It Says Right Here, On Page 43...
We watched the latest film installment of Harry Potter yesterday. It was adequate. While chunks of the movie don’t match my memory of the book, I confess that’s probably because my memory of the books isn’t very good. I continue to read them more out of a duty to remain culturally literate than for their merits as literature, or out of any real enthusiasm for the content. Apart from the mysteries of Snape’s motivations, about which I am genuinely curious, the characters are two-dimensional, the plotting ham-fisted, and the setting artificial. I never find myself thinking, “If there were a hidden sub-culture of wizards with a system of private schools to teach magic to the young, this is what it would be like.”
But that’s okay, because Harry Potter is a series of children’s books, written for an audience largely unready for capital-L Literature. Characters need to be a little obvious; plot devices can be predictable for an audience that hasn’t seen them over and over. So long as it gets kids reading, I’m for it. But the grown-ups, now… they need to get a grip. We tend to forget that Harry Potter is for kids because so many adults have seized upon Potter as their own obsession. Living as I do in social circles dense with fanboys (or, more accurately in this case, fangirls), I can’t help but pick up a certain amount of background chatter speculating about the conclusion, or about what’s really going on “off-camera.” Speculation is running high. Fans are watching the movie, of course, but everyone already knows what happens, apart from an editorial trimming or two. The real attention is on the next book. You can see some predictions at the naturofan forums and hogwarts.com, if you’re interested.
Set aside the obvious wish-fulfillment fantasies (Dumbledore isn’t dead, Harry will get it on with Hermione, etc.) as unrealistic and motivated more by desire than expectation. What remains tends heavily to painstaking detail that would do a conspiracy theorist proud, taking snippets from three different books from their proper context and threading them together as though Rowling had planned details like this all along.
This approach gives Rowling far too much credit. Like the script-writers for the original Star Trek (also subjected to painstaking fanboy analysis), she’s been too busy trying to get the stories down on paper to be engaged in that kind of error checking. And, while I can’t prove it, the series reads like Rowling has been making up quite a bit as she goes along, taking her cue from the fans. When equally detailed analysis can uncover minor contradictions (and it does), or if fan predictions affect future works, relying on the tiniest details for clues revealing the mind of Rowling is pointless.
We are not dealing with James Joyce, who agonized over individual words to the point where a friend considered seven words a day progress, nor are we dealing with T. S. Eliot, whose works depended on literary reference and self-reference to the point where even he didn’t always know what he was talking about. We are dealing with an author of children’s books, cranking out hundreds of pages per installment to a press hungrier for volume than finesse.
Fan predictions need to bear this in mind. Adults don’t bestow grown-up status on a book simply by reading it. The book remains unchanged; it is the adult who changes, indulging in at least temporary childishness.