Harry Potter, Susan Cooper, and George Orwell go to the Movies

The New York Times Sunday book review section yesterday had on the cover a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "Oh," I said, "That could be interesting."

Then, I noticed. It's by Christopher Hitchens. "Well," I said, "Maybe they just don't know all that many British people..."

It opens with:

In March 1940, in the "midnight of the century" that marked the depth of the Hitler-Stalin pact (or in other words, at a time when civilization was menaced by an alliance between two Voldemorts or "You-Know-Whos"), George Orwell [...]

And that's where I stopped, because, you know, life is just too short.

In other late-breaking Potter news, Jane Espenson attempts to explain the appeal in The New Republic, and Timothy Burke compares the Potter series to Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. These may seem like very different articles, but interestingly, I had the exact same reaction to both...

That reaction was "Funny how different people can get such completely different things from the same books." For example, Espenson writes:

When I tell people what I like about Harry Potter, I usually start out by saying something about how thoroughly-imagined the world is. And for a while I thought that this was why Harry Potter appealed even to people who don't like sci-fi and fantasy, that it is set in a world that seems as real as our own.

I see people saying that all the time, and it never stops being boggling. One of the things that puts me off the books is that they seem so ad hoc. At least three books, including the final one, are resolved by some heretofore unmentioned quirk of the magical universe (can you say "deus ex machina?" I know you can, but can you pluralize it? Me neither, hence the awkward phrasing.), and new characters, rules, and institutions seem to pop up as needed for narrative purposes, without much regard to logic. The world of Harry Potter just doesn't have any solidity to me-- it feels like it's in constant danger of being completely reshaped the next time Rowling writes herself into a corner.

Similarly, Burke praises the books for their realism, saying:

The Potter books center the action in a character and his growth and maturation. There's a naturalism in the way Harry Potter navigates the situation of the books. He's painfully aware that he's been chosen to play his destined role and increasingly resentful of the way that adults around him abdicate their responsibilities and leave him groping in the dark. When he at last accepts with grace the inevitable climax that others have scripted for him and (seemingly) sacrifices himself willingly, that's a fairly hard-won moment that's been building for seven books with some degree of consistency.

And again, I just don't get it. Harry never has any great depth for me-- he seems to have just as much personality as is needed to drive the plot, and that only when it's needed. When it becomes necessary to bog down the plot for a while, he can slip into a rage, or a funk, but it passes quickly enough when the page count starts to stretch modern binding technology and it's time to wrap things up.

Of course, to be fair, Burke correctly nails the chaarcter problem in Susan Cooper's books:

Will, on the other hand, often reads as if he's taking a very strong sedative. There's some fairly pro forma attempts on the character's part to reconcile his sense of self before and after his part in prophecy is revealed, but he very quickly adjusts to his new circumstances. In fact, the plot argues for a kind of anti-naturalism, that because Will is one of the Old Ones, he really isn't an eleven-year old boy at all in many respects.

Will Stanton is pretty much a complete blank as far as personality goes. But in both of these cases, I think this is, if not intentional, at least conventional. A lot of kids/ YA books have lead characters who are largely lacking in personality, and I think in some ways that works to their advantage-- the lack of a strong and distinct central character makes it easier for readers to inhabit that character for themselves.

Which is also my reaction to one of Burke's comparative comments:

As a result, [The Dark Is Rising is] not a narrative that allows for any kind of projection: fans cannot be slans in Cooper's stories, really. I suppose you can imagine yourself in a role rather like the Drews, as spear-carriers for the Old Ones. But the books close as tightly as they begin: when it is over, it is over, with only Will left as the Ishmael who remembers any of it.

Maybe I'm just an egotistical bastard, but when I read those books (and re-read them, and re-re-read them) back in the day, I never imagined myself as a spear carrier. I imagined myself as Will, not any of the other characters. That always seemed to be the whole point, to me, not just of these specific books, but of reading in general.

(I won't attempt to defend the ending of Cooper's series, though-- it's really pretty awful. I'll take The Dark Is Rising and The Grey King over anything in the Potter canon, though, just for the prophetic rhymes. And the Welsh lessons.)

Of course, the lack of personality in the lead is one reason why it's a terrible idea to try to make a movie out of Cooper's books. While it works well to have a Will-shaped void there for readers to step into, film is a less participatory medium, and requires a central character who can really put across the story.

And, of course, since it's a terrible idea, Hollywood should be along any minute-- oh, look:

That really just doesn't look right. Or even all that good.

The hell of it is, if you could work out a way to film it straight, the rhyme would make a fantastic frame for a trailer:

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back

three from the circle, three from the track,

Wood, bronze, iron; water fire stone,

Five will return and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long,

Wood from the buring, stone out of sone,

Fire from the candle-ring, water from the thaw

Six Signs the circle and the grail gone before.

I mean, there's your movie, in eight lines of verse. Get someone who sounds like Ian McKellan to read that, over appropriate clips, and it's movie trailer gold.

(Sadly, while the first volume is probably impossible to make a good movie of, I think you could probably do a really good film version of Greenwitch, which pushes Will to the side a bit, and offers Jane Drew, a much stronger lead character in many ways. The Grey King, which is really Bran's story, not Will's, might also work.)

Anyway, to recap: Hitchens is a pompous ass, other people get very different things out of Harry Potter than I do (and they're all wrong), and the Dark Is Rising movie adaptation doesn't look good at all.