The Order of the Harry-Haters

I hate Harry Potter. Let me explain.

In the Republic Plato proposes that poets should be banished from a well-governed state, because poetry can harm the souls of those who listen to it. Plato argues that the souls of children in particular can be seriously misshaped by some poetry, deforming their character and their path in life.

Plato’s argument rests on the assumption that poetry has power, just as do other forms of literature. Contrary to W.H. Auden’s lament, that is, poetry does make things happen. I’m with Plato on this: I think we should concede the power of literature. Children do learn from books how to value, honour and respect their own lives and the lives of others. And just as parents care about their children’s friends, it is reasonable to think and care about what books our children read.

I do not mean this in the sense of caring about what actions children take after reading books. Rather, I mean that it is reasonable to care about what happens to a child in the actual reading of the book.

In The Company We Keep, the literary critic Wayne Booth sets out some good questions to ask of any book: “What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends?”

So, for example, what does happen to us as we read Harry Potter? Who am I in the hours of reading Harry Potter? What is the quality of life I lead in the company of the Harry Potter stories?

Already I can hear exasperated questions from my readers: oh for goodness sake, it’s just a children’s book, why read so much into it, why ask such questions of a book that is fundamentally just meant to keep its young readers entertained away from the playstation or the television for a few hours?

Even if my readers allow that the Harry Potter books are written in a dull and cliché-ridden style, there is always the fallback that at least the books have re-ignited children’s love of reading. Or to use the marketing slogan of the booksellers: anything that gets children reading is a good thing (especially if they buy the merchandise as well …).

I don’t agree. I think that children would be better off not reading anything rather than reading Harry Potter. Actually, I think that children would be best off being read to by their parents. The early-reading child, face buried in a Harry Potter book, has become a fetish.

For the most part these days, children are being taught to read before they have any kind of acquaintance with the great works even of children’s literature, and therefore before they have any understanding of what it is possible to be and to become in the act of reading.

In a recent article entitled “Dickens after dark”, Imre Salusinszky talked about reading David Copperfield to his two children, all 821 pages of the book over 18 months (and if you think that is too long for children, it is not much longer than the last Harry Potter, which many children raced through on the day the book was released). For Salusinszky as well as for his children, this slow reading of DC was a delightful experience, of hunkering down on the double bed and of watching a world of great beauty and poignancy come into being.

I had a similar experience with reading Great Expectations. Like Harry Potter, Pip is an orphan living with an unsympathetic relative, Mrs Joe. Like the Harry Potter books, Great Expectations is a quest, where the hero discovers that the object of his search is himself. And like Harry, Pip discovers that the person he finds at the end of his quest is not what he thought he was, not who he would have liked himself to be. But there the similarities end.

Great Expectations is written in a way that asks to be read slowly, and re-read. It is a book with rich and complex characters. Even the “bit-players” of Great Expectations are more complex than the cardboard figures of Harry, Hermione and Ron. Think only of Trabb’s boy, or the glorious Mr Wopsle. The child to whom I read Great Expectations asked for Mr Wopsle’s reenactment of the newspaper crime reports to be read over and over, along with Mr Jagger’s reproof. Even single sentences had to be repeated over and over again, such as Magwitch’s claiming to have been brought up to be “a warmint”.

Who has ever gone back to a particular passage of Harry Potter to read it again and again, whether for the beauty of the prose or the vividness and poignancy of the character? On the contrary, the impetus of the Harry Potter marketing campaign is all about getting to the end of the book.

The great “secret” of the last two books in the series, carefully stage-managed by JK Rowling’s teasers and the censure of spoilers, concerns who is left alive at the end of the book. That is, what happens “in the end”?

Bloomsbury Press issued a press release “to thank the worldwide media for their own observance of, and strict policing of, the embargo to preserve the secrecy of the plot for the readers of Harry Potter”. If “the secrecy of the plot” is broken, the fear is that children would not need to buy the book.

Some time ago, I asked the mother of a very young boy whether she read to him. Oh no, she said, my son doesn’t let me read any more because I am too slow. With great pride, she told me that her son was a “speed reader”. I shuddered. As a teacher at university, one of my aims is to get students to slow down, to take more than two minutes to read a page while making some fluorescent marks on it. I don’t want students to get to the end of Plato’s Republic too quickly. I want them to stop and think and dream and imagine over a page, even over a sentence - and then do it all over again.

It is sometimes said that even if the Harry Potter books are written badly, nevertheless they whet children’s (and adults’) appetite for reading, that is, that Potter readers will then move on to other books. This is simply not the case. For example, the US National Endowment for the Arts survey report of 2004, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading (PDF 683KB) found that less than half the American adult population now reads literature (defined as any novels, short stories, poetry or plays not required for work or school), and the percentage continues to fall regardless of Bloomsbury’s publishing schedule.

The US National Assessment of Education Progress found that the percentage of children who read for fun almost every day drops significantly between fourth and eight grades, at the same rate in 2005 as when the first of the Harry Potter books was published in 1998.

The path from reading Harry Potter is less likely to lead to reading The Wind in the Willows, say, than to pestering parents to buy a stuffed Hedwig toy, a ticket to a Harry Potter movie, or entrance to “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” theme park.

I do not remember having read Wind in the Willows as a child, although I vaguely remembered the characters, especially Mr Toad and his love of motor cars. So I delighted in the opportunity to read the book to my own child. In reading it, I realised that such books are too hard for children to read for themselves when they are at the very age at which the books are interesting to them. A book like Wind in the Willows regains its interest only much later, for adults taking delight in reading to their children on the double bed.

It is a great loss for a child to have missed out having The Wind in the Willows read to him or her. There is an incident in the book, for example, when the Rat and the Mole are hurrying along their path when poor Mole senses that he has passed his old home.

Mole drops on a tree stump and despite his efforts to control himself, bursts into tears:

“The sob he had fought with so long refused to be beaten. Up and up, it forced its way to the air, and then another, and another, and others thick and fast; till poor Mole at last gave up the struggle, and cried freely and helplessly and openly, now that he knew it was all over and he had lost what he could hardly be said to have found.”

With a quiet tenderness, Ratty inquires of his friend, “What is it, old fellow? Whatever can be the matter? Tell us your trouble, and let me see what I can do.”

The Mole replies:

“I know it’s a - shabby, dingy little place,” he sobbed forth at last, brokenly: “not like - your cosy quarters - or Toad's beautiful hall - or Badger’s great house - but it was my own little home - and I was fond of it - and I went away and forgot all about it - and then I smelt it suddenly - on the road, when I called and you wouldn’t listen, Rat - and everything came back to me with a rush - and I wanted it! - O dear, O dear! - and when you wouldn’t turn back, Ratty - and I had to leave it, though I was smelling it all the time - I thought my heart would break. - We might have just gone and had one look at it, Ratty - only one look - it was close by - but you wouldn’t turn back, Ratty, you wouldn’t turn back! O dear, O dear!”

Ratty then realises how mean he has been in not stopping, and turns back to find Mole’s old home.

The tender but wrenching longing for home and the past, as well as the gentle understanding friendship of Ratty and Mole is as far removed as could be from the brutality of the style and of the relationships in the Harry Potter books. Sure, Harry and Ron help each other in their japes, but a child would know more of the quiet joys of friends and companions on the road in this one little passage from Wind in the Willows than in the seven blustery volumes of the boy wizard’s adventure.

Moreover, the passage is like an allegory of reading: slow down, listen, take your time, think, don’t rush to the end, and a world will come to life. With Harry Potter, all there is, is a rush to the end to see whodunit.