The summer after I graduated high school I was working at a local book store. It was like a geek’s paradise for a couple of reasons. One reason was definitely being surrounded by all the books all the time. The bigger reason, though, was being surrounded by other geeks. Thankfully, the crew I worked with was full of geeks just like, and it was awesome. It was during this time that I was introduced to Harry Potter for the first time. During the time I worked there, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released, and it was mayhem. Everyone and their dog was looking for this book, and we got it in in large numbers, and still couldn’t keep it on the shelves. I personally did not see what all the fuss was about. It was just some stupid kids’ book, and I had no interest in it. Please keep in mind at this point in my story, that I was like 18, which makes me a dumb kid, who also thought he was pretty cool. Too cool for some dumb old kids book.
This is where my geeky coworkers come in. Many of them gave me a really hard time about Harry Potter. They all told me how good it was and that I needed to give it a shot and that it was more than worth my time. I resisted for a while, but eventually I caved to the peer pressure. These guys were all very well read and were all into the same things I was, so maybe there was something to this whole Harry Potter thing. I bought the first book, in paperback, because the hardback books were expensive and I wasn’t ready to commit that much. Two days later, I returned to work and purchased the first book again in hardback, along with the second, third, and fourth. In just two days, my whole outlook on Harry Potter and his wizarding world had completely changed. It had been a long time since I had read something that caught my attention like these books did, and they are some of the rare books that I have read multiple times.
What impressed me, even more, was the effect these books had on young people. I had a sister who didn’t really enjoy reading all that much until she read Harry Potter, and then she couldn’t get enough of reading. Not just Harry Potter, but any books. Harry Potter took a young pre-teen girl who had nothing to do with books and turned her into a bookworm. I’m not sure what the name of that spell is, but it’s real. I saw it happening with kids everywhere, and we still see the effects today. Youth fiction is dominated by fantasy, and everyone seems to be trying to recapture that Harry Potter magic. The story of wizards and witches often takes them to a whole new world while reading the book. School of magic, once in a while looks very fascinating and alluring. I would always want to gain admission into such an institution – maybe someplace like Wicca Academy – where they teach you subjects like “how to become a wizard” or cool spells for that matter. Just imagine the influence of such an experience on the mind! And it wasn’t just young people, although getting young people to be excited about reading is really a big deal. It had interesting effects on grown people. When my wife and I married, she had never been into any kind of fantasy books. At all. It took me a while, but I finally convinced her to give Harry Potter a try. She was hooked. She devoured the books. So much so, that we contemplated buying two copies of Deathly Hallows so we wouldn’t have to take turns. That was magic.
But why Harry Potter? What made the books so amazing and so “magical?” That’s a really good question, and someone could probably do a whole semester worth of college work on why. I won’t go into that kind of depth, but for whatever reason, I have been thinking a lot about it lately. So many things come and are massive and huge and amazing, and then they are gone and forgotten until the surface again as an answer to some trivia game question. Sometimes, rarely, that doesn’t happen. What happens instead is that something sticks around and doesn’t go away. When I first encountered Harry Potter, I thought it would be like all the other somethings that just fade away. I thought it would be popular for a while, and then die out and we would all forget about it. That didn’t happen. We are still talking about Harry Potter today, whether it’s the books or the films, Harry is still a big deal. What made these stories so different? I had four things I came up with. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but these are four reasons that Harry had endured, in my opinion any way.
The Story
This may seem like an obvious one. Of course Harry had a great story. I have read enough books out there, and enough young adult fiction, to know that we should never take a good story for granted. What Harry does well is following the Hero’s Journey, which a lot of stories nowadays don’t do well. If I had been even remotely familiar with a Hero’s Journey when I read Harry Potter, I would not have been as shocked when Dumbledore died. It seems that the mentor always dies in these types of stories. Harry Potter follows this model of a hero’s journey to a T. He gets pulled out of the norm right away, he gets sent on this Journey, he learns from his mentor, who dies then he has to take on the villain alone (that’s all very simplified). It is a tale as old as time, and it is told and retold, and really if you are reading any kind of speculative fiction, if they are not telling this story, it probably stinks. The way, though, that Rowling tells this story is amazing. Through out all 7 books you are hoping that Harry will win in the end, that good will triumph over evil, but there are points in every book where you begin to wonder if it will happen, if it can happen.
The twists were fantastic and kept you guessing, and then Rowling did something amazing, that many authors have forgotten about. She gave us, the readers, exactly what we wanted. Good did win over evil. Harry lived and grew up and was happy. This is an art that seems to be lost in a lot of fiction these days. Somehow, so many modern writers have bought into this myth that to make the story more real, it has to be more tragic. The hero can’t live, or if they live, their life now stinks. Rowling didn’t do that. Yes, there was tragedy and sadness along the way, but in the end, it was happy. That was our reward for sticking with it to the end.
The Characters
The characters in Harry Potter were almost always perfectly written. There wasn’t a single core character that didn’t make you feel exactly how you were supposed to feel about them. In the books, I really detested Draco Malfoy. He was a rotten human being. That’s how he was written and that’s how I felt about him. Sirius was the uncle I always wanted, even though he was only in the books for a short amount of time. Ron was the best friend everyone needs (like Samwise in Lord of the Rings) and Hermione was the girl I wanted to marry (so I did when I met my wife who is like a real life Hermione), and the girl I want each of my daughters to grow up to be. Harry was a great hero. He wasn’t perfect (let’s be honest, there were times in Order of the Phoenix when I wanted to smack the kid), but who is perfect as a teenager? In fact, for me, one of the endearing qualities of the characters in the books is that none of them were perfect, but they were all real. That’s why it always stung when one of them died. Sometimes it stung a lot, and sometimes I thought it was stupid that they had to die, but at the end, those deaths helped me remember what Harry and Hermione and Ron were fighting for and why they had to win.
The World
One of the things that drew me in as a reader of Harry Potter was the world. The idea that there was this whole magical world hiding in plain sight was just incredible. Then the amount of detail that went into all of it, just sucked you in and never let go. It all seemed so feasible. Somehow, I felt like if there was a magical world that was hidden from muggle eyes, this is what it would be like. It was so comprehensive, and that adds to the staying power of a story. If the environment is believable, if you can picture the world, then you’ll want to revisit it again and again. Those are the kinds of worlds that fandoms are built on. The kinds of worlds that theme parks can be modeled after. When I read Harry Potter, it always makes me want to be part of that world. It always makes me sad that I can’t be.
Timelessness
In order for a story to stand the test of time, it has to feel timeless. Although, the timeframe for Harry Potter has been described and documented by Rowling, the story itself could take place in any time. There is nothing in the story to date it too much. No cell phones or TV’s or references to real current affairs. You don’t realize how important this is until you read a story that does have this kind of stuff in it. It is immediately dated, and after just a few years it feels incredibly out of date. Harry Potter will never feel this way. There is nothing in it to tie it directly to a certain time, so anyone down the road could pick up the books and begin reading and feel like it could all be happening now. That will definitely aid the story in enduring through a long time. That’s hard to do in a modern story, but Rowling achieves it.
More that just the dating, the story of the battle between good and evil, love conquering hate and fear, that story itself is timeless. It needs to told and retold to every generation of children, until we live in a world where love has conquered hate. Until that time, though, we will have stories like Harry Potter that will endure, helping us get there.
