J. K. Rowling
2000
Awards:
Hugo
Rating:
★ ★ – – –
Like
McDonald’s fries, this book goes down easily and is engineered to be delicious
to a wide range of palates. And, like McDonald’s fries, once consumed, it may
leave you feeling oddly hollow and a bit greasy.
For
those who aren’t familiar with Harry Potter and his multi-media juggernaut, allow
me to provide a brief background. Harry is a teenage wizard. When he was a baby,
his parents were killed by the evil Lord Valdemort. Valdemort tried to kill
Harry too, but Harry escaped, rendering Valdemort incorporeal in the process,
and thus earning Valdemort’s undying hatred. Harry’s super-mean aunt and uncle
then became Harry’s legal guardians. But luckily Harry has been able to spend
most of his teen years away from them and with his adoring friends and the (mostly)
kindly faculty at Hogwarts, a boarding school for wizards. Harry and his two
best friends, Ron and Hermione, both of whom are also wizards,
get into adventures and conquer various perils together with pluck and teamwork.
Most
of the plot of The Goblet of Fire surrounds
the Triwizard Tournament, a competition in which contestants have to survive
through various interesting-sounding but, in the end, not very challenging
trials like stealing eggs from dragons and navigating monster-laden mazes. The
tournament, which is open to only an extra-special select few, pits Harry (of
course) and one other Hogwarts classmate against each other and against the top
students at two other wizard schools.
During
the competition, the stakes are raised when Harry learns that his old nemesis, Lord
Valdemort, has a spy at Hogwarts and this spy is trying to use the tournament to get
Harry killed. Valdemort is also doing his best to regain physical form and wage
terror on the world once again.
I had a number of irritations with this book, all related to Rowling’s
writing style. For one thing, she leads us by the nose through the logical connections
we’re supposed to make and the emotions we’re supposed to feel in a hyperbolic,
plodding way reminiscent of Dan Brown. She inserts backstories too obviously via
awkwardly contrived conversations. She explains and re-explains jokes until
they lose whatever humor they might have had, and they often become even more forced
and unfunny when the characters have to stifle their uncontrollable laughter by
burying themselves behind a book or shoving food in their mouths.
Her
characters are also either 100% good or 100% evil. Evil people (like Harry’s
aunt and uncle) are unrelentingly, unreasoningly evil with no apparent
motivation. Good people (like Harry and
his best friends) are lauded by everyone else who is good, tend to have good
luck at exactly the right times, are in with and protected by the authorities, and
never do harm except to evil people.
Rowling
also seems to have an oddly hostile attitude towards people who do not conform
to stereotypically normal looks. Anyone who is ugly, fat, or has greasy hair is
almost guaranteed to be on the evil side. Even Hermione is never noticed as a
girl until she transforms her hair from its naturally unattractive “bushy” state to “sleek and
shiny” for a school dance.
And looking different seems to give everyone—even good
people—license to make fun of you. For example, Harry’s evil cousin Dudley is fat. At
one point in Dudley’s life, a wizard once gave him a curly pig’s tail on his rear
end. So, now, when Dudley is around wizards, he is constantly grabbing his
bottom in fear. It is clear that Harry has gossiped to his friend Ron about
this and the two of them nearly explode with stifled laughter watching poor Dudley do this.
 |
| A school for witches (1982) |
What
bothered me the most, though, is that I can’t think of anything else I have
read recently that felt so blatantly derivative of earlier works of myth and
fantasy. I realize that authors unconsciously draw elements from others all the
time. But this book seemed to consist almost entirely of pieces taken directly from a wide range of classics.
Next week, I
will provide a sampling of some of the specific derivations that I saw. For
now, I will say that I found characters, plot points, and even
specific phrases pulled almost completely intact from sources like The Sword in the Stone, The Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars saga. Rowling also seems to
owe a great debt of, shall we say, inspiration to her countrywoman Diana Wynne
Jones, who wrote a clever and original series of books back in the 1980s about a boarding
school for young witches.
I think that what Goblet of Fire reminded
me of the most was The Sword in the Stone—the
animated, Disney-fied take on the story of King Arthur as a boy. Like Goblet of Fire, the Sword in the Stone has an orphaned boy hero, raised by inexplicably
vindictive custodial relatives who have it in for him for no discernible reason.
It has a gruff, elderly, paternal wizard mentor who trains the boy in the arts
of magic. It has monsters, cute mythological creatures, and transmutation of
people into animals. It has a tournament of strength and ability during which
our young hero proves his magical mettle. It has a wizard duel. And it even has
a kindly but sometimes grumbly owl as the wizard’s pet.
 |
| Wart, Merlin, & Archimedes in The Sword in the Stone |
Both
Tolkien and Arthurian legend would have been inescapable in Rowling’s own British
childhood, so it’s understandable that she would have been influenced by them. But,
to me, the quantity and degree of her element-borrowing goes beyond unconscious
influence or even homage.
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