The most amazing thing that I noticed about the Harry Potter books is how they aged. The last book felt like it was written for folks who were about 10 years older than those for whom the first book was written. Oh, I should put stuff after this behind a cut because we’re going to touch on some middlin’ (maybe major?) spoilers for the Harry Potter books which probably means spoilers for the movies as well.
The first book was a childrens’ book, through and through. It was about as scary as a particularly heavy episode of Scooby Doo. The plot was lifted straight out of Joseph Cambell with lovely little touches seen one thousand times before: orphaned main character, hidden abilities, plot vouchers for the main characters, and the barest inkling of all of the mayhem that is going to come tumbling down toward them (and us). A lovely little trifle that I read at an airport after Maribou put it in my hands when she told me to stop pacing. This was around the time that Prisoner of Azkaban came out and I read the next two books barely noticing that each one was targetting a little bit older than the previous one.
I surprised both Maribou and myself by being at Mediaplay for the midnight release launch of Goblet of Fire but it wasn’t until Order of the Phoenix that I noticed that, holy cow, these books aren’t for kids anymore. They had evolved into full Young Adult novels. Characters had real moral dilemmas before them, characters had real consequences for decisions that they made, there were even characters who *DIED*. It wasn’t really a “good guys vs. bad guys” story anymore but a “good vs. evil” story.
(I admit to being grossly disappointed with Half-Blood Prince… that book felt like she wrote the last two chapters first and then sat in front of a blank piece of paper in the typewriter (or whatever the analogy is today) for a few months before yelling “heck with it!” and pounding something, anything!, out.)
In the very last book, we learn pretty much everything about Dumbledore and about many of the moral decisions that he made that brought us to where we were… and instead of it being about “Good vs. Evil”, it evolved even beyond that to being a story about making decisions and trying to shore up the good ones and atone for the bad ones. It’s about loss and processing loss.
Assuming a tween who read the first book when it first came out, the reader would be in his or her early 20’s when the last one came out… and it’s weird. I think that I would recommend The Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone to any/every 10-year old out there… but I don’t know that I would recommend books 5-7 with the same enthusiasm to the same kid (though, if the kid’s anything like I was, it’d take a freight train to pull me away from the sequel the moment I found that such existed).
Of course, kids really are quite sophisticated and don’t need me to give or withhold recommendations after the first book. Rowling talked about how she kept getting letters from kids saying something to the effect of “Don’t kill Ron. We have read enough books where they kill the dog to know that you’re setting us up to watch you kill Ron. Don’t kill Ron.” (The kids weren’t alone, I’ll tell you that much. I was one of those who thought that Ron would die at the end of the penultimate false finish of the story to set up Harry vs. Voldemort. “No one could survive that!”, he could say, right before Voldemort demonstrates that he survived that and gives Ron an avada kedavra facial.
I digress.
The only other story that I can think of that did something similar was *MAYBE* The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings… but not really because The Hobbit was a story told as a grandfather tells a story to a grandchild but the Lord of the Rings was a story told between adults without anything between. Slipping into “real life”, kinda, we have the Anne of Green Gables books, but the later ones are just as readable/accessible as the early ones.
So, to me, the most amazing thing about the Harry Potter books is that it was the first series I’ve ever encountered that aged along with its readers. I don’t know that we’ve seen that anywhere before. I certainly hope that, someday, we see it again.
The plot of Lord of the Rings is simplistic like Star Wars and Redwall.
Bad guys are bad for the sake of being bad. No real motivations where one can think “Huh. Sauron has a point but he’s going about it the wrong way. What a maroon!” The battles become farcical facing off with enemy troops who are fragile one hit wonders. If they’re so fearsome why didn’t the good guys strike years ago instead of letting things come to a head? Are they so good that they decided it was worth a fair fight and let the bad guys recoup their losses?
