A Few Shelves Up [jenna]

Nobody appeared to notice me particularly the day I slipped into the children’s library and hid myself down the R aisle, but I felt conspicuous all the same. Besides being nearly six feet tall and having no small fry in tow, I hadn’t exactly gone in after Curious George and that weighed on my mind as I wandered in the aisles, unsure where to look. It took me nearly an hour of hiding and hesitating to find the Harry Potter books—on their own shelf, of course, neatly and clearly displayed near the front door.

I was one of the original cave-dwellers who never even heard of Harry Potter until the release of #4, and one of the suspicious types (ashamedly) who attended a church showing of Jeremiah Films’ Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged. When I picked up that first book, I fully expected to be bothered by dark thoughts and horrified by pagan ideas. Instead, I found a kinship to Harry and companions that took me through the story in less than two days, kept me reading and re-reading sections all week and made me hardly willing to return it to the library even to get the sequel.

My week with the first book proved to me that the Harry Potter stories are not about witchcraft. Nor does the backdrop of magical imagery bear any real connection with actuality. Harry Potter is to wizardry what Tim Allen’s Galaxy Quest is to space travel: fiction based on fiction. The forms of Harry’s magic—wands, brooms, cauldrons, spells, charms, etc.—may be traced to a wide selection of pagan spiritualities, but the use of those items is drawn from magical fantasy and fairy tale, and J.K. Rowling obviously took care to keep religion out of it. Rowling also pokes sly fun at some of it, having her characters use things like leech juice and beetle eyes in potions, and she openly mocks the “imprecise” art of Divination:

“Harry, at least, felt extremely foolish, staring blankly at the crystal ball, trying to keep his mind empty when thoughts such as ‘this is stupid’ kept drifting across it … Professor Trelawny rustled past.

‘Would anyone like me to help them interpret the shadowy portents within their Orb?’ …

‘I don’t need help’, Ron whispered. ‘It’s obvious what this means. There’s going to be loads of fog tonight.’”

I do, however, have a caveat on the books. Two, actually; neither having anything to do with sorcery, though I have heard it said that “young children cannot tell the difference” and for very young children this is reasonable. The first is simply that there is an element of horror in the books that will trouble people with certain sensitivities. The second is that Harry and friends get away with more than I’d want my children attempting—lying to get out of trouble they shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place, for instance. The stories are PG—I’ll not deny that, and as each novel matures with the characters, this applies particularly to books 4 and up.

But these are good books—great books, even. Friends of mine who have studied literary technique respect the books. I don’t have much expertise there; as a reader and writer, though, I can say that the plot is extremely well-developed, the prose clear and smooth, the use of mystery and humor brilliantly creative, and the scenery well-drawn. And of all the strengths of Ms. Rowling’s writing, her characters come out at the top.

Part of this is due to her apparent choice to keep agenda from cluttering the stories. Her girls behave as girls, rather than displaying unnaturally masculine emotions or fighting tendencies. Her boys think and act like boys, with the physical roughness and without feminine softness. Racial diversity is acknowledged and respect for it championed (centaurs, giants, house-elves), but it is not treated as though ethnicity were in and of itself a virtue. In the current culture of “obligatory reference”, a story that is just a great story without any kind of forced notice is refreshing and respectable.

Through the characters come the great truths and delights of the story. Courage forms a central theme in the books, as the main attribute of the House of Gryffindor and of Harry himself. Yet it is shown in complexity: tainted by evil (Bellatrix Lestrange), and in cowardice shown by the otherwise good (Horace Slughorn); also, courage is not limited to daring personality: Neville Longbottom is a Gryffindor student. Self-sacrificing love and strength of character also define the stories through Lily and James Potter, Dumbledore, Harry, and many others.

Throughout the books, as the good gradually marshal themselves against the rising of the darkest and most powerful forces of evil known to wizard-kind, the army-roster of Davids preparing their stones against Goliath reads not unlike the list of Christ’s disciples, or simple human heroes anywhere. Among the adults are numbered the werewolf, the thief, the poor couple with seven children, the convict, etc.; among the students are the know-it-all, the klutz, the school pranksters, the tabloid editor’s daughter, and more. And the whole admirable, ragtag lot pays honor to one of the brightest, most complex and offbeat personages ever to smile bemusedly out of the pages of popular fiction: Albus Dumbledore.

With the seventh book less than two weeks from release, and all us desperate nerds just days away from finding out who lives and dies, whether Harry’s scar is a horcrux and where Snape’s true loyalty lies, I look forward to reading and re-reading that last book like all the others. When I have my own children, I look forward to sharing Harry with them—gradually, for the stories are something to grow into. The books will wait for my children, a few shelves up; and if my kids gain half the understanding of courage and love and right through those stories as I have—not to mention enjoyment—the read will be worth their while.