Harry Potter and the Re-reading Critic

The best thing about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is knowing that there are six more books after it that more fully develop the story. On its own, Harry Potter 1 is a rather bland read. It is intriguing enough, however, that the promise of more depth and detail in the following six books makes it worth the few hours takes to read the first short novel. The story of Harry’s development from a child into a young adult is, of course, timeless and engaging, but just from a technical standpoint, anyone who enjoys arc-driven storytelling will find plenty to admire throughout the course of all seven books.

From the first, I was dead set against reading any of the Harry Potter novels. They were children’s books; I don’t read children’s books. Widespread hyperbolic comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a saga I absolutely adore and have read many times, didn’t help any. It sounded to me like blasphemy to state that anything could be as good as—or even worse, better than—LOTR. Such comparisons are ridiculous, of course, since HP and LOTR are very different literary animals. LOTR is a heroic saga in the mold of the ancient sagas of myth and legend (especially the Norse sagas); HP is a seven-volume coming-of-age tale. The two books share some themes and, of course, magic as a plot device and reality of their literary worlds, but otherwise, comparing the two is like comparing Star Wars with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When I did eventually give HP #1 a chance several years ago, I wasn’t impressed. After re-reading it in the wake of finishing the seventh book, I am a little more impressed by Rowling’s skill, but the story of the first book, on it’s own, is still fails to move me significantly. In it, Harry is 11 years old, and the story is written to that level of reader: descriptions are suggestive rather than detailed, dialogue is sometimes stilted, and the plot is episodic in the extreme. Each book covers one year in Harry’s life at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; the first book is only 309 pages long, and in it, Rowling has to plant many, many seeds that will enable the following six books to flower effectively. Every character (and there are dozens of supporting players) is new and therefore must be introduced quickly, but effectively enough so that when they show up in later books (and some don’t show up again until book 7) they will be remembered. The plot of HP #1 has to work on its own, yet leave enough unanswered questions to keep readers coming back at least for the second book, which then has to hook readers even more deeply so they’ll come back for #3, and so on. And perhaps most significantly, Rowling has to create an entirely new world and make it believable. On all of these counts, Rowling succeeds in an efficient, workmanlike fashion.

Harry, the Dursleys, Ron, Hermione, and various other “minor” Hogwarts characters like Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy, and Severus Snape are efficiently and colorfully brought to life—and although they have small roles in book #1, they will play important roles in the books to come. Even characters who only show up once in this book will play a significant role in the final book—but to tell who they are at this point would spoil the fun. The story these characters bring to life does work on its own—Is the powerful sorcerer’s stone being kept at Hogwarts, and is Snape out to steal it for his old master, Lord Voldemort?—but, since Harry is only 11 years old and just a novice at magic, he gets by on luck as much as he does skill. His bravery, a central characteristic of Harry’s, also get him through many tight spots, but most of his bravery is geared toward things an 11-year-old boy, magical or not, could reasonably accomplish on his own: breaking school rules, standing up to bullies, jumping on the back of a rampaging troll (well, OK, the last one isn’t typical 11-year-old behavior, but even in that scene, he survives mainly through luck).

Of course, Harry and his friends are triumphant at the end of the book (like there is ever any doubt in the reader’s mind they won’t be), but Rowling leaves plenty of unanswered questions: How will the evil Lord Voldemort threaten Harry again? How will the inevitable showdown between Draco and Harry happen? Who is going to be the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher? Why did Hagrid get expelled from Hogwarts? Some of these questions get answered in book #2, but even as the old mysteries get solved, new ones crop up. In this way, Harry Potter #1 reminds me of the first season of J. Michael Straczynski’s science fiction “novel for television” Babylon 5: lots of exposition and world-building crammed with new characters and plot points, some of which get resolved that season, some of which get resolved in the next season, and some of which carry through four more seasons to the end of the series. And the whole way, more plot points and characters get introduced, develop, and even die. Like the first season of Straczynski’s masterpiece, the first Harry Potter book often seems clunky, bland, and uninspired. But these kinds of problems are almost unavoidable. Stories have to start somewhere, and the effectiveness of the threads used at the beginning cannot be fully judged until the entire story has been laid out and the full tapestry can be appreciated in its entirety. In this sense, re-reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is most enjoyable because of the seemingly insignificant details dropped in—a name here or device here, a plot point or setting there—that anyone who has finished the series will recognize as extremely important later on.

Much of what becomes important later on in the series is the wizarding world that Rowling has created: Hogwarts, of course, and Quidditch and Muggles and wands and potions and the Ministry of Magic and an entire history going back hundreds of years that is only hinted at in the first book, but no less real because of it. Harry’s non-wizarding life with the Dursleys is painfully real (they hate him and make him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, for starters), his wonder at discovering the wizarding world of his birthright is just as believable because readers are introduced to it through the simple faith of an 11-year-old’s eyes. The prose, stilted and bland as it sometimes is, perfectly captures Harry’s point of view and acceptance of a magical world parallel to the regular, Muggle world we are all familiar with. Once Harry accepts it (which he does easily), we do, too. Still, the first book has to cram so much of the world into so few pages that we only get a quick glimpse of this intriguing place, and the best thing about this quick glimpse is that it whets out appetites for more.

In short, Rowling gets the job done, creates a mildly entertaining story, and leaves room for plenty of development. Were it not for the assurance that in six more books all of the characters, settings and plots would get more detailed and more complex (by at least one or two orders of magnitude), the first book would hardly be memorable at all. Every book is longer than the previous one, except for books 6 and 7, which are both a hair shorter than #5, but by that time, Rowling has planted almost all of the seeds she needs to plant to make Book 7 the immensely satisfying and mature conclusion of what started with a mildly entertaining and efficiently-written little children’s novel.