Two weeks after the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix, Rowling has become the subject of a damning indictment by the the
British author AS Byatt.
Writing in the New York Times, Byatt dismissed the latest instalment of
the boy wizard’s adventures as below par ”ersatz magic” which lacked the
skill of the great children’s writers and catered for readers with stunted
imaginations.
The adventure became the fastest selling book of all time when it was
published last month.
But according to Byatt: ”Ms Rowling’s magic world has no place for the
numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to
TV cartoons and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening)
mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.”
She said children were understandably attracted to fantasies of escape and
empowerment but the books lacked the ”compensating seriousness” of
novelists such as Susan Cooper and JRR Tolkien.
Byatt, best known for her novel Possession, said she believed adults had
become fans because the books allowed them to regress into the comfort zone
of childhood.
”Ms Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation, that hasn’t known
and doesn’t care about mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not
of the real wild,” Byatt said. ”They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz
magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz
with what imagination they had.”
She also said the books were ”derivative” as Rowling’s world was ”made
up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of
children’s literature – from the jolly hockey sticks school story to Roald
Dahl, from Star Wars to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper”.
Byatt’s comments brought a sharp response from the literary website
Salon which described her review as a ”goblet of bile”. The website’s
critic, Charles Taylor, said the argument was ”just what you’d expect from
someone shouldering the mantle of high culture” and accused her of
snobbery.
”Loath as I am to resurrect the old canard accusing writers or
critics who dislike a popular work of art of being jealous, in Byatt’s
case, it might be true,” he said.
Others were more sympathetic to Byatt. The author Fay Weldon praised her
courage for speaking out.
”She is absolutely right that it is not what the
poets hoped for, but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable,
everyday, useful prose,” Weldon said.
She said she found the sight of adults reading the Potter series troubling,
adding: ”Byatt does have apoint in everything she says but at the same time she
sounds like a bit ofa spoilsport. She is being a party pooper but then the party
pooper is often right.” — Â