The Ultimate Bildungsroman
Apr. 5th, 2009 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJan 2009
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling - Bloomsbury, 2007
* * * * *
Books are like savings accounts. The reader makes an investment in them and expects a return. The more time spent with them, the larger the payoff has to be, which makes the final book in a multi-volume series particularly important. If done well, the reader’s investment in the major characters is repaid with interest and they are left with a feeling of satisfaction that overcomes any niggling objections to plot developments, characterisation or writing style. If not, they are left feeling short-changed and disappointed.
J.K. Rowling has more to do this in this respect than most. The high number of books in her sequence and the ungainly lengths of the last three means that a reader who has followed the entire story will already have invested in over 2500 pages of Potterishness (that’s over twice the length of Lord of the Rings). So has she pulled it off? Somewhat to my surprise, I’d have to say that she has.
Not, it has to be said, through any startling originality in the plotline, which follows the plot-token collection quest set up at the end of the previous book. But Rowling cleverly ups the tension level by stripping away the froth and focussing purely on Harry, Hermione and Ron as they try to achieve their goal while avoiding the attentions of Voldemort and his Death Eaters (the secondary characters we have come to know and love do make an appearance but only as walk-ons, or in some cases, victims). This gives her the space to mature the main protagonists into young adults, with some much-needed subtlety and realism finally appearing in their characterisation.
All this is at the expense of the pacing in the middle section, but Rowling does a superb job of gradually ratchetting up the tension of each successive encounter with the bad guys and the final scenes are as dramatic as anyone could wish for. The resolution of the story follows Rowlings’ method of telling you the magical rules and then doing something logical but unexpected with them, and it works here as well as it did in the earlier books of the series. However her clumsy plotting is also in evidence with major characters occasionally behaving in uncharacteristically stupid or improbable ways, and it is a shame that the climax relies on this.
Still, Rowling has achieved what I think was her aim, which was to write the ultimate Bildungsroman. For all their weaknesses of plotting and their pedestrian style, the Harry Potter books successfully negotiate the transition between children’s story and young adult novel in a way that no other sequence that I can think of, fantasy or otherwise, has ever managed. For this reason, if no other, they are classics, and your investment in reading them is well repaid.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling - Bloomsbury, 2007
* * * * *
Books are like savings accounts. The reader makes an investment in them and expects a return. The more time spent with them, the larger the payoff has to be, which makes the final book in a multi-volume series particularly important. If done well, the reader’s investment in the major characters is repaid with interest and they are left with a feeling of satisfaction that overcomes any niggling objections to plot developments, characterisation or writing style. If not, they are left feeling short-changed and disappointed.
J.K. Rowling has more to do this in this respect than most. The high number of books in her sequence and the ungainly lengths of the last three means that a reader who has followed the entire story will already have invested in over 2500 pages of Potterishness (that’s over twice the length of Lord of the Rings). So has she pulled it off? Somewhat to my surprise, I’d have to say that she has.
Not, it has to be said, through any startling originality in the plotline, which follows the plot-token collection quest set up at the end of the previous book. But Rowling cleverly ups the tension level by stripping away the froth and focussing purely on Harry, Hermione and Ron as they try to achieve their goal while avoiding the attentions of Voldemort and his Death Eaters (the secondary characters we have come to know and love do make an appearance but only as walk-ons, or in some cases, victims). This gives her the space to mature the main protagonists into young adults, with some much-needed subtlety and realism finally appearing in their characterisation.
All this is at the expense of the pacing in the middle section, but Rowling does a superb job of gradually ratchetting up the tension of each successive encounter with the bad guys and the final scenes are as dramatic as anyone could wish for. The resolution of the story follows Rowlings’ method of telling you the magical rules and then doing something logical but unexpected with them, and it works here as well as it did in the earlier books of the series. However her clumsy plotting is also in evidence with major characters occasionally behaving in uncharacteristically stupid or improbable ways, and it is a shame that the climax relies on this.
Still, Rowling has achieved what I think was her aim, which was to write the ultimate Bildungsroman. For all their weaknesses of plotting and their pedestrian style, the Harry Potter books successfully negotiate the transition between children’s story and young adult novel in a way that no other sequence that I can think of, fantasy or otherwise, has ever managed. For this reason, if no other, they are classics, and your investment in reading them is well repaid.
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Date: 2009-04-06 10:39 am (UTC)