JK Rowling To Pen More Potter by Lauren Cates
September 18, 2013 3:26 am | 1 Comment
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Our long national nightmare is over, and I’ve finally recovered from some-unnamed-former-child-star getting nekkid and trying to act “street”.
The case of eye-rolling I contracted sent me to the emergency room, but I’m finally back to eating solid foods and shouting at kids to get off my lawn.
And, so, a new piece of news flitted my way like a golden leaf catching an autumn wind. My reaction is thus:I don’t give a shit that JK Rowling is writing a new Potter-verse novel.
In fact, I don’t give a shit about anything that JK Rowling does.
Okay, fine, she’s a bestselling author and a billionaire (I refuse to call her a “billionaire author” because that implies the books alone made her a billionaire. Say it with Yogurt, kids…moichandising!) and a known philanthropist. Whatever.
Maybe it’s my distaste for the notion that Rowling fans have crowned her some sort of nerdy queen of fantasy novels when really, they’re not bad, but I’ve never seen them as sterling achievements of literature (Tolkien wrote fathoms of background on his books: histories, languages, family trees…and still had time to tell the Nazis to fuck off in the most eloquent way possible. That, friends, is the gold standard for “a gentleman and a scholar”). I’ve never felt they were in any way more than gimmick-laden and flowery.
Maybe I hate the idea that, while it got kids interested in reading again, it also got them interested in tie-in merchandising, which I regard as more crass commercialism and materialism than anything and probably influences the cycle of obsession with the story anyway: I buy the thing that the guy in the book has. I have a real, tangible connection to that book. It’s just that much more real to me than, say, a book like Charlotte’s Web or Bridge to Terabithia. I have more emotional attachments to this story because I love this object AND this book. I must buy the next book. (In that vein, it is a very good thing that I could not buy the merchandise associated with the characters of the books I was reading when I was a kid/teenager, if it was even possible. Except for, you, know, a towel.)
Maybe I just don’t like that the books started the increasing trend of fiction writers putting children into circumstances where they are in peril the way wartime soldiers are in peril. Not that I believe in censorship or that anything is so sacred that it can’t be written about. But I get kind of a queasy feeling about authors who are constantly putting children in harm’s way. My inner mother hen is always squawking about the kind of therapy bills these kids will need when they realize that of all the odd and scary changes they face during puberty, PTSD should not be one of them, while my inner cynic is cringing at the need to shove kids into adult roles and making adult decisions as it feels contrived to the point of painful, never once having a crying fit or a tantrum befitting a child (at least, as far as book four went, more on that in a moment). Never mind that in the Potter books, the kids face danger once a year and yet they come back to Hogwart’s for the next year all it couldn’t possibly happen again this year, could it? You’d have thought they would have learned their lesson by the third year and transferred to one of the other Wizard schools. There are at least three, right?
Suspension of disbelief in her books is a serious problem for me. Magic, sure, what the hell; baseline rules of the universe, okay, that I’ll get behind. However, constantly putting kids in extraordinary circumstances even by the standards of the world that they live in and then expecting them to think and act like adults and not be seriously traumatized by it even in the short term and then their parents keep sending them to that school…disbelief is no longer under some Wingardium Leviosa spell. I can’t get there from here.
I will allow that the stories are entertaining, if I don’t have to think about them too hard (though I couldn’t get past The Goblet of Fire because the premise was simply stupid: a lot of trouble for a small plot point in an event that, once again, puts kids in harm’s way for no apparent reason. Really, was the Triwizard Tournament a thing…that they actually decided was a good idea? “Sure, let’s put kids in a tournament that is likely to get them killed. Won’t that be FUN?” They couldn’t have Magic Fairs the way the rest of us had Science Fairs?).
Once again, disbelief went THUD.
There are also things about Rowling the person that piss me off.
She felt it necessary to “mark the spot” where she finished writing the last Harry Potter novel, because, obviously that place will become a mecca for her followers for centuries, right?
She announced she thought of Dumbledore as gay and received cheers and applause, but it doesn’t make you brave or progressive if you don’t put it expressly in the book.
She wrote a book that originally had only seven copies which annoyed me on an intellectual level because the point of a book, any book printed since the beginning of time, was so that it was accessible to anyone. When you create a book in astonishing rarity so that it is not accessible, you ruin the point of it being a book.
Maybe it’s also a little bit of the “going back to the well” thing too. Rowling not too long ago was found out to have penned a novel under the name of Robert Galbraith. She apparently did this because she wanted to be a success without being JK Rowling. I understand that and that is very, very cool. But if she’s so hell-bent on distancing herself from the Potter franchise to show that she can be successful without the books, perhaps she should just let sleeping dogs lie and work on her non-Potter craft for a while.
Frankly, I don’t like having to rely on the “meta” to help my opinion on whether or not I should like a work of fiction. And none of these things would bother me if Rowling stopped courting the spotlight. (If someone tries to tell me the “Dumbledore is gay” thing wasn’t calculated, I’ve got a real magic wand to sell ya.)
And that kind of thing, where everyone shouts at me to like not just the base fiction, but to make sure I constantly understand how profound it is, how big a cultural experience it is, and how much bigger than life it is, it leaves me with the same cold impression that all overhyped products do: it doesn’t change my life. It doesn’t make me a better person. The only thing it does is annoy me and make me want to tell it to fuck off and go cure cancer or something.
Tags: Harry Potter, JK Rowling
Categorised in: Headlines
This post was written by David Griffin
I’m a huge Harry Potter fan and I have read all books several times. Now I’m either going to read the series once more, or I’ll read some of Rowling other books. For some reason I havn’t read anything but her Potter books. I’m trying do decide by reading up a bit 😉