Generation HP

I was an eight-year-old boy like any other, except perhaps in my obstinate refusal to read what seemed like a childish novel with a ridiculous cover by an author whose name I had difficulty pronouncing: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

J. K. Rowling and her now famous wizard orphan were far from being household names back then, but the book’s popularity was certainly growing fast. In fact, that’s what made me suspicious of the book in the first place — how people became spellbound by Harry Potter and his magical world. Later on, when I finally got around to reading the first book, I fell under the same spell. That enthrallment is what made me wait for and read all the other books in the series with the same febrile anticipation — a spell that would last for the next ten years.

I wasn’t much of a reader before I met Harry. In this, Rowling’s book changed my life for the best. The feeling that I found so suspicious — that indescribable beguilement that grabs you by the gut and doesn’t let go, doesn’t let you sleep or eat or talk to anyone without thinking about Hogwarts and quidditch and horcruxes, until you’ve turned the last page — is what got me hooked on reading books in the first place. Once you’ve found that gripping feeling, you start reading books to find it again, until books simply become part of who you are, and you can’t imagine yourself living without them.

When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, the magic was still operating. My sister commented to my mother about my strange behaviour the weekend I was reading the book (I was told this afterward). She remarked that I seemed inattentive, strangely mute, dreamy. “It’s Harry,” my mother explained to her. “He’s just reading Harry Potter. He’ll be fine when he’s done.”

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One of the best tomes in the Harry Potter series is probably the third book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It is the only book in the series which has almost nothing to do with Lord Voldemort, but it is much darker in both tone and content than the two first books, and it introduces elements and characters capital to the development of overarching narrative: dementors, the patronus charm, the Marauder’s Map, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin…

HP3 is also tremendously well constructed in terms of plot — it is tightly wound, packed with action, suspense, and Rowling’s remarkable humour. The final chapters of the book, which feature time-travel to repeat previous events from a different point of view, are among the most skilfully crafted passages in the entire series. As Carolyn Ross recently pointed out in The Millions, YA novels are all about plot, and so the more time-bending, sleep-preventing plot there is to spoil, the better.

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is my least favourite book in the series. It is also the longest. I read it on a family vacation in Italy, while we drove through the Tuscan back country. My reading was thus tainted by golden sunsets, delicious foods, and Renaissance architecture. Nevertheless, I was intensely disappointed with the book (which happened to be the only thing I had brought to read on that vacation — never again would I overestimate the time it takes me to read a Harry Potter). I had difficulty connecting with a troubled, angry Harry. Perhaps the problem mostly had to do with age. At 15, Harry is very much a teenager in HP5 — while as a twelve year old travelling in Europe with my parents, I had difficulty relating to some of the stuff he was going through. For the first time in the series, Harry was disappointing me, he seemed to fall short of himself.

For instance, there is a very dramatic scene in the book in which Harry wrecks Dumbledore’s office (Dumbledore is the headmaster at Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry — he is old and wise and witty). I was deeply troubled by this act of violence, which I saw as gratuitous, mean, and furthermore committed against one of my favourite characters in the series. I understand now, of course, the emotional crisis that Harry was going through. Looking back, I realize I should have understood him better. Harry is constantly at moral crossroads in the books, constantly forced to live up to his ethos as a hero (the boy who lived), and yet willing to define himself on his own terms. You would expect him to blow a fuse once in a while, with the enormous pressure not only put on his shoulders by others, but by himself. Instead of trying to understand the character I thought I knew, who was becoming rounder and more complex, I was disappointed by Harry, and more importantly I was disappointed by J. K. Rowling.

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By the time Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, I felt I had somewhat outgrown the series (ironically, I was then fifteen myself), so I read the sixth book almost half-heartedly. I remember distinctly that I read the chapter in which Dumbledore dies — the most chocking event in the whole book, and probably in the entire series — while watching tennis on TV. Thus Rowling beat me at my own game, because the sixth book really is good, and despite the qualms I had developed about the series, I couldn’t help but get teary when my favourite character was murdered.

I feel somewhat guilty at admitting that for a time I wasn’t that hooked on Harry Potter anymore. But then, how could it not be so? In a relationship that lasts 10 and more years, there has to be some ups and downs.

The launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, however, was definitely an up.

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HP7 was published in June of 2007. By then, I had finally caught up with Harry, and we were both exactly the same age. But something else had happened, I was now a bookseller, which meant that I had to actively promote the new book, as well as participate in the activities surrounding its launch. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better way of celebrating the end of a series which had marked me and my generation than by tending a Care of Magical Creatures station, fighting in a mock duel, and helping to open that enormous crate, covered in black plastic, and handing out the very first copies of the book on the stroke of midnight.

After finishing the last book, J. K. Rowling declared that she had felt simultaneously heartbroken and euphoric. By some symbiosis with her readers, that’s exactly how she made me feel when I finished HP7 — elated by the happy ending, by all of the strands Rowling had been weaving for thousands of pages which finally came together so majestically; and yet dreadfully sad that I would never have the pleasure of opening a new Harry Potter every again, faintly surprised that it was all over.

I read most of HP7 by night, in the pool of reading-lamp light, while the rest of my house slept peacefully. (This is unworthy of a true Harry Potter fan. My girlfriend, for instance, started reading the book as soon as she got home from the midnight book-launch and read the whole thing in one sitting. By the time her family got up the next morning, she was reading the last sentence: “All was well.”) During the day I worked in a bookstore, having to sell the book; at night, I was carried over in a different world, packed with action.

HP7 is good in an explosive way. For the first time, the three main heroes of the series aren’t at Hogwarts, they are moving around from one action-packed death-trap to another, acting for the most part blindly, questioning themselves constantly on what they should do next, and on Dumbledore’s motives (yes, him again). In fact, the trio only finds out what the deathly hallows are on page 332 (of 607).

HP7 is explosive in a thematic sense, as well. The entire series is about dealing with grief and loss, about growing up, about friendship, about defining yourself through your actions. All of this transpires in the final book of the series, but on a much larger scale, mixing in issues like loyalty, political corruption, racism, guilt — demons bother inner and outer.

And then there is love, of course, which is really Rowling’s ultimate message: that love defines what is good, it is what we should strive for, how we can overcome anything that devastates us.

Of course, Rowling’s writing has its flaws: it is efficacious but not beautiful, her prose is repetitive and sometimes awkward (especially when describing action), and the series is riddled with plot holes. But in essence that’s all superfluous. What’s important is what the books tell us about being human, what they teach us about surmounting fear and terror through everything love encompasses: community, trust, care, passion, loyalty, sacrifice...

Rowling’s message isn’t particularly groundbreaking or original, but she communicates it with such honesty in her books, with such vigour and truthfulness, that it is difficult not be taken with it — it is difficult not to join the movement, so to speak.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that the books have been tremendously popular (400 million copies sold worldwide). It is certainly encouraging, because it means the message has been reaching out. I am specifically interested in what the books did to my generation, people from my age group who grew up with Harry, Hermione, Ron and all the other great characters in the series. We learned and laughed and cried with them — but at an age when we were still developing and growing ourselves. We’ve grown both with them and from them. From the time we started reading to when we became adults, we were Harry Potter readers. We are defined by the series.

Call me romantic or naïve, but I have a firm belief that because of J. K. Rowling a big part of my age group has grown not only to love books, but to understand what can be learned from them. I have much hope in my generation, because I believe that underneath all the dazzling magic and heart wrenching action, through all those bleary-eyed hours of night-time reading, Harry has made many of us better human beings.