Thoughts on Harry Potter

So… a little while ago, I made my way through all 7 Harry Potter books in one continuous audiobook saga over the course of about 6 weeks.

I have to say, as someone who remembers the unbearable waiting, the midnight parties, the fear that someone would spoil the ending, this was both an incredible experience and a bizarre one. I was able to enjoy Harry’s progress through school in a way I never could before, and I found myself noticing things that had never occurred to me.

For example, lots of people die in the 7th book. I know, you all know this. But it’s a lot more jarring when you compare it to, say, the 4th book, where the death of a relatively minor character causes an earth-shaking change to Harry’s psyche. By the time we get to Fred, Tonks and Lupin, we as readers are, like Harry, almost accustomed to death. We feel a jolt, and then we continue. Taken all at once, that’s pretty scary.

Here’s another example, Harry’s parents. I never noticed before how Harry, like all of us in some sense, finds himself having to gradually develop a more complex understanding of his mother and father as he ages. Questions about James’s moral character, for example, are carefully avoided until the 5th book, suddenly get thrown into sharp relief from that point forward.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you read Harry Potter one by one, over the course of many years, when you’re the same age as the characters in the book, it’s hard to view the series as an exploration of what it means to grow up. But when you read them again several years later, all at once, it’s hard not to view them that way. In each novel, J.K Rowling carefully includes only as much complexity, moral ambiguity, and difficulty as is “age appropriate” for Harry, and therefore, for her readers. An 11 year old cannot read The Deathly Hallows, but for a 17 year old, The Sorcerer’s Stone might seem childish and relatively without conflict. This might, to some degree, explain why so many of us never outgrew Harry Potter the way we outgrew the other series of our pre-teens and teens. Or, maybe, we just all liked the idea of receiving our Hogwarts letter too much to let it go.