Harry getting special treatment

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 146015

In message 146001, La Gatta Lucianese wrote:

"Alternatively, it can be argued (though I'm not entirely comfortable 
with this) that the level of sophistication in the books increases 
steadily from PS/SS through HBP. I'm not sure whether JKR set out to 
write a series of children's books and found that it had gotten away 
from her (Snape goes from being the eleven-year-old's idea of a 
teacher from hell to something much more complex and tragic), or 
whether our view of Snape developes from book to book to match 
Harry's own growing level of awareness."

Geoff:
In my opinion, this is possibly one of the most revealing comments 
made in this thread. Jo Rowling has intimated that the books 
certainly began as children's books and I think that this is at the 
heart of the current discussion.

When I was about 10-12 years old, as a pre-teen, I used to read 
comics. They included normal illustrated publications – including 
that most marvellous of comics "Eagle" (sigh) – but there were also 
one or two "text" comics which featured quite long stories intended 
to be read properly, if that doesn't sound too snobbish. They 
included "Wizard" (surprise!) and "Rover". These often had story 
lines involving teachers who were nasty, dim or over-authoritarian; 
some has similar stereotyped characters who were, for example, in the 
police. The well-known children's writer Enid Blyton often had adults 
who were set up as "baddies" to be defeated by the combined talents 
of young people and sometimes other sympathetic adults. This was 
fairly standard fare. We did not involve ourselves in the rights and 
wrongs or the ethics of what was being done. Rules often got bent in 
the need for those "wearing white hats" to win and we would always be 
glad that good prevailed.

I think that this still prevails in some younger children's 
literature. Books are fairly short, episodes brief and the plot moves 
at a good pace. I feel that this covers the early books in the 
series. It is as the readership who first met with Harry when they 
were perhaps the same age have moved on into adolescence (or 
senescence in some of our cases!) that the style of the books has 
subtly altered.

Agreed, in the later books, there is more back story to support but 
the episodes have become longer and exposition – such as Dumbledore's 
discussions with Harry – has become lengthier and more involved. 
Someone recently suggested that incidents in "Philosopher's Stone" 
are written for the satisfaction of younger readers may be correct. 
They will vicariously enjoy the comeuppances suffered by certain 
groups of characters in the book who may come under the heading 
of "baddies". The length and style of the later books echo Harry's 
move into his teens and the realisation that the world is not black 
and white but displays a whole range of greys, both in moral 
attitudes and in characters' personal agendas, and the realisation 
that the looming threat of Voldemort is overshadowing the naiveté of 
his early years at Hogwarts.

Changing tack slightly, I have written on more than one occasion in 
the past about what I see as the danger of taking ourselves (and the 
books) too seriously. I read a book for pleasure, not to dissect it 
analytically. When I was at Grammar school, Shakespeare was often 
ruined for me because we would discuss the play, dissect and analyse 
it for exam purposes and it was only when I was involved in acting in 
some of them that I really began to appreciate their worth. One of my 
favourites is "MacBeth" and it remains so because of my involvement 
on stage.

Since the publication of HBP nearly six months ago, our group has 
been swamped with threads about Snape and Horcruxes ad infinitum and 
ad nauseum many of which I have tended to skip over, not being a 
Snape fan (shock and horror – heretic!). We seem have fallen into the 
trap of what I have been credited with calling "tennis match posts" 
whereby two or three members swap posts, often repeating the same 
details and none of them moving from entrenched positions, often 
becoming obsessive and occasionally impolite in their responses.

I hope that many HPFGU members, like me, are here for fun – as well 
as enlightenment and the meeting of kindred minds. I sometimes sigh 
nostalgically for pre-HBP days when we could get into threads which 
investigated peripheral snippets of knowledge. I think of a long 
thread which Shaun Hately and I steered a couple of years back when 
we looked into Riddles diary and the significance of Vauxhall Road; 
it threw up a huge amount of additional detail about orphanages inter 
alia. 

Do not misunderstand me. There is a place for the sort of discussions 
which we are having, but as we sometimes say in the UK "You can have 
too much of a good thing".

I repeat what I quoted in a previous post: while writing this, my 
mind went to the end of the film "Star Trek: Insurrection" where 
Artim, the young Baku boy, says to Data:
"Don't forget – you have some little fun every day."

Our thought for the day?