Harry Potter and the Curse of the Over-rated writer (Harry Potter Series - J. K. Rowling in general)

Member Name: Fairydustbitch

Product:	Harry Potter Series - J. K. Rowling in general
Date:	22/02/06 (1564 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gets kids reading, the world Rowling creates is complex and great for the imagination

Disadvantages: poor structure and writing style, repetitive, over-used red herrings.

Boy am I tired of having Harry Potter shoved in my face left, right and centre. I’m not one of the anti’s, I promise, I’ve read all the books, enjoy them and can see their merits…but I also see their failings. While JK Rowling has an amazing ability to fire the imagination and should be honoured for her ability to get kids reading, her writing style is purely simplistic and irritating, verging on bad actually, and there are many other much superior children’s writers I can think of. I don’t think a book that lists pretty much all vocabulary as “he said/she said” and uses capital letters to get the point across as a work of literary genius. I’ll give the woman her due, she’s created a wonderful world for kids and adults alike to lose themselves in, but the woman is no Roald Dahl. Most of the characters are extremely flat, Harry is far too perfect at everything and all the good characters keep bloody well getting killed off! So, without further ado, here’s my opinion as to why I think Harry Potter is the most over-rated book series on the planet.

A bit about the plot:

Wizards are real and most people don’t know that…I know it’s a bit of a shocker but how else could an idiot like George Bush get into the White House? By the power of witchcraft I tell you! There was this rather nasty wizard named George W...sorry, er, Voldemort *gasp I said his name* and he killed all these people. For some strange reason the only thing that could stop him was a baby boy…for some reason the killing curse he cast on the little boy backfired on him and reduced him to less than human. That little boy was sent to live with his muggle (non-magic) relatives, his only living relatives, in fact. They treated him like crap and he grew into a noble and slightly bizarre young boy. Along comes a big oaf named Hagrid, who tells him he’s a wizard and he will go to Hogwarts School for young wizards (and witches, lets not be sexist). Harry makes friends with Ron Weasley, who has about fifty siblings, shocking red hair and is a tad clumsy, and Hermione, the school geek…er, brainy kid. What follows is the adventures of three amateur Nancy Drews with the uncanny ability to thwart the most powerful wizard in the world; despite the fact that the OTHER most powerful wizard in the world, the wise and wonderful headmaster of Hogwarts, Gandalf…er, sorry, Dumbledore, never seems to be able to defeat Voldy. That’s the very short spoiler free(ish) version.


Right that’s the plot bit over and done with. JK Rowling dreamed up these books while sitting in the beautiful little Elephant House café in Edinburgh (which I go to on a regular basis and let me tell you it’s a lot better than these books) and hers is a classic rags to riches tale, now she’s absolutely effing loaded.

Now the thing about JK Rowling is she has one hell of an imagination on her, but I wouldn’t really call her a good author. Her writing style is very simplistic, repetitive and dull. I realise these books are aimed at children but even the latter ones which are supposed to be “darker” and “more grown up” still use limited vocabulary and linguistic technique. As I’ve mentioned, there is little inventive language used in the long lists of dialogue that often occur in the book, it usually just reads “he said” or “she said”. Hagrid is always grunting, Snape is always snarling and Hermione is always shrieking. Harry takes to using capital letters in “Order of the Phoenix” to get across how misunderstood he is, which just shouts juvenile writing style to me. JK Rowling also seems to use length as an alternative to more sophisticated writing style. “Goblet of Fire” was unnecessarily long, and “Order of the Phoenix” was ridiculously so. You could have cut half of the chapters out of that books and still been left with a decent amount of book...with a much better pace and story arc. If the length of the books were used to build some sort of dramatic tension, fair enough, but they aren’t and in the end the length of the latter books is just tedious. Fortunately, the last offering “Half-Blood Prince” is much shorter and to the point. There seems to be a list of vocab that JK Rowling overuses on a regular basis…I mean a woman with her millions wouldn’t find it difficult to invest in a decent thesaurus and dictionary surely? The writing style, pacing and length of the Harry Potter books could be so much better if just a little more thought was put into the way they are written. These books have the potential to be way superior to the way they are, and I just find it frustrating. It just seems as though Rowling is dealing with the maturation of her target readers by introducing length instead of increasing complexity. In these books the plot just lurches from one part to the next instead of building any kind of palpable climax.

