When asked if one likes Harry Potter, it is always a temptation to reply that in order to like somebody, one first has to meet them and given JK Rowling’s profound inability to write characters — indeed, to write anything at all — it is clear that I will wait for my introduction to Master Potter in vain.
Of course, one never says this, because the first rule of being well-mannered is never to make one’s company feel uncomfortable. The fact that said company is entirely unschooled in etiquette (evidenced by its panting, lip-licking, monstrously banal questions about one’s literary tastes) is no reason for one to be cruel or dismissive.
The trouble is, of course, that any response to a question about Rowling’s novels can only be destructive and hurtful because the only people who ask these questions are the sorts of emotionally frail proto-intellectuals one finds medicating their eczema in comic shops. They are human gossamer, liable to shred before the faintest breath of criticism, barricaded inside their velvet-lined, cat-fur-thatched, chickpea-scented grottos, lest the warm sunbeams of real life ever fade them into invisibility.
And so when they ask if one likes Potter, the sensitive sophisticate can immediately divine their true questions: did we, for the time it took you to read the book, share the same pleasures, and if we did, does that make you less inclined to judge me for wearing these fey medieval sleeves attached to my middle finger with an elastic band?
But, apparently not all fans of the Potter series are adults. Many children adore the books, I suppose because they don’t know any better: those who point to the immense popularity of the novels among pre-teen readers and equate it with some kind of literary merit, seem to have forgotten that pre-teen readers love doing other things too. Indeed, when they’re not reading, they’re out picking their noses and strapping fireworks to frogs and inserting pick-up sticks into the eyes of their infant siblings and licking snails and throwing rocks at poor people. This is not a demographic anyone wants to be endorsed by.
Still, when they’re not being human filth, they are devouring the apparently endless sludge of platitude, cliché and middle-class smugness dished up by Rowling, which is better than them licking razor-blades and throwing hand-grenades at poor people. Enter the ‘at least they’re reading” school of thought, clung to by parents who have clearly long since surrendered their parenting duties to teachers and television.
It is a philosophy that has spawned a curious piece of logic: if you get children reading schlock, they’ll grow into adults who will explore the classics. This is rather like hoping that if you get your child addicted to crack, he’ll quickly develop a fine nose for wines and a taste for haute cuisine.
In reality, though, the crack addicts stay crack addicts and the pushers — such as Rowling, Dean Koontz and John Grisham — invest in new fur for the dashboards of their Mustangs and continue to bounce through the literary hood on their hydraulic suspension, tucking C-notes into the G-strings of their honeys as they play La Cucaracha on their horns.
Rowling’s fantasy world is dull as dishwater (which, incidentally, is the kind of phrase she’d employ without the faintest blush), but perhaps the critic should ask what alternatives she had.
After all, what fantastical inspirations are available to the middle-class typist looking to make a buck? And frankly, rather she exhumed the festering carcass of some idyllic British never-never land of the 1950s, all scabby with Enid Blyton, than she drew on current events. Who knows what our children might have been reading?
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Afghanistan? The 101st Airborne Division arriving to liberate Hogwarts, introducing new boy Gunnery Sergeant Butch who thrills and fascinates with his ability to choke people unconscious with the heel of his boot? How about Harry Potter and the Half-Pint Prince, in which the wizard and his pals are sent to save the diminutive Prince Albert of Monaco after it emerges that he has been possessed by a spiteful fairy and will surely go bald unless he persuades the kingdom that he is heterosexual?
On second thought, let her write what she likes.