I sat down the other day to try to begin a work of fiction involving some of the minor characters from the Harry Potter series, just for fun. A sort of "what happens then?" type story.

I've kind of decided (without giving things away) to focus the story on Aberforth Dumbledore and George Weasley, two men who suffered the loss of a brother in the long battle with Voldemort. For Aberforth, it would be a journey of forgiveness and rebirth; for George, it would be the story of how he learns to carry on when half of him, his twin brother, is no longer around.

Doesn't sound like the happiest of stories, does it?

I would hope that the shape of the story will be the movement from sadness and loss (and lostness, as well) to happiness and rejuvenation.

The problem is, after numerous false starts, I finally erased it all and shut down the computer. I guess I'm just not ready yet. Maybe I need to dwell in the world of Abigail Massey and the McAdam Station and Hotel for a while longer. Maybe I need to finish my personal Harry Potter Concordance first. Who knows? But, for now, the story of the lost brothers will just have to wait.

Tags: Harry Potter, Rowling, Dumbledore

I've recently become a frequent visitor to the "You Tube" library of videos, wandering up and down its many corridors, checking out the wide variety of items it has to offer. The other day, on one of my wanderings, I stumbled across a fascinating little video in which a young woman (maybe 12 or 13) recorded her immediate reaction (live and almost unedited) upon completing her first reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I was amazed at the level of raw emotion on display. The young woman was so overcome at times that she actually had to turn off her recorder and take a moment to compose herself before starting it up again. My first thought was to marvel, yet again, at the tremendous impact of the seven novels on their reading public. Then I wondered how Jo Rowling must feel if and when she comes across these kinds of tributes in cyberspace and sees, first hand and unedited, how strong an impact her books were having. Then I started to recall recent studies that have been done on how the young people of the 21st century are seeking and finding community in cyberspace to share and deal with even their most intimate personal issues: parents divorcing, family members dying, break ups with boyfriends or girlfriends, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.

After a while, however, the irony hit me. This young woman's video on You Tube captures her emotional reaction to the final novel about a group of 21st century kids who have, apparently, completed rejected the cyber age.

What does that say about the millions of people who love Harry Potter?

Especially the young fans?

I find it amazing that the most successful collection of children's novels in the 21st century involves a clear repudiation of science and technology. Children are putting aside their cell phones and iPods, their XBoxes and Wiis, turning off their TVs and their internet connections, to read these books. And the children in the books — even though they apparently live in the same time and place as their fans — never (and I mean never) access the many technological wonders of the modern world. I don't think that the words "internet" or "e-mail" appear even once in the seven books.

I have long compared the Harry Potter series to the Star Wars series of the 1970s and I think the comparisons are valid (see other posts on this website) both with regard to the internal world of the two series and with regard to the fan phenomenon they have created. But the original Star Wars series was all about technology — even the good guys, who embraced magic (sorry, the "force"), had space ships and blaster guns and androids and light sabres. Harry Potter carries in it a distinct, unchallenged distrust of technology.

There is, in fact, little or no science in the books. The closest course to Science at Hogwarts is Potions, which seems a little like chemistry but really isn't. These people trust magic but never seek to explain how it works. Even when we are privy to the lessons the students are taught, we find very little interest in explaining why things work, why a potion is effective, how an effect is created.

Harry's cousin, Dudley, loves his technology. He has TVs in every room and a computer upon which he plays. It's no surprise, then, that Dudley is portrayed as the worst kind of child, spoiled rotten and a bully to the core.

The only person from the wizarding world who shows any interest at all in scientific questions is Arthur Weasley. He takes Muggle cars apart and marvels at their trains that run underground. He states in book six that his greatest ambition is to figure out how airplanes stay up, yet he shows absolutely no interest in understanding how broomsticks stay up.

Let's face it, the wizarding world in the books of J.K. Rowling is practically Amish in its rejection of technology. If it weren't for the Hogwarts Express — an actual train — we would find absolutely no remotely modern technology among the witches and wizards.

What do we make of this? In an era where we find it impossible to get young people to put their technology aside even for a minute, why is this Amish world of magic so insanely popular?

It's possible, just possible, that the children of the 70s still hoped that technology could be trusted to save us from ourselves, from the damage we've done to the planet, from the damage we threaten to do to each other, and that the children of today no longer share that trust. And J.K. Rowling has tapped into that in creating an alternate world that is free of the nastiness that technology threatens to bring.

