like finding a pile of gold coind that are actually disguised insects that eat all your clothing.
I don’t know that Rowling is the better writer than Tolkien. Certainly, in my opinion, the more entertaining writer. Reading The Lord of the Rings, I always had the distinct impression that Tolkien was an historian and linguist first, a storyteller second. His was a meticulously well crafted world, fully imagined, yet for me it often failed to come to life on the page. Whereas, for all their considerable charms, Rowling’s books could do with a little more fleshing out and thinking through.
Because I do think you’re right. Harry Potter, the marketing and book-selling phenomenon, will have a long-lasting impact, but I don’t think kids twenty years from now will still be reading the series just as enthusiastically as they are now. I can’t imagine Rowling’s books will disappear from memory completely, especially if she goes on to write something else, but I would be surprised if they really stood the test of time.
I think Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books exist as a happy middle — the meticulously detailed world-building of Tolkien, but with a much better sense of storytelling. (Plus, I think she’s a better writer than either of the two combined.)
It’s funny you should compare Rowling to roleplaying games. Jeremy’s recently been doing the same thing…
She’s not wrong.
Oh, but she is, in many places:
why is [magic] taught at rows of desks?
Is it? Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts classes, held up as exemplars of good teaching, are pretty hands-on. Potions are taught at cauldrons, which seems appropriate. Care of Magical Creatures is taught on the grounds. It’s the History class that’s the most desk-based, but that’s not a magic class as such. (There’s also the the flawed Defense classes taught by Umbridge (Book 6) and Lockhart (Book 2), but these are pointedly flawed.)
if [academic skill] were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry
Hermione is, in fact, a better wizard than Harry. Part of what makes Harry a sympathetic character is that he is not, in fact, at the apex of a “hereditary aristocracy of talent.” His grades (we see them in Book 6) are mostly average. Part of what makes Snape (another superior wizard) so sympathetic is that he is absolutely correct when he pegs Harry as a celebrity underachiever, gliding through on luck and pluck.
I also think that Rowling’s consistent treatment of Muggle-born wizards and critique of pure-blood genealogies repeatedly undercuts the notion that magic in her world is a “hereditary aristocracy”—note that the characters who subscribe to such a world view are all towards the evil side.
To characterize wizards as the ones “who get to run things” and Muggles as “clueless” also seems to ignore some of Rowling’s willful drawing of balance between the two groups (parallel prime ministers, different areas of expertise, etc.)