It's Gonna Reach Out and Grab Ya

I read the bulk of the 6th volume of the Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) last Thursday and Friday so that I could see the movie with my wife if afforded the opportunity. Like kismet, and appropos of nothing, Granny volunteered to babysit on Saturday night, so we took in the movie that very evening.

I dug Volume 6, enjoying it in a fuller fashion than the previous books in the series. I think this was because I'd read the first 150 or so pages prior to Christmas, and prior to receiving a whole pile of books that I'd been working through since. The first part of each Harry Potter book tends towards the tedious -- Harry's Muggle relatives are horrible and disgusting people, the evil villans are meanies, teachers can be unfair. By getting the first part out of the way, completely forgetting about it, then returning to the book 6 months later, I bypassed that problem.

But Volume 6 goes on to really raise the stakes for the characters, and led me right into Volume 7 (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), which I have now also finished. And enjoyed.

I was a latecomer to the Potter phenomenon, and didn't read any of the books at all until just before either the second movie came out. They were low priority books for me -- I wanted to read each subsequent volume before seeing the movies, but was otherwise in no rush. They're decent books, fast reads, and entertaining -- one turns the pages. On Friday night, I read 300 pages of Volume 6 in 5 hours, which (for me, who reads slowly and in small chunks) is like passing the speed of sound on a tricycle.

It's hard to fault the books, partially because they're kind of designed to be critic-proof. If they're a bit too pat and goodsie-badsie for serious adult literature, it's because they are meant for kids. If they are too dark or violent for kids books, it's because the characters are growing and developing into adulthood. And anyone that grumbles too loudly about them will likely be accused of elitism or anti-populism, because the books made a gazillion dollars and everybody in the world has read and loved them. And maybe the Snapely impulse to sneer at Harry Potter is elitist and anti-populist. (I'd be okay with that. In my world, 5,000,000 Elvis fans can ABSOLUTELY be wrong.)

The Potter plots are almost all developed by withholding information (what Snape is up to, say, or why a particular room is off limits), but this is pretty well true of any mystery or suspense story. The early books cointained a clever humor and a tongue-in-cheek approach to the magic of the Potter world (the "Pensieve," for example, or "The Mirror of Erisde"), and much of that got squeezed out as the books got thicker and thicker to accommodate the forumula of covering a Hogwarts academic year in a single book.

The books are a bit like the Mee Goreng noodles at the Chinese restaurant we patronize -- they're tasty and easy to digest, but you can't expect them to stick with you for very long. The early books recapped the previous volumes to an absurd degree, but the later volumes presume you've retained total recall. A lot of the references to Harry's earlier adventures were lost on me, even though I'd read them all.

Still, I'm pleased to let you know that, as far as I'm concerned, and J.K. Rowling's The Compleat Harry Potter is less engrossing than Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I'll take my urban fantasy both Dickensian and arch, please.