(An interesting side-note to this issue is the fact that the second trilogy in the Star Wars series, released at about the same time as the Potter books, continued to cling to technology and was, at least from what I can see, significantly less popular than either the original trilogy or the Rowling books).

Interesting. And yet the same kids who are loving the books are also streaming their immediate emotional reactions to those books through You Tube in cyberspace. Hmmmm...

And of course I wonder at the relationship between the wizarding world and the Muggle world in Rowling's creation. We learn that witch burning in the 14th century was a waste of time because the witches just cast a spell that caused the flames to tickle rather than burn but what about pollution and nuclear weapons? What about disease and starvation?

An interesting future story (and one that has been featured numerous times on Star Trek) might be what happens when the wizarding world decides that it MUST intervene to stop the Muggles from destroying the planet we all share. Interesting.

Tags: Harry Potter, Rowling, Deathly Hallows, Star Wars, You Tube

I finally got around to re-reading (I think for only the second time!) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment in the celebrated seven-novel series by English author J.K. Rowling. I added the exclamation point for the simple reason that I have read the first, second, third, fourth and seventh books at least four or five times each. And the only reason I haven't read the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as often is because I find it so effectively unhappy and claustrophobic that I find reading it emotionally and psychologically difficult.

My reticence with regard to The Half-Blood Prince comes from a different source: I simply didn't like the book the first time I read it. So I didn't go back to it for the longest time.

I read it again this past week. Did I like it better? Maybe. Do I understand why I find it to be somewhat less successful than the other books? I think so. Did reading it again help me appreciate, once again, just how great a writer J.K. Rowling is? Undoubtedly.

I think I find The Half-Blood Prince less compelling than the others simply because it is mostly a launching pad for the bewilderingly good seventh and final book. Rowling packs the sixth book full — too full, I would argue — in order to prepare for the last novel.

The main, suspense plot develops when two more minor plots (Harry's private sessions with Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy's deadly assignment from Voldemort) come together in the final 50 or so pages. Up until that point, however, we are caught up in a spin cycle of minor plots: Dumbledore preparing Harry for his showdown with Voldemort; Harry suspecting Draco of nefarious acts but getting no sympathy from the others; Harry benefiting from hand-scrawled notes in an old Potion text book (once owned by the titular Half-Blood Prince); all of our young heroes struggling with their hormones as they deal with puberty; Harry taking on his first season as Quidditch Captain; the introduction of a new potions master, Professor Slughorn, who holds the key to the puzzle of what makes Voldemort tick; the students facing their Apparition tests; and much more.

To prepare us for the grand finale, Rowling needs us to emerge from the sixth book with an understanding that Voldemort has attempted to render himself immortal by tearing his soul into pieces and hiding the bits in various objects (known as Horcruxes), that it is Harry's job to find and destroy these Horcruxes and then to kill Voldemort himself, and that Dumbledore will not be around so that Harry and his friends face this daunting task alone.

It's a tall order and not one that lends itself to the creation of suspense.

On the other hand, my recent re-reading of The Half-Blood Prince has helped me to appreciate how beautifully written the book is. There is poetry in these pages as Rowling shows that she is as capable a writer for adults as she is for children:

Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about the phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: it was his own grief turned magically to song that echoed across the grounds and through the castle windows (p. 573).

She also proves herself a virtuoso at presenting gripping scenes of absolute authenticity, leading her reader to read the scene and the characters within it in a certain way, and then turning that understanding inside out at a later date. The scene on the ramparts of the Astronomy tower, where Dumbledore finds himself poisoned and weak, wandless at the hands of his enemies, with Harry, invisible and paralysed, forced to watch, is an epic, heartrending scene.

But somebody else had spoken Snape's name, quite softly.

'Severus...'

The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading...

Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face. (p. 556)

You read that and you are convinced that Harry has been right all along about Severus Snape, that Dumbledore was wrong in trusting him. It is true and real and authentic and nothing is left out. As readers, we are right to read the scene that way. Just as we are right to read Snape's running battle (of spells and of words) with Harry later in the book as more clear evidence of Snape's hatred of Harry, his treachery toward Dumbledore and his loyalty to Voldemort.

