I never intended publishing this piece on misrule.com.au

I long ago got tired of being Australian children's lit anti-Potter poster girl, especially after a particularly unpleasant incident on the ABC's 7:30 Report. But after reading a stack of fairly uncritical commentaries on HP inspired by the newly released movie version of HP3, I re-read my article and decided it still had some valid points to make, even though it was published in 1999, and I haven't read past book 3. Just don't send me any hate mail, I really don't need the aggravation, and if my opinion so severely challenges your enjoyment of the books, I'd say that's a case of SEP (someone else's problem). Cheers. Go read Diana Wynne Jones.

This was first published in Viewpoint: On Books for Young Adults some time in 1999.

The Latest Big Thing in children's publishing is a series of books by a first-time British writer, J.K. Rowling, about a young boy who discovers that he is a wizard. The first two titles in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, have been universally praised by critics, literary judges, and readers of all ages (The third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban had not been published at time of writing). They are the biggest sellers we have seen in a long time. Children cannot wait for the next one to be published. Parents are delighted, and critics are stretching for superlatives.

I feel rather like the bad fairy at the princess' baptism, but I do not believe that the acclaim the Harry Potter books have received is warranted. These are books which are superficial and derivative, which are carelessly executed, and which offer troubling ideologies, yet they are being praised as the best on offer to young readers. I don't think they're the worst books around by any means, and I would not wish to suggest that children who have enjoyed them should not have done so. But I feel compelled to question why these books have been so well received by the “gatekeepers”. Is it because we apply a different, that is, lower set of standards to genre - in this case, fantasy - fiction than we do to realistic texts? Or - and far more troubling - have the standards by which we assess the quality of writing for young readers been eroded by a publishing industry which too often places its emphasis on marketing (“success”) over the writing, the editing process and the nurturing of new writers (“quality”)?

The premise of the Harry Potter books is that Harry discovers, when he is summoned at the age of 11 to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, that he is a wizard, "an' a thumpin' good'un'" at that. Harry doesn't know he's a wizard, because the Dursleys, the aunt and uncle who raised him, have kept the truth from him because they despise and fear anything to do with magic - and so they also despise and fear Harry . Somehow, as a baby, Harry survived an attack by the villain Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents and attempted to kill Harry himself. It is his survival that makes the magical world believe that Harry is a wizard of exceptional ability.

It is the point at which Harry's two worlds intersect - the "real" world of the Dursleys and the magical world that Harry actually belongs to - that a major inconsistency arises in the conception and creation of the fiction, which for this reader meant that from Chapter One, the entire believability of the Harry Potter books falls apart.
The fundamental law of fantasy writing, is that whether the fantastic world is related to the "real" world, or is a distinct world cut from "whole cloth", as Natalie Babbitt describes it, it has to follow its own set of consistent laws. It has to have an internal logic which allows the reader to suspend their disbelief of what could not be true in the "real world".

But Harry's world is full of inconsistencies. The fundamental laws and logic of a world where people with magic live side by side with those who don't ("Muggles") have not been thought through. We are told on page 13 of The Philosopher's Stone that Muggles do not know about those with magic. Yet the Dursleys absolutely know that Harry is from a magical line of the family. Many of Harry's classmates at Hogwarts come from Muggle families, and these families know about magic. The magical world clearly knows all about Muggles, yet there are wizards and witches who know nothing, for instance, of basketball, or how telephones work. It doesn't make sense. The relationship between the two worlds is a total - pardon the pun - muddle.

And it is no accident, I believe, that when such flaws exist in the foundations, that all sorts of other inconsistencies easily slip in, and the believability of the fantasy unravels. At the start of The Chamber of Secrets, for instance, Harry is reprimanded for apparently using magic during school holidays, which is forbidden. It's an error, but Harry is worried, as if he's "caught" again, he'll be expelled. Yet just a few short pages later, he and his friends are off to practise the sport of the magical world, Quidditch, which requires flying on broomsticks. Furthermore, how children from pureblood magical families cope in school holidays - suddenly forbidden at the age of 11 to use magic, yet apparently ignorant of the Muggle way of doing things - remains completely unexplained.

There are many examples of laziness and poor and planning in the plotting of the books, especially The Philosopher's Stone (The Chamber of Secrets is a better and more tightly plotted book by far). Too often, it feels as if a plot point has been thrown in at the last minute to take the story where the author has suddenly realised it needs to go, rather than having been carefully planned and foreshadowed. Similarly, facts about characters are thrown in as we need to know them, rather than layered and woven in as part of a complete portrait. One of the worst examples of poor or lazy plotting is the revelation of the identity of the teacher who is the bad guy at the end of The Philosopher's Stone. It's a total cheat. There has been no ambiguity, no sense that anyone but the person who has been fingered from the start is the villain, but it turns out to be someone else entirely. It's bad writing at best, a mean trick at worst, it’s certainly poor editing - and it's simply not fair on the reader. How we would feel if, at the end of the Tomorrow, When the War Began series, we were to discover that it was the New Zealanders who were behind the war? We simply wouldn't accept it if the clues hadn't been laid out carefully for us to discern or to misapprehend.

