When many years elapse after the publication of a book, we often cannot imagine ourselves back at the time the book appeared and react with a virgin sensibility.
But “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is only a decade old. So we who have the gift of obliviousness still should be able to approach freshly what we missed, regardless of the subsequent Potter phenomenon.
On the eve of the final book’s publication, then, I went back to the first to see what I’d get out of it. This I did as one who used to read a lot of poems, essays and novels — having long ago taken an advanced degree in English — only to fall away as the reading of art catalogs and monographs for work gradually replaced the reading of literature for pleasure. I do not have special interest in children’s books or contemporary writing, so for better or worse did not approach J.K. Rowling any differently than I would have any other writer of fiction from any other century, and I did not read reviews or interpretations of her work.
The result was an agreeable, if not memorable, vacation that passed the time better than last year’s trip into best-seller country — two of the junkyards- in-prose by Dan Brown — but gave little impetus to read more of Rowling’s septet and less insight into why millions of adolescents of all ages cultishly do.
A primary means by which the author holds interest leaps from the very first page. She tells us the Dursleys, the aunt and uncle of her hero, have everything they want in life and also a secret. But the nature of the secret, that Harry is a wizard from an extraordinary family, she keeps from us for 50 pages. Thus does the narrative baldly proceed with gears grinding — partial declaration, revelation withheld, partial declaration, revnatural events and predictable clashes fill the interstices.
Harry is a foundling out of Charles Dickens, whose funny, fantastic-sounding but aptly British names for characters Rowling echoes. Like Oliver Twist, the child is preternaturally mature and intelligent, despite having been reared poorly by people almost as blind and cruel as those who run Oliver’s workhouse (While the Dursleys lavish everything on a coarse, piggish son, they have Harry, who is well-mannered and clearly special, sleep in a closet under a stairway!).
A miraculous inheritance allows him to escape to magic school, where he proves a model friend, problem solver, athlete and warrior. High birth eventually explains Twist’s superior deportment, which is a cause and effect nowadays no one would believe. Harry’s superiority comes from being the only person ever left alive after an attack by the story’s arch-villain, a condition even less believable but more politically correct.
In short order we meet such recognizable types as the all-powerful spiritual father (schoolmaster/wizard Albus Dumbledore) and gentle giant (guardian angel Rubeus Hagrid). Harry’s classmates also include types: wisecracking best friend (the impecunious Ron Weasley), brilliant student (the lone girl Hermione Granger), forgetful bumbler (Neville Longbottom) and a bully (the drippingly evil-named Draco Malfoy) who is accompanied by two “bodyguards” who look wicked and important but in the course of the narrative shield him from nothing.
Nearly everyone behaves according to type, which doubtless is reassuring to young readers. But Rowling surprises with two professors at the school, Snape and Quirrell, who are not what they appear to be, operating from motives that are among the most complex in the book. Little prepares us for the apparent turnabouts, but that’s OK, because they are made to carry lessons about both the fallibility of feeling (Harry feels but has no proof that Snape is out to get him) and observation (the perpetually trembling Quirrell deceives as an excellent actor).
That the fantasy provides lessons at all is endearing.
Sentiments such as friendship and bravery being more important than books or cleverness may no longer have as much weight as they might have had 60 years ago. But I was glad Rowling set them beside her flying brooms and hatching dragon and had something to say as well about human readiness for knowledge and an enlightened perception of death. There, in an elementary way, she tells readers how to live — which is, after all, what we once went to literature for.
———
aartner@tribune.com