It's spellbinding writing and absolutely right. And yet, as we find out at the end of book seven, our reading of it — which is fully justified every step of the way — is completely wrong. Snape is one of the good guys. Miraculously, when we reread these sections from book six, knowing the truth after reading book seven, we find that Rowling didn't cheat, that not one word is false. Once we know the truth of the situation, her descriptions of the original events ring just as true. We interpreted them in one way because Rowling has very adeptly led us to that interpretation — it is right for that time. But, as we discover when we go back to the scenes after reading the final novel, the truth is there too. We simply allowed her to lead us away from it.

Just like Harry, we distrusted Snape, we doubted Dumbledore. Just like Harry, we found out we were wrong.

And Rowling was right every step of the way.

That makes me think about what Snape would have been going through as he carried out Dumbledore's wishes up there on the tower. To honour the man, he had to killhim. His revulsion and hatred were not focused on Dumbledore as we originally believed but on the act of horror Snape has to carry out in order to live up to his word, to help out his friend.

So, sure, The Half-Blood Prince is not the most effective of the Harry Potter novels but, my goodness, it offers some magnificent writing.

Tags: Harry Potter, Half-Blood Prince, Rowling, Snape

I have a lot of things rolling around in my mind but not much is coming out onto the keyboard right now. Let's see, I've got an Abigail story half-finished, a Phillip Gold story finished and awaiting final touches to send to a magazine, another Gold story half-way written, plus I'm starting to plan a post-Deathly-Hallows story and I continue to work on the Harry Potter Concordance.

I just don't seem to be able to get to them, all of a sudden.

Maybe I've got too much on the go and that's paralysing me.

Actually, I got a good two hours' work done on the Concordance this evening. I'm almost finished work on The Chamber of Secrets, with a view to moving on to the Prisoner of Azkaban. Problem is, every time I read one of the books, I want to read the rest. And then I want to watch the movies again. I think I've watched all five of the films in the past two weeks. And I'm feeling the pull to pick up The Half-Bood Prince and read it again.

I'm hopeless, I guess. I get into these cycles and I can't focus on my own work. I'm not even reading other things anymore. I've got a Lehane book waiting but I haven't been able to go crack the cover.

The Concordance, meanwhile, is a lot of fun. I find it interesting to dig through the details and discover just how many seeds Rowling sewed in the early books that grew into important issues later.

And, of course, I'm learning a lot of purely useless trivia. How many people out there can tell me the name of the female student who teased Moaning Myrtle about her glasses just before Myrtle was killed by the Basilisk? Well, now I can. Her name is Olive Hornby.

Scary.

And by watching the movies at the same time, I'm seeing more clearly what changes had to be made to turn these very effective prose works into equally effective filmic creations: some of the short cuts to save time, the changes in emphasis moving from the written to the visual form. For example, did you notice that, when Harry and Ron take the Polyjuice Potion and transform into Crabbe and Goyle, in the book they also take on Crabbe and Goyle's voices but in the movie they keep their own?

I guess that, in the written version, the reader is more able to keep in mind which character is which after they've transformed. In the film, it is only the voice that reminds us.

Fascinating stuff.

Tags: Harry Potter, Rowling, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Hogwarts, Chamber of Secrets

I've gotten back into doing the work for my personal Harry Potter Concordance. It's very challenging, detail-oriented work in which I'm trying to note and catalogue every character, every place, every race of creature, every spell, every book, and every special term or item mentioned in JK Rowling's books, including the book and page number where each mention is made.

Not the kind of thing one takes on casually.

So why am I doing it? Quite frankly, I'm not always sure. One reason is that I enjoy this kind of work: I like cataloguing and organising things, making things neat and orderly. I prefer computer games like Solitaire and Free Cell, where you organise a mess, to war games or character-driven vehicles like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda or whatever the more modern equivalents are. I enjoy the process of reading each page carefully, noting down the various bits of information that appear and organising them into a different form. Once I'm done, I'll have taken seven incredible narratives and converted them into an orderly collection of facts.

My goodness, am I really doing that? Sounds awful, actually. Those poor books. They deserve better.

Another reason I'm doing it is that it gives me a chance to understand the Potter books better, to get a stronger idea of how they are put together as narratives, how Rowling reveals and builds character, how she has constructed this amazing world. That kind of understanding can only help me as a writer. By knowing how a supremely talented writer works, I may get better myself.

I think a third reason is that the work gives me the chance to spend a lot more time within the Potter books and the world they inhabit, time to think about the myriad details of that world, to see connections and understand relationships.

