Rereading Potter

Like millions of other people, I'm looking forward to the two new Harry Potter releases, the film this week, and the book next. Galena and I have been rereading the entire series in preparation: I finished The Order of the Phoenix last night, and when my allergies got me up at 1:00 am, managed to make about 100 pages of my way into The Halfblood Prince.

It's interesting rereading the series. Even though I enjoyed Rowlings' work, when the first Potter books came out, and were widely compared with Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, I was insulted by the comparison. "Fifty years from now," I said to anyone who was interested, "people will be asking 'Harry who?', but they'll still be reading Narnia." I still think that the Chronicles will last longer than Harry Potter, but my opinion about Harry Potter has become somewhat more nuanced.

Lots of people have pointed out that the plots have become darker, and in that way, more interesting. But Rowlings' character development has also been better than I expected it to be. Harry isn't all good, any more than his parents were: he's moody, he doesn't trust his friends, he gets angry, and at one point he uses an illegal cruciatus curse. Lots of characters who are on the "right side" are still unpleasant people, and in that way, it's a good deal like real life. Harry's disturbing trip through Snape's pensieve, or his misplaced attempt to "save" Sirius at the Ministry of Magic, were not what I expected – and are therefore more interesting than I expected.

Still, there are aspects to the books which have disturbed me this time around. I don't like the way that the characters – all the characters – lie so casually. For a book which revolves around the fight between good and evil, it's not always clear to me what Rowling sees as the difference between the two. I'm not complaining, of course, that the characters are themselves ambiguous and complex. Jane Austen's novels portrayed complex characters with very mixed motives – but the narrator's moral perspective is always clear: Emma Woodhouse is portrayed sympathetically, but the narrator leaves you no doubt as to her failings. But I don't get the same sense from Rowling that she's quite as clear about the moral problems with many of Harry's actions. If the narrator judges them at all, it is from a distance, and almost as an afterthought.

Perhaps I'm misjudging here: I've only read the books twice, after all, and it'll be another couple weeks before I can read the last one. But I get the impression that Rowlings' somewhat muddy moral perspective reflects, not surprisingly, the muddy waters of the 21^st century in which she (and all of us) must wade.

The Children of Hurin

Like many of my fellow-geeks, I'm a great Tolkien fan. So even though half a dozen volumes of The History of Middle Earth currently lie unread on my bookshelf, I was quite excited when Christopher Tolkien recently released a new novel by his father, The Children of Hurin. After a long bike ride today, I came home and finished it over dinner.

My reactions to it are mixed. On the one hand, I think the story itself is amazing: a tragedy that ranks with the best of world literature in its exploration of the many griefs that inhabit our world. As in the Silmarillion, Tolkien makes oblique reference to the Biblical story of the Fall: "A darkness lies behind us," Sador says,"and out of it few tales have come. The fathers of our fathers may have had things to tell, but they did not tell them. Even their names are forgotten." Indeed, for all its attempts to tell a story of the world before Christ -- for all its attempt to recreate the pagan world of the Norse myths that Tolkien loved -- the book could not have been written by other than a Christian.

That said, nearly all of this story has already been told in The Silmarillion, in the long chapter "Of Turin Turambar". The story is told somewhat more fully in The Children of Hurin, and some of the details are changed, but it's fundamentally the same story. Having been a year or two since I last read The Silmarillion, I wasn't able to pick out where the one was more expansive or even where the two differed. Even as it presents more details, The Children of Hurin still largely maintains the summarizing, distant style of The Silmarillion: if you liked The Silmarillion, you'll like The Children of Hurin; if you didn't enjoy the former, you won't enjoy the latter.

That said, it's worth reading. It was one of the stories which most engaged Tolkien's mind throughout his life, and it stands as a firm refutation to those who critique Tolkien for creating only two-dimensional characters, either all good or all bad. Indeed, in Tolkien's universe, LOTR stands distinct from the rest of his tales: it is the one story where all finally goes well, where nearly all of the main characters (Denethor, Boromir and Saruman excepted) stand true and remain admirable throughout. That cannot be said of any other story in Tolkien's universe.