Best of 2020 Harry Potter fans need to grow up The Boy Who Lived hit 40 this year, but the books' binary worldview hasn't aged well BY Sam Leith . It's time to move on. Credit: NEIL HANNA/AFP via Getty Images Series Best of 2020 Our favourite pieces from the last year of UnHerd Other articles in this series > Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator and the author of Write To The Point: How To Be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page December 24, 2020 questingvole December 24, 2020 Filed under: Best of 2020Harry PotterJ.K Rowling Share: Harry Potter is 40. The Boy Who Lived has, in his parallel universe, become the Middle-aged Man Who Kept On Living. That lightning scar is now, perhaps, peeping through an unruly salt-and-pepper fringe; or providing the reproachful point of punctuation below a widow’s peak. The glasses are now bifocals. He’s still skinny-limbed, no doubt, but has he acquired a paunch — the faintest hint of a butterbeer-belly? There’s a poignancy to him: there’s a poignancy to the hero of any story who outlives the central plot arc of his own life. Ask any middle-aged man. One of the most brilliant of many brilliant things about J. K. Rowling’s books was the way in which they grew up alongside their readers. In the first novel, Harry turned 11, and he grew older with each one; an 11-year-old reader of that first book would have crested young adulthood at the same time Harry did. The stories grew darker, more complex, more challenging. The adventures spilled out from the classroom into the wider adult world. The dangers were greater, the reverses and losses more permanent and more grave. But then, of course, they stopped and their readers carried on into the trackless wastes of maturity without him. That will have been a loss. It’s worth taking this opportunity to say what artful books they are, and how thoroughly imagined was their world: Rowling seeded future developments and plot strands so early in the first book; she dropped her trail of breadcrumbs. She knew where she was going, and she went there at just the right pace, and (admirably) she stopped when she got there, her story told. The writing may not have been showy, but it did its work. She picked out evocative details — Ollivander’s moonlike eyes, say, or the light through the high windows striping the stone corridors of Hogwarts. She employed the whole sensorium to make her world immediate. And there was a warm gleam of humour on every page. More from this authorHumans don't know how to be happyBy Sam Leith When they first came out, some early reviewers — including this one — groused a little that Rowling was a magpie. The novels seemed to be a collage of influences: this from T. H. White or Tolkien, that from Roald Dahl, this from The Worst Witch; that from any number of old-fashioned boarding-school stories; this – blimey — from Kafka. But of course, looking back, to indict her for a lack of originality was to miss the point. Rowling knew just what she was doing. She was in the business of building a myth. And all myths steal and repurpose previous stories: they draw their power from them. The Torah was a straight remix of Babylonian creation myths and all the better for it. And if a myth does its job, it offers — however fantastical — a way of thinking about the world. Like many children’s books, the Harry Potter books set out to affirm a set of moral principles for the generation that grew up with them; and given the almost 100% saturation of the market it’s fair to assume they will have had an influence. These principles are, we can say, pretty uncontroversial. They affirm the value of courage, honesty, loyalty and the importance of friendship. They say that bullying is to be deplored, kindness valued; that might doesn’t make right and that love is stronger than hate. They go in to bat, too, for some easy liberal values. Slavery is a bad thing. Eugenics and racial profiling are no-nos. Torture and random sadistic murder are definitely frowned on. Hey kids, these books say full-throatedly: don’t be a Nazi, ‘mkay? More from this authorThe woke are coming for ScrabbleBy Sam Leith In so doing, and in the very reasonable line of being children’s books, and bloody good ones — and exciting stories at that — they present the world as an all-or-nothing heroic struggle between unmitigated good and unfathomable evil. You have lovely, wise, kind and selfless Dumbledore in one corner and you have that utter rotten egg Voldemort in the other. Pick a team. Institutions are to be trusted only inasmuch as they are run by goodies (the Ministry of Magic is eminently corruptible but Dumbledore’s Hogwarts is not, at least while the old man remains in charge), and rules are to be broken ad lib as long as it’s the goodies doing it. Normative authority is creepy old Filch, skulking the corridors with Mrs Norris in search of fun to spoil and miscreants to snitch on. The mainstream media is the prurient and unctuous scratching of Rita Skeeter. Suburban normies — incarnated in the Dursleys of Privet Drive — are the pits. In their fine texture, the books are subtler than that — Snape’s story arc, for instance, has a level of real moral complexity; and the psychology of the protagonists’ day-to-day friendships is