I didn’t really get into Harry Potter until my sophomore year of college. I’d read the first few books as a child, but hadn’t picked one up for years. Then, a couple weeks before finals, I unwisely picked up “Half-Blood Prince.” I blew off school, then read the entire series over Christmas break. Last summer, I read them again. There may or may not have been a third reread in there somewhere, and I wish I could unread them and start all over.
Which probably means there’s something inherently wrong with the Harry Potter stories. Not wrong enough to make them bad, but enough to make their recent place on bookstores’ “Children’s Classics” shelf a stretch.
In my experience, great books yield more every time I return to them. I didn’t even like “Brideshead Revisited” the first time I read it, then fell in love when I went back a couple months later. Narnia was infinitely better at age 21—my seventh time through the series—than when Dad first read it aloud at age 5. “David Copperfield” creeps a little deeper into my general understanding of life every few years.
That hasn’t been the case with Harry Potter. Sure, I can now tell you Dumbledore’s least favorite jelly bean flavor, but that’s just trivia. I think the reason that I get less out of Rowling each time I read her is that her universe ends when her words run out.
Waugh, Dickens, and Lewis open a window on the world that exists. Every time I look through that window, my eyes get a little more accustomed to the brightness, and I make out more of the scenery. Rowling looks through a window into a curiously-furnished room, but once I’ve noted all the furniture, there’s nowhere else to go.
At the end of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the lion Aslan tells Lucy Pevensie that she will never return to Narnia. He brought her there in the first place to teach her to recognize him in England, and now it is time for her to love her own world. Lewis’ fantasy draws his readers to embrace reality. “Harry Potter” inevitably makes me discontented with reality because it presents an alternate one—not just because people don’t actually play soccer on broomsticks, but because Rowling’s world is essentially different from the real one. At Hogwarts, there are no Platonic ideals that give meaning to their earthly manifestations: Harry’s love for his friends is the ultimate love, Voldemort is the evil, and Dumbledore is wisdom. I think this immanence of Rowling’s world is what makes it so initially attractive.
But I’d rather meditate on a shadow now of something truly beautiful that I will see some day, than spend too much time studying a Kincade.
“Harry Potter” is crazy fun and not necessarily bad for you. I may even read it a fourth time. But it is pure escapism. Eventually, there comes a time for us to draw near to our own world.
