I t seems eccentric ​ to say it of a person richer than the queen, but J.K. Rowling is, I think, undervalued. Or rather, she gets credit for the

Katherine Rundell · At the British Library: Harry Potter · LRB 14 December 2017

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-25 08:00:04

I t seems eccentric ​ to say it of a person richer than the queen, but J.K. Rowling is, I think, undervalued. Or rather, she gets credit for the less important things, for being a marketing phenomenon whose books have sold more than 400 million copies, and not for the painstaking intricacy of the texts themselves. In the nine years that I’ve been writing children’s fiction, one of the questions I’ve been most often asked is ‘Are they any good, the Potter books?’ – a question which, like the Latin prefix num, anticipates the answer ‘no’.

A lot of their power comes from appealing to the fairy-tale desire of every child to believe that they are secretly special, the Chosen One. An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ‘suddenly’. (The same is true of Tolkien.) They are not texts that traffic in ambiguity; we are rarely left in doubt as to the precise emotion of any character in the room. (The same is true of Dickens.)

Rowling revels, too, in the humour of bodily excretions. Her books deal with ambition and corruption, power and death, but she is silly as often as she is wise. Rowling is a writer who has looked into the hearts of children, and seen immense moral seriousness compounded with frenetic energy and a measure of lunacy. Because her evocation of the Christ narrative is mixed in with jokes about troll snot, it is possible to dismiss the books as a little thin, a little cheap (this would be a mistake).

Leave a Comment