Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

I had been hearing about Harry Potter since this book was published in 1997, but something about it put me off reading it. I think the fact it was marketed as a children’s book, plus the gigantic paean campaign lionizing the author as a housewife who just created the greatest work of children’s literature EVAR!!!111oneoneoneeleventyone!, just set off my cynical marketeer alert, and when the further marketing of “it makes children want to read!” started I’d had my fill. Literally every snippet I’d heard from the book’s text in reviews, online readings, etc. told me this was not the book for me.

Then I moved to China in 2001.

Doing something this extreme rewrites a lot of calculations. At the time there was a decided lack of reading material in English, so the vanishingly small expat community in the city I wound up in at first hoarded whatever written English they could find or bring or have sent to them and circulated the books so we could actually have something, ANYTHING, to read. That is how Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone wound up in my hands.

I swore to give it a fair shake. I would drop, as much as is humanly possible, my marketing-based aversion to the book and judge it on its own merits. And it turned out I didn’t need the marketing-based aversion. There was plenty of aversion in the first 50 pages of this grotesquely verbose yet somehow thin novel.

First, the plot. Another “Chosen One” story. Another “despised outcast is secretly a badass” story. Harry can do no wrong, except for those times he does wrong so he can learn a quick lesson so that later in the story he does right. This is straight-up paint by numbers plotting. If you’ve ever read any cheap fantasy novel before you’ve read this story. Hell, go to the fantasy racks of any bookstore in the 90s, blindfold yourself, and shoot an arrow into the books and you’ll get arrested for a great number of charges, likely, but you’ll also certainly penetrate at least four novels that have exactly this plot, right down to the ludicrous “love saved you from the big baddie” ending.

THIS was the “innovative story” that captured not just children (who pretty much by definition have no taste because they’ve never had the chance to form it) but also adults!? THIS was the saviour of reading culture?! Frankly I’d rather have lived in an illiterate society …

... (Protip: I WON!) ...

… than a society who thought this tripe was good.

And this is only the plot. The twee “British WHIMSY!” (yes, shouted, likely by someone who’s got a garbage pail over his head and is otherwise dressed as a knight) was tiresome. The train to Hogwarts (and … uh … what’s with the bloody names!?) is on platform 9¾. Get it? GET IT!? It’s fractional because ha ha whimsy! The book is full of this kind of dreary nonsense. It tries to get passed off as whimsical fantasy but it wears out its welcome quickly. The sorting hat. The pictures. The house elves. The whole British boarding school vibe, with literally every screeching stereotype of a Bildungsroman torn from the pages of better stories, stripped of all subtlety, and thrown together into one gigantic mish-mash that is a tonal mess. And then on top of that you throw the Quidditch game, as the replacement for British boarding school field hockey or rugby or whatnot, a game whose rules make zero sense whatsoever.

So why did I say “tonal mess”? Well, let’s look at some of the … ah … social assumptions. Hermione is bossy because a woman telling people what to do is being bossy. Others (specifically male others) telling people what to do are leaders. Or just assertive. And … was I the only one skeeved out a bit by the servility of the house elves? Or the … I won’t be putting too fine a point on this … stereotypical Jewishness of the gnomes? And let’s not forget the dismissively arrogant term “Muggles” tossed around as an epithet all the time.

From beginning to end this book was painful for me to read and when the time came to swap around our libraries again I gladly passed it on so that I would never have to read that ever again.

So as for what to read instead?

Better Books

If you want a classic children’s story that will be a dramatic eye-opening when read again later as an adult for nostalgia’s sake, it’s hard to beat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. What a child gets from this whimsical story is enormously different from what an adult gets reading it. I was positively obsessed by this book when I was a little girl. When I came back to it, just for fun, at the age of 25 or so … ah … yeah. Very different book. Despite the same words. If you want a modern children’s story that doesn’t have the forced whimsy, the incoherent sport at the core, and a plot that isn’t a tired, recycled dead horse beaten to fine mist, there’s Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. There’s no Chosen One plot armour. There’s just a fiercely independent little girl who has to claw her way, using only grit and determination, through a universe that actively wants to crush her; a child navigating a deeply coherent, rigorously thought-out world filled with genuine stakes.

If you’re an adult and want to read classic epic fantasy at an adult level, I’d recommend J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for fine world-building and complex theme. (You’ll find the plot very ordinary, but that’s because most fantasy novels since him basically followed his tune well into the '90s before branching off finally.) If you want a different take on classic epic fantasy, writers like Ursula K. LeGuin did fantastic stuff, and the Earthsea novels are a fascinating example of epic fantasy that isn’t Lord of the Rings and its imitators. (They’re also nice in that the protagonists aren’t all white and European in style.) For more modern takes on epic fantasy, there’s N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, a series that takes the … ah … problematical social structures of Hogwarts and Rowling’s books and places them under a microscope where you can’t squirm your way out of the implications. Here there’s no Chosen One for whom all others serve as whimsical backdrop or Pure Evil™ conflict. They are instead complex people navigating their own way through a profoundly unjust world.