Sullivan: The Series-Book Fantasy World

An Excerpt from C.W. Sullivan III's Paper

"J.K. Rowling and Ursula K. LeGuin:
Creating the Series-Book Fantasy World"

There are a number of articles that, like Richard Bernstein's piece in The New York Times (30 November 1999), comment that the Harry Potter books are "not nearly as brilliant or literary as, say, The Hobbit or the Alice in Wonderland books."

These comments come in spite of a general agreement that Rowling is a good writer or tells a good story. Lee Seigel, in The New Republic (22 November 1999), asks, "What it is with the British, why are they so good at creating stories in which there is this world and an alternative world?" and goes on to place Rowling in the company of J.M. Barrie, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. Andrew Stuttaford, in The National Review (11 October 1999), says that the "lesson of Harry Potter is that well-crafted, intelligent stories can indeed flourish in the marketplace-if the gatekeepers of our contemporary culture give them a chance." Shannon Maughan, in Publishers Weekly (19 July 1999), argues that "[m]ost children's book experts agree that the attention paid to the Harry Potter books is well-deserved, primarily because they are first and foremost works of quality fiction." Elizabeth Gleick, writing from Scotland for Time magazine (12 April 1999) suggests that it is the "completeness of Rowling's vision [that] may explain Harry Potter's stunning popularity." Michael Winerip, in The New York Times Book Review (14 February 1999), writes, "Much like Roald Dahl [the writer to whom she is most often compared, by the way], J.K. Rowling has a gift for keeping the emotions, fears and triumphs of her characters on a human scale, even when the supernatural is popping out all over." And Eden Ross Lipton, again in The New York Times (12 July 1999), contends that Rowling "never breaks out of her voice."

It is obvious that the books are popular, and I agree with the evaluations of her writing. But I, too, was dissatisfied as a reader and was reassured to see comments like the following from Pico Iyer in The New York Times Book Review:

There is a kind of writing for children, often misnamed "fantasy," that starts from something universal and speaks to some mythic core in us; there is another kind, of which Harry Potter is a grand examplar, that simply tweaks the particular in a magical direction. That is why the figures in Ursula K. LeGuin's [A] Wizard of Earthsea (inspired in part by the author's knowledge of Native American lore) seems to spring from some deep place inside the collective imagination; Harry Potter, by contrast, is more likely to be spotted at King's Cross, waiting for the train back to Hogwarts on the platform that, to the discerning eye at least, is numbered, surprisingly, "Nine and Three-Quarters." (10 October 1999) If there is something lacking in the Harry Potter books and if it is not the writing, that is, the style, then it may be--or perhaps might be--some flaw or lack in the creation of the Secondary World, a flaw or lack which leaves adults, at least, with the feeling that there is something important missing. And if you ask me (and I think that you have--although you may not have meant to), I would say that the problem lies with the magic.

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