Now to the characters. The only characters I can truly say I love out of these books are Sirius and Dumbledore…you can guess I’m peed off by this point in the series. Aside from that I have to say the characters really, really irritate me. Firstly, Harry. Aside from being sick of his terminal martyrdom disease, I find him to be far too perfect and flat. We don’t see enough of his thoughts for me to really feel for him. He’s just too…good. At everything. And too much of a good little boy too, a perfect friend and all the rest of it. It becomes a little better in later books when he becomes jealous of Ron’s prefect position, but all in all the character of Harry is just too nice for his own good, he just doesn’t seem at all alive. I realise the book is told from a third person perspective, but something about Harry just doesn’t make him appeal to me…JK Rowling just doesn’t make him human enough for me to really like him.

And if we see little of Harry we see less still of the others, there is little information to guide us on the motivations and passions of all of the secondary characters. Ron is always overshadowed by Harry, his supposed best friend, and really doesn’t seem to have a lot of redeeming qualities at all, except for passable Quidditch skills later in the series (which is still nothing next to Harry’s perfect Seeking skills) and he’s just too much of the put-upon best friend for me to like him. Hermione is a walking sexist stereotype. Sure she’s the brains and all that, but she’s always gasping and shrieking, and on more than one occasion she faints. She’s like a little cheerleader for Harry, which again ticks me off when JK Rowling could be doing so much more with the character. For such a brain she’s far too delicate and girly for my liking, and you would expect a female writer to know better than to indulge in such sexism towards females.

Dumbledore is a loveable character, much more human than the others in his advanced age, and although he’s clearly just modelled on Gandalf, I love all his weird, wise and zany little ways and saying. He’s a touch of humanity in a book with 2D characters, and I love the way he comes across as human because he makes mistakes in latter books as opposed to being deified as he is in the earlier ones. Having said this, I also find it unrealistic that so powerful a wizard has not been able to fight off Voldemort, and yet an immature teenage boy can do it. Again it just all adds to the predictability of the story for me.

Sirius is another character I do like, again because he’s quite human. He’s a very dark character in the book, painted as quite mysterious even when he’s supposed to be a goodie, which I quite like. Like Dumbledore, he has a lot more depth, intrigue and layers to his character, which is strange as Harry really should be the one with the depth.

Voldemort has to be the most incompetent baddie I have ever come across. Seriously, Draco Malfoy would make a better opponent for Harry than Voldemort. I really don’t see the threat from this spineless little weasel of a supposedly evil dark wizard at all. He’s always just looming in the background, having his cronies do his hard work for him. He is far too easy to thwart, and the fact that a bunch of amateur wizard school kids can do it just doesn’t cut the mustard for me.

Another huge problem I have with the series is the repetitive use of plot devices…in particular the red herring…Snape. Its getting old now, at first he was suitably creepy in his bat-like manner, but JK Rowling really does need to think up some new potential baddies now. In pretty much every book there is some sort of suspicion of Snape being a member of the dark side, and now where we’re at the point where Snape actually does seem to be evil, yet its clear the story is not that simple. Its unoriginal and its dull to use the same red herring book in, book out. Malfoy junior is another one that seems to be getting the red herring treatment in too many of the books. Why not point the finger at Neville for a change? Its just so boring and predictable to keep dropping in the same tired, old clichés. There hasn’t been a real shocker regarding baddies since “Prisoner of Azkaban” and its high time JK Rowling took the focus off the school meanies for a change.

Then there’s JK Rowlings recent inability to build up to a climax in the book. The last three books have been too long, and when we finally get to the action packed bits at the end, it feels jerky and wrong because all the clues that have been thrown in earlier in the book have been buried in a pile of trite, pointless dialogue and irrelevant lessons. In the first few books the dramatic peaks were always led up to nicely with various plot clues and such like, but Rowling seems to have lost that ability recently. Once again, I really feel if she cut more of the crap out of the books they would be a whole lot better.

Nevertheless, the Harry Potter series is capable of taking us into a fantastic magical world that makes these books perfect for rainy weekend reading for either adults and kids. If JK Rowling doesn’t have the greatest writing skills she still has the ability to see into another world. It would be much better if we could become so involved in the books that we felt we were actually there, but for me there is always a level of distance that could be removed with a little more thought on Rowling’s part instead of just churning out the books. It’s a real shame as I think the Harry Potter books could be so much more than they are. Personally if it was my kids (if I had any) reading them I’d wanting them to be reading much more complex and literary books as well.

You never know, maybe Rowling will manage to pull something out of her magic hat for the final book that will make me look more favourably on the series as a whole. Something to shock me and to remove the predictability of the books would really make the series from me. Of course in order to find out I’m going to have to buy the book, which of course is the whole point of this series, or so it seems to me anyway! All in all I think the books are a nice read when you don't want to think about very much at all, but I really feel a good deal of the praise heaped upon JK Rowling is unjustified.

Summary: I hate to be the one to pee on the bonfire...