I had never read any of the Harry Potter books until this summer. It is not that I have anything against wizards or witches -I have always been a great fan of Celtic literature, and am a sucker for anything linked to The Knights of the Round Table, King Arthur, Excalibur, Lancelot and Merlin!...to the extent that I find Monty Python’s cinematographic interpretation of the theme a rather vulgar disgrace to humanity’s imagination. However, fantastic literature, -the type written by Edgar Allan Poe, or by Guy de Maupassant-, or any literature containing spectacular creatures and alien worlds, like The Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, or science fiction in general, is really not my cup of tea…with the exception of the rather poetic Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.
What bothered me more was the fact that there would be more than one Harry Potter book and what if I read the first one and liked it and then had to wait for the next one to be released? I do think I am patient…except when it comes to books: for instance, I am constantly checking whether Andrei Makine is publishing a new book or not; I love his style of writing so much that I never can get enough of it, and then devour the published book within 2 days…to then mourn until the next one is released. Such is my literary enthusiasm that it leads me to abysses of despair when a favorite author takes his or her time to fill my hunger.
So when the final, number 7, Harry Potter book was released on July 22, I knew I could start digging into the series. Now, for those of you curious to know how long it took me to read all 7 books: 10 days exactly, and I was not on vacation, but since we do not own cable or satellite TV in our household, entertainment is rather Spartan, and I read every day from about 7:00pm until 2:00am, and more at weekends.
And…I fell in love with Harry Potter! The books brought back memories of other books of course, like the Mallory School series I avidly read when I was 12, about a British boarding-school. J. K. Rowling’s genius is to have used some recurrent themes dear to an Englishman or woman’s heart, such as…boarding school, or the witches and wizards whose fates have been legendary since Camelot and Stonehenge, or even Quidditch which is a transformed polo game, broomsticks instead of horses! From book 1 to book 7, the intrigue darkens, and here again the author smartly called on the eternal fight between good and evil.
What qualifies it originally as children’s literature disappears with the death of a young contestant in Book 4, and from that book on, Harry Potter targets a more mature audience in my opinion. Blood purity, which is a major motive in the series reminds the reader of the 20th and 21st centuries past and ongoing ethnic cleansing…”Mudblood” stands for all the racist epithets that have been proffered since the Armenian Genocide, or even earlier the Jewish Pogroms in Tzarist Russia.
It is also an interesting fact that Book 1 had to have a different title in the US. The original title, as published in the UK, is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. In the US, it becomes ‘…and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, as if it would be politically incorrect to assign an enchanted stone to a philosopher…when anyone who has studied the Middle Ages knows that philosopher meant alchemist, therefore the stone!
Lots of critics wonder whether J. K. Rowling has not sold her soul to the devil. Surf the internet and read the satanic accusations launched against her by some right-wing Christians: one becomes ashamed of calling oneself a Christian in front of so much ignorance and lack of culture! Some even say that there is no God in her books. There might not be the conventional idea of God known to most of us, but if we look deeper, we realize that because Love (of Harry’s parents for their son, of Harry for his friends) is omnipresent in the books, with another very religious theme such as sacrifice (that is what Harry’s mother does to protect him!), and if we contemplate the fact that God is love, then J.K. Rowling’s books contain more God’s presence than Tolkien’s or C.S. Lewis’s oeuvres.
Others have trouble grasping the extent and the depth of her imagination: how can one woman (on top of it all!) have thought of so many characters, monsters, creatures, and so on? Well, this summer, after having achieved my goal of reading all the Harry Potters, I went for my routine early morning run. I happened to be running in a small village along the banks of the river Lot. If you have spent some time in France in July and August, you know that it was rather crispy and cold, not at all a remake of the 2003 heat wave. As I was running over the bridge, I looked at the river and thought: “Dementors!”…I saw dementors coming out of the river! And that is when I realized that the inspiration for some of the creatures found in the Harry Potter books come from an acute observation of Nature: my dementors may have been J. K. Rowling’s ones too, I will never know, but my dementors were those thin to thick clouds of fog that raise from the river waters when the water temperature is higher than the air…and with the winds they looked like creatures from another world, armies of them, slowly advancing to give me the Kiss of Death!
It is time for all of us grumpy grown-ups to rediscover the joy of imagination. Enjoy!
Sarah Pickup-Diligenti © 2007