If space allowed, I could cite dozens of other examples of such inconsistencies in the Harry Potter books. And they are inconsistencies which I argue we do not tolerate in realistic fiction, yet they are all too easily overlooked or forgiven in genre fiction. One need only remember the criticisms levelled at Elizabeth Honey's Don't Pat the Wombat for plot inconsistencies in the latter half of that book; there are far many, and far more fundamentally serious errors in the Harry Potter books. Is this nit-picking? Do inconsistencies matter all that much? Well, yes, I believe they do. It all goes back to the dual issues of believability, and of maintaining standards of excellence in writing for children, regardless of genre. I would argue that we must maintain the same rigour in our critical appraisal of genre fiction as of realistic fiction; to do otherwise is to claim a superior status for one over the other, which is to thus devalue the profound impact excellent fantasy can have on the life of a child reader.

I'd also add here that in the same way I expect a truly excellent realist novel to have a "second layer", I want something meaningful from my magic. I don't mean fantasies must also be entirely serious; a good writer can have enormous fun with the possibilities that magic offers - think of T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, or Michael Ende's The Night of Wishes, or just about everything Diana Wynne Jones has written . But it's also true that profound and serious ideas are frequently embedded deep within the fun in those books. There's no doubt that there's fun in the magic in Harry Potter's world (especially Quidditch, which is, credit where it's due, a masterful invention), but the magic in these books serves no deeper purpose. "There was a lot more to magic.... than waving your wand and saying a few funny words" is about as much of the philosophy and purpose of magic as Rowling offers us. At the end of their first year, the students of Hogwarts are tested on whether they can make a pineapple dance, or turn a mouse into a snuffbox. This is Magic Lite, Disney magic. If that's all he's learnt, it's no wonder that when Harry actually faces Voldemort at the end of The Philosopher's Stone, he survives not by using his own abilities, magical or otherwise, but by a vague combination of luck, low-level violence, and the timely arrival of an adult; Dumbledore, Hogwart's Headmaster.

But there are other, for me, more worrying elements of the Harry Potter books, and these are the ideological problems that I referred to earlier. Here's a couple of "for instances"; the only female character of note is Hermione, who even when she becomes friends with Harry and his best friend Ron remains a figure of fun, even derision, to them, because she is intelligent and studious. I thought Lisa Simpson had put paid to that particular misogyny. The books are also full of stereotypes; you can easily spot the bad guys, for instance, by their hooked noses, and/or greasy black hair. We may expect fantasy to draw on archetypes, but we should expect that excellent fantasy does more than recycle stereotypes that in a realistic context would immediately smack of racism.

Another serious ideological problem I have with the books is the "Sorting Hat", which announces which House each new student of Hogwarts belongs to. Three of these houses are fairly interchangeable, so if you get sorted into one of them you are brave, loyal or hard-working. However, if you're fated to the House called Slytherin, the best the Hat can say for you is that you're cunning. And everyone knows that Slytherin has a reputation for turning out wizards and witches who go bad. I object to the notion that one quarter of 11 year old children are fated to be sly, cunning, and with the strong potential for evil. I think it's a nasty and unconscionable concept, and it sits uneasily in what is essentially meant to be a comic work.

Ultimately, and I do think that this is in many ways the worst sin, I think the Harry books cheat their readers. Rowling apparently determined from the beginning that seven books would be needed to tell Harry's tale. I have no problem with the books being planned as a series, but I do believe that every book in a series must be complete within itself. It's completely unfair - and either bad writing or cynicism - to leave major questions which are fundamental to the plot and intent of a given book unanswered at the end of that book.
The very worst example of this comes at the end of The Philosopher's Stone. Harry has retrieved the Stone (it actually falls into his pocket, no effort or ability required) and survived a confrontation with Voldemort. Now, the usual conclusion to what is essentially a Hero's quest is that the Hero learns a lesson, and is granted a boon. In children's fiction, as Babbitt, again, has beautifully described, this lesson is that which the hero must learn before he can become an adult . But when Harry asks Dumbledore the question I have been aching to know from the start; why did Voldemort want to kill Harry in the first place?, Dumbledore's answer is a cheat, both to Harry and the reader. It's also the one answer to a legitimate question that young people resent more than any; "I cannot tell you.... You will know, one day..... when you are older.....". It's no surprise to me, then, that after all his trials, Harry returns to the Dursleys for the summer holidays no more in command of his supposed extraordinary abilities, and no better equipped to deal with the Dursley’s relentless and unmotivated cruelty than he was before he left for Hogwarts.

There are many, many books around with flawed plots, careless characterisation and dubious ideologies. And there’s clearly something enormously appealing about the Harry Potter books for them to have been received so rapturously by so many children, even given my suspicions that a part of the appeal is the lack of anything really new and groundbreaking in the genre over recent years - for we crave our magic, of this I have no doubt. My concern is over the uncritical acclaim the books have received by the gatekeepers; it appears that we do not apply the same rigour in our critical assessment of genre fiction as we do to realist writing. Either that, or our standards overall are dropping, and the mediocre is now viewed as the exceptional - and that couldn’t be true, could it?