10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT HARRY POTTER
1. There are different covers for adults and for children.
How much of a snob do you have to be to buy a children's book in an adult cover to keep up appearances? Are we so insecure about what our fellow human beings think of us that we think that being seen reading the version with the children's cover will make us look childish?
And does anyone actually believe that the adult covers are fooling anyone?
2. It's basically Billy Bunter with wands
Let's face it, Hogwarts is a public school and a public boarding school at that. You can argue that there appear to be no actual tuition fees but there does seem to be an elitist selection process. So only people with magic powers are allowed to attend eh? Sounds like one of those single faith schools that have been attracting a lot of criticism for failing their increasingly insular pupils.
Charms and potions are all very well but what about Mathematics and English? Are Hogwarts students REALLY prepared for the outside world?
I wouldn't mind this but it all must be far removed from the everyday experience of most of the readers. What I'd like to see is Hogwarts comprehensive where the teachers find the threat of Voldemort is vastly preferable to the threat of an unsympathetic OFSTED report. Hermione has a pregnancy scare and Ron and Harry take time out of their glue-sniffing habit to experiment with homosexuality behind the bikesheds.
3. It's all so middle class
A book with a major character called 'Hermione' cannot be anything other than resolutely middle class. Harry might well live in a cupboard, but it is a decent cupboard of a well-to-do family in the suburbs.
It's worth pointing out that a major mode of transport in the Potter novels is Floo powder which allows wizards to travel from fireplace to fireplace. Just try that on a housing estate and see how far it gets you.
4. There is no technology
An odd one this. I'm no Potter scholar but I can't remember if the Internet, I-pods or texting with mobile phones make much of an appearance in the Potter milieu. This is strange, because they are becoming increasingly important to children.
I wonder if this is because technology and the modern world is something Potter readers (and, more importantly, their parents) also find threatening. Presumably, for the Daily Mail readers, there is less chance of children being groomed over Owl mail...
Best to avoid the modern world then and submerge yourself in a vaguely-defined Enid-Blytonesque anytime in the hope that it all goes away.
5. Quidditch
JK Rowling obviously noted that some children like sport and so to sucker in any sport loving children (not traditionally big readers) she invented a sporting element called Quidditch.
As a well thought out piece of background detail it's fine - but there are pages and pages describing Quidditch matches and I try to skip them if at all possible.
There is a reason why sports fiction is a) not a big publishing concern and b) tends to focus on the behind-the-scenes element of sport. This is because to describe a sporting contest is deeply, deeply boring.
Witness my attempt to describe a Grand Prix:
"Michael drive around the track, he drove around the track again, he drove around the track again a bit faster".
'nuff said. Sports literature sucks -whether it's mounted on a broomstick or not.
6. People who read Harry Potter often despise people who enjoy fantasy and science fiction.
I read fantasy literature. I've always been annoyed by the people who sneer at it - and it's even worse if they sneer at it and then pick up a copy of Harry Potter.
Harry Potter IS a series of fantasy novels.
In reading Harry Potter YOU ARE reading a fantasy novel.
For those of you who are reading Harry Potter and who once sneered at the sad people who read Tolkein and were into Dungeons and Dragons - congratulations, you are now one of us!
7. All children's fantasy books are now sold as being 'like Harry Potter'.
Even the noit exclusively children's literature Tery Pratchett has two sets of covers for his books. Will any children's fantasy book ever be published without the boy wizard raising his head?
8. Harry Potter fans who say that the books are a completely original and different concept to anything else out there.
Lets be honest here - there is are very few concepts in Harry Potter that haven't been done before. I'm not claiming JK Rowling stole any ideas, but merely that she's tapping into a milieu that children's authors and fantasy writers have been using for decades.
OK, lets run through a couple of examples. Harry Potter is a boy wizard with an owl who has the potential to be the greatest wizard ever (see Neil Gaiman's 'Books of Magic' - written years before Rowlings' series - about Tim Hunter, a boy wizard with an owl who has the potential to be the greatest wizard ever). Harry Attends a school of magic where he learns wizardry, flys around on a broomstick and has various run-ins with her teachers (see the 'Worst Witch' sequence of children's books - again written years beforehand - where a girl attends a school of witchcraft, flys around on broomstick and has various run-ins with her teachers). You can even find parallels between Tom Brown's schooldays and Harry Potter for god's sake.
I'll state once again that I'm in NO WAY suggesting Rowling has ripped off other authors - just that her books touch on ideas and themes that are very familiar to anyone who has ever read any children's or fantasy literature.
9. Harry Potter fans are always accusing other fantasy authors of ripping the series off.
This reached a nadir recently when I genuinely heard someone say that Lord of the Rings was obviously a Harry Potter rip-off. "I mean, look at the Nazgul - they are obviously a rip off of the dementors."
I've nothing but praise for what JK Rowling has achieved with her books, but to my knowledge she has yet to conquer the power of time travel and publish her books before 1937.
Terry Pratchett has also fallen foul of the criticism that he based his wizarding college Unseen University on Hogwarts and had to patiently explain that Unseen University appears in a book written 10 years before the Potter series (and is based on the Invisible College, which really existed and was much, much earlier).
10. Too much padding.
Books one to three were decent enough books. Despite their failings they were, at least, short and snappy....
...and then 'Goblet of Fire' happened and the subsequent books have been somewhat of a chore. There is a lot to be said for brevity but Rowling seems to going more for a "never mind the quality, feel the width" with several hundred pages and only a couple of chapters worth of plot.
We don't care about the Quidditch world cup, Harry's teenage angst, his abortive teenage love affairs, or the changes he is going through which make him speak in CAPITALS. Please, please, please...just get on with the story.
As ever, all opinions expressed are my own. I'll still read the last book (to judge it without doing so would be prejudice) and I'll probably even enjoy it.
I just wish I knew what all the fuss is about.
