OK, it’s just entertainment, and perhaps I’m as guilty as Megan McArdle is, here, of reading too much into it. Frankly, I might not even have made a comment on the book at all, except for this article of hers. I’d like you to read the whole bit of hers, but for context, I will drop a few edits in here :
But this actually presents a problem for authors. If magic is too powerful then the characters will be omnipotent gods, and there won’t be a plot. Magic must have rules and limits in order to leave the author enough room to tell a story. In economic terms, there must be scarcity: magical power must be a finite resource.
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But there have to be generally accepted rules. Characters can’t get out of the predicament the author is sick of by having the car suddenly start running on sand. Similarly, if your characters will be using magic, they must do so by some generally believable system.
Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.
A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult – until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it’s thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired.
Oh, for pity’s sake, Megan.
Had it occurred to you, that being a children’s book, the reason that this is so easily done, is that there’s an underlying moral that Rowling is trying to convey with this part of the storyline… that you never know what you can do until you try… and that most people don’t know what they can do until a great need is upon them.
That’s a popular enough subtheme in children’s books in general that I have trouble believing you actually read any children’s books as a child.
More, it’s a theme that has been repeated all through the Potter series, most memorably when Potter saves Cirius Black from the Dementors, also by use of the Patronus, which he really dind’t know how to do either, until forced to it. Gee, something of a pattern, here… did you miss it?
Perhaps, as some friends have argued, I am expecting too much from a children’s book. But I don’t think that is right. Children are great systemisers, which is why they watch the same shows and read the same books over and over again: they are trying to put all the details together into a coherent picture. “I could do things no one else could do!” is a great thrill; but so is “I know how this works”. You can’t say that about Harry Potter, because Rowling doesn’t seem to know herself
Then please explain to me how it is that so many children have gotten so much more of the series then have you…
I’m willing to bet you knew about it once, but you’ve simply forgotten it… this mysterious force that allows so many so much younger than you to understand what you do not. It’s called imagination.
But the best children’s fantasy does something else: it gives one the illusion that the magical world is as consistent and real as one’s own world – that it exists, just barely out of reach.
One’s imagination is the place where such worlds exists regardless who the author is. When one uses that imagination, rather than , as with the television storyline, having the entire story and every detail about it’s spelled out for you, that world becomes very real to you because you have helped to create it yourself , rather than having someone describe it to you in their terms. Put another way; The trick to stirring that imagination is not a sharp digital photograph, with all the details revealed, but rather, a watercolor, which the reader can fill in with his own imagination.
That, it seems to me, the most important aspect of this series being attached to Schoolastic as a publisher. Use of the imagination, is one of the primary reasons for getting kids to read. And, adults, for that matter.
I like Megan generally, but she’s clearly out of her depth, here. Leave it to somebody who primarily deals in numbers, to demand a balance sheet for a kids’ story line.
And, yes, I already have the 7th book in the house… as usual. Just picked it up a half hour ago, in fact.
Also Blogging: OTB, Betsy’s Page, Unfogged, Liberal Values, and Greg Mankiw’s Blog
