Just Mild About Harry

Photo by Peter Mountain

In the latest installment in the ongoing and wildly lucrative adventures of Harry Potter — conqueror of bookworm children everywhere, scourge of literary lions and freaked-out Christians alike — the boy wizard has taken on the dragons of Hollywood and come out of it, well, a bit of a dullard. Does it matter? For Potter fans, it’s unlikely. Movie lovers who read more than opening credits are used to disappointment. The film versions of beloved books so rarely make us happy that when one does succeed in bringing forth some of the original’s good feeling, turning privately loved words into images that don’t betray either the words or our love, we’re not just surprised, we’re grateful. And so it is with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation that’s heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph. That’s a drag, but since author J.K. Rowling, with her plain style and alert imagination, has already done the film’s toughest work by summoning up flurries of snowy owls, its hobgoblins, ghouls and all the enchanted rest, neither is it calamitous. The movie’s pleasures are finally those of the book — inferior, but welcoming enough to putter through.

If the movie never jostles the book from your head, it’s likely because the first Harry never left. Motherless, fatherless, friendless, outfitted in broken glasses and ill-fitting hand-me-downs, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) lives with his unwilling adoptive family, the Dursleys, in a London neighborhood after having been left on their doorstep years ago as an infant. Now almost 11, Harry sleeps in a closet under the main staircase filled with shadows and spiders, and puzzles over the lightning-bolt scar emblazoned on his forehead. He’s the family scapegoat, one of those outsider kids who, if he were living in the United States, would be headbanging to death metal and thumbing through Soldier of Fortune. But Rowling is a sentimentalist, as well as a pasticheur, and her Harry is heir to various British literary traditions, among them Dickens foundlings, boarding-school adventures and the myth-rich fantasy genre. As with most famous orphans, Harry is destined for more than heartache and gruel, which is how he’s whisked to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to find his fate, along with his friends, classmates Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), and Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), a childlike giant who looms through the books as sentinel and eternal wild card.

J.K. Rowling’s novel was first published in Great Britain in 1997 under the title Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. By the time it hit the United States a year later, the book had been “Americanized” (an insulting procedure that involved everything from crumpets being turned into English muffins to the very title), and widely debated — the more so, it seemed, the more successfully it sold. The philosopher’s stone is meant to transfigure base metals into gold as well as promising restored youth, so it seems fitting that on publication Rowling’s book itself became something of a philosopher’s stone, both in its journey from slush pile to best-seller lists and in its staggering appeal to adult readers. Since then, the Harry Potter series has been called many things in its short shelf life — publishing sensation, marketing juggernaut, ungodly threat — but rarely has it been called literature. But then, why should it be? Genre fiction has always been the bastard child of the literary arts: “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd,” Edmund Wilson famously sniffed about the likes of Agatha Christie in 1950. (Wilson was similarly appalled at W.H. Auden’s love for J.R.R. Tolkien, whose novels Rowling has clearly strip-mined.)

While some detective and mystery writing has since muscled into the ranks of serious literature, much genre fiction remains the province of geeks and freaks, or worse, at least as far critics such as Harold Bloom are convinced. Just last year, serving as a literary gun for The Wall Street Journal, Bloom tried to make canon fodder of Harry Potter by declaring that Rowling “makes no demands upon her readers” and that her millions of fans are nothing other than “reader non-readers.” “At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study,” wrote Bloom, “anything goes.” As Harry was no more than a pint-size straw man in Bloom’s Goliath crusade against postmodernism, it’s not surprising the Yale scholar didn’t solve the biggest mystery of the books — their extraordinary popularity. What Rowling gets and Bloom doesn’t, even as the editor of a collection called Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (by Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, among others), is that the best kids’ books don’t merely create worlds in which imaginations freely roam, they create other consciousnesses with which to experience those worlds, and that while Hogwarts is a blast, Harry’s a pip.