not simplistic — but the basic shape of the main story is goodies vs baddies to the death. And that is, as I say, quite proper. They’re children’s books. More from this authorWhy are publishers pandering to the mob?By Sam Leith Revolutions eat their children. Critics of the series have since argued that there are subtextual or framing issues: that they’re kind of heteronormative (Dumbledore was, Rowling told us later, gay — but there’s scant evidence for it in the text); or that they’re kind of white (Rowling welcomed the casting of a black Hermione in the stage show, and Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote interestingly about how a black Hermione would have enriched the story in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, but, again, the text tends not to support the idea). You may agree with these criticisms or you may scoff at them — but it’s striking that an audience primed to take a binary goodies vs baddies worldview has turned with some decisiveness on the author of that worldview when it decided (most dramatically over her gender-critical comments on Twitter) that she’s on the other team. Our cultural and political moment now looks very much like one with a sorting-hat view of the world: the hat peers deep into your soul, and after no more than a minute – though usually instantly – it assigns you an identity. If you’re Slytherin, that’s that. More from this authorWhat Eton taught me about powerBy Sam Leith That is to say: evil is held to reside ineradicably in the person so sorted. The extent to which this has become general is shown on the reaction to the now notorious Harper’s letter — signed, among many others, by J. K. Rowling — which offered some pretty unexceptionable bromides on free speech. The debate centred not on the arguments made in the letter but on the people who signed their names to it. The question not was it the right argument, but were they the right people? Was the Dark Mark upon them? One signatory who had freely endorsed the contents of the letter, presumably having at least skim-read them, immediately withdrew their support and apologised on the express grounds that they never would have signed had they known who else was signing. Wrong team. Expelliarmus. These are, as I’ve said before, children’s books. Harry Potter, somewhere in the multiverse, grew up. So must his audience. This article first appeared on 31 July, 2020 Share: Join the discussion Not sure this is exclusive to Harry Potter. It seems most children’s books take a binary view of morality. This might be because children can learn what is wrong , before their rationing abilities have been developed. I think if you tried to teach children ethical complexities, before they can fully think for themselves, it could do more harm than good. And agree that adults need to learn the nuances; perhaps read some books made for adults? The vast majority – perhaps 95% – of adults are completely incapable of reading books for adults. Well, C S Lewis achieved it in his final book in the Narnia series: The Last Battle. At the very end – the end of the Narnian world, literally – Aslan sorts those who will join him in his own country, and those who will not. A binary choice between the good and the evil drawing on Christian apocalyptic literature. However, when it comes to the young Calormene devoted to his demon-god Tash, Aslan does not relegate him to post-Narnian blackness but draws him into his own country (and forgive the long quote but I can do no better): “Not because [Tash] and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou has done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan it is Tash who he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.” This little dissertation on the nuances of binaries is in a little Puffin children’s book with a largish type face. To get involved in the discussion and stay up to date, become a registered user. It's simple, quick and free. Sign me up
Not sure this is exclusive to Harry Potter. It seems most children’s books take a binary view of morality. This might be because children can learn what is wrong , before their rationing abilities have been developed. I think if you tried to teach children ethical complexities, before they can fully think for themselves, it could do more harm than good. And agree that adults need to learn the nuances; perhaps read some books made for adults?
Well, C S Lewis achieved it in his final book in the Narnia series: The Last Battle. At the very end – the end of the Narnian world, literally – Aslan sorts those who will join him in his own country, and those who will not. A binary choice between the good and the evil drawing on Christian apocalyptic literature. However, when it comes to the young Calormene devoted to his demon-god Tash, Aslan does not relegate him to post-Narnian blackness but draws him into his own country (and forgive the long quote but I can do no better): “Not because [Tash] and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou has done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan it is Tash who he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.” This little dissertation on the nuances of binaries is in a little Puffin children’s book with a largish type face.