Stormtroopers can’t shoot straight. Hilariously Obi Wan declares in A New Hope, “And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” Ben’s obviously racist towards Sandpeople and senile to believe in Imperial marksmanship and yet we’re supposed to root for his allies? A runaway, a murdering thief, a barely sentient creature who can’t enunciate the common tongue are symbols of a rebellion’s principles and are to be considered ‘good’ because they saved a sassy princess?
The Empire created jobs, they ensured the safety of their subjects and expanded their territory in a relatively short span of time taking the ‘prequels’ into account for the amount of time which passed between the Ep. 3 and Ep. 4. If the Empire is evil then you can argue that James K. Polk was evil and if those words cross your lips I’ll demand that you step outside with me so we can settle things with the Marquess of Queensbury rules.
The only thing differentiating Star Wars and Lord of the Rings from Redwall are the lack of recipes and mentions of trifles.
To their credit Star Wars and Lord of the Rings defined a media culture and genre (respectively). They were the first in their field and it was exciting the first time around.
Considering the depth presented by their descendants they pale in comparison.
If you haven’t seen it, you should check out McSweeney’s transcript of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn’s unused audio commentary for Fellowship of the Ring. Check it out here.
Without getting *TOO* political/religious, I think that it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that a universe with an interventionist Eru Ilúvatar is capable of making much stronger moral statements than those made by inhabitants of universes without.
I hate to be glib but this is really a fundamental misreading of LoTR. To put it simply – Sauron is not a character in LoTR, he’s a fixture, a part of the setting. He does nothing, he says nothing, he never appears for even one moment. To say the book is a good vs. evil trope for kiddies is to have not read the book at all.
There is considerable time spent on why the ‘good guys’ don’t attack Sauron until it’s too late, and that’s not even the main conflict of the novel.
It’s true that Tolkien did not write a modern novel of motivations and complexity, but he wasn’t trying to write one, either. Tolkien was largely interested in myth-making and harkening back to the classic sagas like Beowulf, Gilgamesh or Sigurd. It’s more instructive to see LoTR as an attempt to create a new base myth, something that I would say has been quite successful.
It’s also important to note that LoTR, though it was what ended up polished and popular, was just a side story to what interested Tolkien about Middle-Earth, that would be the Silmarillion and the other stories of the Elves, which you’d find are far more complicated in motivation, though still inhabiting a world in which, as Jaybird puts it so well, one is capable of making strong moral statements.
Matthew 4:19 if it’s not completely oblique.
> that’s not even the main conflict of the novel.
The main conflict of the story is Frodo vs. The Ring. Which is, after all, a part of Sauron.
It’s also important to note that LoTR, though it was what ended up polished and popular, was just a side story to what interested Tolkien about Middle-Earth, that would be the Silmarillion and the other stories of the Elves
This.
The 12-volume History of Middle Earth is ultimately very, very sad, because it amounts to 50 years of failed attempts to tell those stories.
I liked the LoTR but I read and reread the Silmarillion passionately. I so adored the grand epic glorious sweep of its narrative.
Interesting… I can’t think of another series offhand where we get to see the character grow up over the course of it. You see it a bit in the Narnia books, but since the kids re-grow up in each book, it doesn’t much affect the stories after the first chapter or two.
But I don’t really see a progression in the HP books themselves, more of a bright line between the first 3.9 books and the final 3.1. It didn’t seem particularly natural, and I don’t think she did a particularly good job of integrating the darker themes into her world. She was at her best when describing some fun new bit of magic or capturing the schoolkid banter, but that didn’t fit nearly so well with all the grimness and dying of the post-cedric books.
There are a handful where the character grows up… The Xanth novels are full of them… the aforementioned Anne of Green Gables books… I’m sure that if Maribou were in town, she’d be able to rattle off a handful more.
I honestly thought that, say, 3 (dementors) was darker than 2 (the diary/horocrux was *REALLY* creepy) which was darker than 1 (which had the dead unicorn, now that I think about it, and that was kinda creepy).
I can kinda see that. I guess my frame of reference is reading the books to my pre-teen kids at the time, and nothing much bothered them until the end of book four.
In Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, we see Miles grow up; in fact, that’s one of the best thing about them.
Yeah, I recommend the Miles books for this. They’re also at turns funnier, better written, and more complex than the Harry books.
I’m not sure where the whole “Ron Dies” thing comes from. It would be a pretty basic violation of Harry’s role as protector.
Ultimately, what the story comes down to is that Harry Potter is willing to die for his friends. Seeing one of his friends die and Harry live would be a cheat, and it would just feel wrong. If anyone was going to die near the end, it would be Harry.
In fact, with one exception, nobody Harry’s age or younger ever dies. It’s mostly adults and one or two older students.
I read this interview waaaay back when.
Here’s the part I remember:
E: People love Ron, for example. Kids think you’re going to knock off Ron because he’s the best friend.
JK: Kids do, exactly, because they’re sharp and they’ve seen so many films where the hero’s best friend gets it. So they think I’m going to make it personal by killing Ron. But maybe that’s a double bluff… (Laughs)
How about series were just the author grow odler and then dies before finishing the series? Does that count?
LEAVE GEORGE RR MARTIN ALONE!
I’m pretty sure he’s really talking about Mervyn Peake.
David Eddings passed before he was able to write a proper sequel to the Belgariad.
There is only one I know of, Robert Jordan. I am sure there are others.
Did David Eddings die? I had not seen that. But since all his books had the same plot. Read one series and you know what is going to happen in all his other ones. I heard someplace that Eddings decided to write fantasy as an experiment of a theory he had developed about the genre. I think his therory was that there is only one plot and you can do it over and over again and still people will buy it.
George R-F’n-R (stands for Rest and Relaxation) Martin is well on his way to being another dead author that has not finished his series.
Yeah, he passed in 2009.
It’s too bad. His books helped me transition between 12 and 14.
His books didn’t all have the same plot as much as they had a “signature sound”.
He was the Fogerty of fantasy writers.
I dunno Jay, the Malorean had the same theme as the Belgariad. So much so that he made it a plot point in the second series.
Insert joke focusing on use of the word “proper” here.
The thing is that we aren’t just seeing a character grow up, but also seeing a writer grow up.
It’s the inverse of what happened with Star Wars. We all watched Star Wars when we were little kids, and as we grew up and matured, our ideas of the Star Wars universe and the stories it held grew and matured along with us.
But George Lucas didn’t go through that. He knew what he wanted Star Wars to be, and he always knew. So when he made the prequels, he made his Star Wars Prequel movie, which was a lot different from what we’d imagined for ourselves. (this is not an invitation to discuss the Star Wars Prequels; it’s merely an observation.)
I was thinking exactly this. Remember most of the folks that brought us big book series are doing so later in their careers and have a better sense of what they’re getting into and how it will go. I’d posit our closest comparison is The Dark Tower, which took way longer to complete and maybe not nearly as successfully, but follows a similar arc with King starting out young and simple and as he aged and developed his craft, the series grew with him.
In science fiction, the usual arc is that a writer who’s young and fresh starts with some neat stories, then as he ages they get slower, talkier, and eventually unreadable. See Heinlein’s Future History, Asimov’s Foundation/Empire series, Niven’s Known Space, etc. This is colloquially known as Brain Eater syndrome.
Well, of course. The thing that drives sci-fi stories is the exploration of an Interesting Idea. The more time the author has to play around with that Interesting Idea, the deeper the exploration of that Idea becomes, and so we see more talk, and less action, as the author tries to explore the deeper and longer-lasting effects of the Interesting Idea.
Asimov’s Foundation series is really a great example of that, with economic determinism given a fancy name as the Interesting Idea.
I’ve often held that the rockets and rayguns are just set dressing for sci-fi, and that the most successul and “classic” SF stories actually boil down to a single Difference From The Modern World–which is, sometimes, never explicitly stated in the book.
“Starship Troopers”, for example, has at its core the question: What would the world be like if we developed a concept of morality that was provably objective?
You leave Asimov alone or I’m gonna get out my shiv!!!!