I'm one of those people who enjoys familiar people and places, who will read the same book numerous times in his lifetime and watch the same films over and over again. Some people talk about eating comfort food — food that makes them feel good inside, happy and warm and safe. Well, for me I have comfort books and movies. They are places I like to be, worlds I like to inhabit. I enjoy being onboard the Enterprise in the 23rd century with Kirk and his crew. I find the people in most romantic comedies and some sitcoms attractive and likeable; their lives are light-hearted alternatives to the world I live in on a day-to-day basis. I find it comfortable and exciting to be at Hogwarts with Harry and his friends.

So I go back time and again.

Plus, my partner's friend, Debbi, and her two daughters, Thea and Marieke, count on me to be able to challenge them in Harry Potter trivia. And I can't let them down. Maybe someday I'll actually beat them!

Tags: Rowling, Harry Potter, Chamber of Secrets, Philosopher's Stone

Interesting reading this past weekend. As part of our evening ritual, I have taken up reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to my partner as she sits working on her first knitting project. I even try to inject some of the voices into the reading, mimicking as best I can the voices of the characters from the movie versions. It's not easy, let me tell you, and Hagrid just about kills me. Still, we're having a lot of fun and Patti is a fantastic audience. She laughs a lot at the first book and reminds me what it was like when it was still fairly new to me too.

It's a nice bit of reminiscing for me and some good together time for us. And it brings us back to the year we met — 1997, when JK had just released The Philosopher's Stone — because I started reading the book aloud to Patti then too. Of course, she was in England then so we didn't get all the way through it. Now, no doubt we will. And then on to The Chamber of Secrets!

Reading the first book, however, also sparked in me the inclination to read the seventh volume — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — once again. I have to admit, I didn't read every word of it. I skipped over the bits about Harry coming to doubt Dumbledore and part of the section where they are on the run (from the day Ron leaves to the day he returns). That's not to say that those aren't important, well-written parts: I just didn't feel like subjecting myself again to the unhappiness Harry experiences in his own soul as his image of his old school master is tarnished and with Hermione as they flail about, without Ron, trying to trace Horcruxes on their own.

Anyway, it was quite interesting to read the first and last of the books at the same time. Certain things stood out, like the impressive consistency of Ms. Rowling's vision and of her presentation of the world of magical characters. Or the incredible amount of detail that she included in book one that still resonates in book seven. The seeds she plants in The Philosopher's Stone are still growing, with amazing results, in The Deathly Hallows.

Not surprisingly, a few inconsistencies did come to light. For example, Dumbledore's light-stealing device is called a "Put-Outer" in the first book and a "Deluminator" in the seventh (sorry if there are spelling errors there — I've got a dog sleeping on my feet and I don't want to disturb her to go check). It's also interesting that Hagrid tells Harry that he had flown to the rock in the middle of the sea to deliver Harry's Hogwarts letter early in the first book and yet, when they leave, the narrator makes no mention of the presence of a broomstick, a Thestral, a Hippogriff or any of the other methods of flying that develop in later books. In the final volume, however, it is commented on several times that Voldemort has developed the ability to fly without such aids, something that is, apparently, unusual even in the world of wizards and witches. So how did Hagrid get to the rock?

Perhaps the most interesting issue I've noticed (or been reminded of) through this little exercise in reading is the impressive change in the level and sophistication of JK's writing from the first book to the last. As Patti has helped me to remember, The Philosopher's Stone is a delightful, witty children's book with all kinds of charming turns of phrase and silly incidents. By contrast, The Deathly Hallows is clearly an intelligent, intense novel suitable for adults, with a much more complicated plot, a great deal more violence and much more mature themes.

It's a credit to Ms. Rowling that both are, in my opinion at least, excellent examples of their genres. They are consistent with each other and yet very different in their style and sophistication.

The exercise has also got me considering taking on two new projects: first, preparing my own Harry Potter Concordance (I've actually already started one), not so much for public consumption but simple to give myself a reason to continue to dwell in that magical world and to enjoy and learn from Ms. Rowling's skills as a writer; and second, writing a sequel of my own, using secondary characters from the original books, to tell the story of what I think would have happened next. Once again, it wouldn't be for any reason other than my own enjoyment but it could be a lot of fun!

And either or both could find their way onto this website.

Tags: Harry Potter, Rowling, Philosopher's Stone, Deathly Hallows