Writing a column, one quickly realises, is like doing stand-up comedy in a soundproofed box in a theatre with the lights turned off. If someone is out there, they are invisible and inaudible. There is no laughter, no applause. Good jokes die in the silence along with the bad ones. Nobody throws flowers. Nobody throws dead cats.
The silence is understandable. Those who have enjoyed a piece dare not write, lest they lose their minds and dignity in the boggy mire of fan-letter cliché (”I’ve never written a fan letter, but I just wanted …”), and besides, by the middle of the following week, the watery pleasures they enjoyed on the weekend have been entirely diluted. Those who have found nothing to admire in the same piece simply plunge on, hoping for better.
But every so often there is a flash in the darkness, a muffled thud in the silence. Because sometimes, if one’s claws are very sharp and one’s rag particularly frayed, it is possible to write a column that not only makes people angry, but makes them angry enough to throw dead cats.
Some particularly ripe moggies have sailed over the cyber fence and squelched into my inbox through the years, flung by the religiously incensed, the corporately castrated and the politically yoked. Some have been well aimed, tossed by expert tossers. Others were hysterically hurled, little more than the results of banging a fevered, pimply forehead against a keyboard.
But nothing has come close to the wave of protest I have received in the last few weeks since declaring that JK Rowling was Britain’s most celebrated typist. Not even the Absa copywriters got people this angry.
From all over the world the emails streamed in, some eloquent, most babbling, listing my defects as a writer and a human being. Many were smugly certain that I was jealous, leaving me smugly certain that only fools equate royalties with literary merit. Most floundered around in kindergarten, self-defeating arguments: yes, they said earnestly, Potter was childish and derivative, but did it matter if people were reading? Crack dealers, take note. All, without exception, called the column an ”attack”, as if I had ambushed an elderly spinster tottering down to the orphanage with a basketful of gingerbread men.
Finally, in a 2 000-word tome laced with every sentimental conceit known to mediocre literature, an aspiring novelist (almost perspiring) declared that Rowling had overcome ”insurmountable odds as a single mother”. Having run his sexist colours up his flagpole, he promptly saluted by demanding the email address of my editor so that demands for my dismissal could be sent to ”him”. One paused to wonder whether he would surmount his insurmountable odds as easily as Rowling seems to have surmounted hers, but his prognosis looked as grim as his prose.
It was a fitting end to a stream of rage, an outpouring of passion, whose emotion was directly proportional to its inability to control (indeed, to fully comprehend) language.
It should have been depressing. It should have confirmed one’s worst fears about the state of the chattering classes: that we have embraced childish pursuits; that we can no longer distinguish between what is popular and what is good; that we would rather take 15 minutes to defend a children’s book than take 15 minutes to browse Amazon in search of three masterpieces whose combined volumes contain fewer pages than half a Potter, but infinitely more worth.
It should have made one despair. And yet, through all the bluster and outrage, it was affirming, even pleasant. People, it turns out, are still willing to defend a book. They are prepared to write, some well and some badly, and to shake a fist at someone who has affronted their taste and their sensibilities.
Most of what I find depressing about Potter is its suburban banality that leaks through into passivity. For someone raised on the real masters of fantasy and magic ‒ Le Guin, Byatt, even Tolkein — Potter seems supremely passive; derivative themes handed at a digestible consistency to a public well briefed about what to expect; the books ultimately turned into that most passive of all art forms, the special-effects blockbuster. And so perhaps I made the mistake of assuming the Potter’s fans would be passive too, willing to let my insults go, just as most of us let the insults of advertisers, corporations and governments go unchallenged also.
Not so. They came in force, and they came hard. True, none could argue why I was wrong to dislike the books, because argument requires depth of reading, and depth of reading is the enemy of the best-selling paperback. Most urged me to ”read the books”: they could not imagine that someone could read Potter and not be instantly adoring. One challenged me to ”come back in 30 years” to see whether Potter was still important, as if it is now.
But they were willing to stand up to — and even insult — a complete stranger, all for the love of their damned books. And there is something hopeful in that.
I am not sorry that I expressed an intense dislike for Harry Potter. But I am also not sorry that his followers expressed an intense dislike for me.
Tom Eaton is on leave for the next three weeks