"...when I became a man, I put away childish things"
Over the past few days I've discussed with koalathebear a time or two the capacity some people have to kick in the teeth of other people's enjoyment of Harry Potter. The "you're an adult, you shouldn't be reading childrens' books" attitude.
On Radio 4's Today Programme this morning there was a discussion which summed this up nicely for me. On the side of "it's rubbish, read something better, I haven't read it and my son threw it aside and said he was bored" was Will Self. On the side of "there are adult themes, and don't knock it if you haven't tried it" was a professor of English Literature.
Self talked over the other guy, trying to bear him down with his opinion. He maintained that, despite having not read the new book, he had children and therefore was immersed enough in the Potter phenomenon to be able to judge. He apparently appears not to be able to judge sufficiently well for it to have occurred to him that his son might have been a bit young for the final book of the seven to appeal to him yet; that maybe it's a bit too adult for him.
The professor of English Literature, when he wasn't being talked over, made all the counter-arguments that you'd expect. He pointed out that there are layers of themes in the books, and that some of them are very adult concepts, that there's satire and political and racial commentary alongside the fantasy. But Self countered again with comments about the pedestrial nature of the language it's written in, and started lauding Ulysses. Excuse me while I faint with shock at the predictability of his intellectual snobbery.
It would appear that he's willing to buy into some types of herd mentality, but not all. He can subscribe to the belief that if you care at all about English Literature you must praise Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, for instance.
I'm not against James Joyce's writings on principle. I liked A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite the fact that his characters leave me intellectually cold. But Ulysses's experimental stream of consciousness stylings seemed unbelievably pretentious to me when I had to struggle through it. They took me out of the plot, and there wasn't much of one of those, once you peel away the layers of literary allusion. And, frankly, I didn't care for Leopold Bloom as a protagonist. But the language is poetic enough that I can see how it would be appealing to some; I'm just not a poetic kind of reader, and the book felt ugly to me. If I hadn't needed to read it for a degree course, I'd have put it down after the first few pages and never picked it up again.
It seems to me that there are pretty much two schools of thought when reading (and indeed writing) a novel. There's the type who build a sculpture; a picture in words, the very best of which have a single, warm, emotional core around which all the wrought ironwork is wrapped. And then there are the storytellers, who write great rambling narratives and share out the emotional heart into smaller parcels, assigning them to multiple characters along the way. They're in the business of page turning, so they have to get you invested in their characters from the start, and make you care what happens to them.
So, personally, I'll stick with the storytellers. I'm a plot-driven kind of person, and what I look for as entertainment in the novel is a rattling good yarn. If it provokes new and interesting ideas in me during the course of reading, that's a bonus, but the essential thing is that it amuses and diverts. And as a secondary aspect, give me the warm, funny, flawed and interesting characters to hang my interest on. I need at least one POV character for anything, and I don't much care if it's Elizabeth Bennet or Tom Paris or Tamzin Grey or Alex Krycek or Francis Crawford or Steve Collier or Vad Varo or Arthur Clennam, just so long as there's some spark of interest that makes me care about them, and want to follow the story of their lives, and those of their friends and enemies.
Besides, it's not as if I never read anything else. Too many of the Potter-bashers seem to assume that because you read those novels and the final four are rather long, you never get around to having time for a more varied literary diet. And if sometimes that means I have to be childish, then I'll be childish. I have to be adult all day long at work, after all, and sometimes you need the break.
On Radio 4's Today Programme this morning there was a discussion which summed this up nicely for me. On the side of "it's rubbish, read something better, I haven't read it and my son threw it aside and said he was bored" was Will Self. On the side of "there are adult themes, and don't knock it if you haven't tried it" was a professor of English Literature.
Self talked over the other guy, trying to bear him down with his opinion. He maintained that, despite having not read the new book, he had children and therefore was immersed enough in the Potter phenomenon to be able to judge. He apparently appears not to be able to judge sufficiently well for it to have occurred to him that his son might have been a bit young for the final book of the seven to appeal to him yet; that maybe it's a bit too adult for him.
The professor of English Literature, when he wasn't being talked over, made all the counter-arguments that you'd expect. He pointed out that there are layers of themes in the books, and that some of them are very adult concepts, that there's satire and political and racial commentary alongside the fantasy. But Self countered again with comments about the pedestrial nature of the language it's written in, and started lauding Ulysses. Excuse me while I faint with shock at the predictability of his intellectual snobbery.
It would appear that he's willing to buy into some types of herd mentality, but not all. He can subscribe to the belief that if you care at all about English Literature you must praise Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, for instance.
I'm not against James Joyce's writings on principle. I liked A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, despite the fact that his characters leave me intellectually cold. But Ulysses's experimental stream of consciousness stylings seemed unbelievably pretentious to me when I had to struggle through it. They took me out of the plot, and there wasn't much of one of those, once you peel away the layers of literary allusion. And, frankly, I didn't care for Leopold Bloom as a protagonist. But the language is poetic enough that I can see how it would be appealing to some; I'm just not a poetic kind of reader, and the book felt ugly to me. If I hadn't needed to read it for a degree course, I'd have put it down after the first few pages and never picked it up again.
It seems to me that there are pretty much two schools of thought when reading (and indeed writing) a novel. There's the type who build a sculpture; a picture in words, the very best of which have a single, warm, emotional core around which all the wrought ironwork is wrapped. And then there are the storytellers, who write great rambling narratives and share out the emotional heart into smaller parcels, assigning them to multiple characters along the way. They're in the business of page turning, so they have to get you invested in their characters from the start, and make you care what happens to them.
So, personally, I'll stick with the storytellers. I'm a plot-driven kind of person, and what I look for as entertainment in the novel is a rattling good yarn. If it provokes new and interesting ideas in me during the course of reading, that's a bonus, but the essential thing is that it amuses and diverts. And as a secondary aspect, give me the warm, funny, flawed and interesting characters to hang my interest on. I need at least one POV character for anything, and I don't much care if it's Elizabeth Bennet or Tom Paris or Tamzin Grey or Alex Krycek or Francis Crawford or Steve Collier or Vad Varo or Arthur Clennam, just so long as there's some spark of interest that makes me care about them, and want to follow the story of their lives, and those of their friends and enemies.
Besides, it's not as if I never read anything else. Too many of the Potter-bashers seem to assume that because you read those novels and the final four are rather long, you never get around to having time for a more varied literary diet. And if sometimes that means I have to be childish, then I'll be childish. I have to be adult all day long at work, after all, and sometimes you need the break.