Potterdammerung

Since I've been at work the last few days I've had nothing to do but cruise the Guardian and BBC websites reading all the Potter pre-release articles. And the amount of bile (mainly in the comments rather than the original post, to be fair) spewed about the books and the people who read them really shocked me. I can see how you could just not be bothered by the whole thing, but I'm a bit mystified at why you would get so outraged by other people's enjoyment. In the new book there is a little comment on this which I liked a lot (it's not a spoiler and I won't attribute it to a character, because that would be a spoiler I think!): "That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing."

I don't feel like I want to be swinging my cultural capital around to defend Harry Potter (which happened in comments on both the Guardian and the BBC), but I would like to at least question the idea that slightly ploddy prose and poor editing are a valid reason for moral panic. Nobody would say JKR is an amazing prose stylist, and she's by no means my favourite contemporary writer for children, but she really understands fiction and the pleasure you can get out of it, and I think that's probably the kind of thing you'd want your kids to be learning from books. Reading unambitious prose that tells a banging good story doesn't poison your little brainbox or magically destroy literary masterpieces with every paragraph.

The reason I prefer Cultural Studies over English Literature as a term is because, unlike Voldemort, I think that the things you don't value are probably the things you don't understand. There are lots of books I don't like because I think they're too confusing or difficult (I still haven't finished that Wyndham Lewis tetralogy), unegaging (this is where On the Road falls), or completely objectionable because they're in conflict with my take on things (this is why I don't like The Alchemist or The Lovely Bones), but those are all because of me, not because of the books. The thing about books (and particularly books, which don't yet have the marketing heft of music or films behind them) is that if they're incredibly popular, it is worth looking at what they're doing right and how those strategies are effective and interesting, rather than just calling people who enjoy them illiterate morons. Then again we could just all get together and mock the people who were queuing up outside Waterstone's in London from Wednesday dressed as the Lestrange sisters; they'd made up quite a shockingly poor chant (given they'd had two days to compose it by the time they were on the radio last night).

So yeah, I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.