July 14, 2011
Anyone who knows me well, or even just in passing, knows I have an affectionate attachment to Harry Potter. No, I’m not attached to Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who portrays Harry in film, nor even to the fictional character of the boy wizard himself. It’s the whole package that intrigues me and sucks me in to another world in which I feel very much at home.
I think it all stems from situations in my childhood that led me to rely on my own imagination for entertainment. I was a bookish child, always reading something. I loved books about magic and mysteries, and mysterious magic. With no siblings near my age, and saddled with a crippling shyness, I lived in my own fantasy world. Daydreams were the norm for me as my imagination became my reality. I was especially fond of fairy tales and stories about witches and magical folk. My father encouraged me by buying me any book I wanted and telling me bedtime stories he knew from memory from his first-grade reading primer. These stories almost always involved fairies and elves and gnomes. Never would he tell me magic or fairies weren’t real. He allowed me to believe whatever I wanted. As Dumbledore told Harry, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Oh, did I mention I have acquired a special talent of having a Harry Potter reference for most any situation?) The world of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, the Forbidden Forest, Hagrid’s Hut and The Burrow may as well have been borrowed from my own imagined childhood.
My early years were spent locked in my own world, but as I overcame my shyness, to an extent, I found a new fantasy world based more in reality. It was travelling. Again, my father encouraged me by funding me. But I didn’t go anywhere alone, I was still too shy for that. I had a travelling partner, my oldest friend. In high school we went twice to ancient Mexico. Then, in college we went on two study abroad trips. Our first adventure was to discover Caribbean literature in the tropics of Jamaica. But it was our second excursion, a trip to London to find King Arthur, which enveloped me. There the imagined world of my childhood slowly materialized before my eyes. I belonged there. I was comfortable there. It was beyond what I dreamed it would be.
Fast forward about ten years and there is a phenomenon exploding around a little book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. By that time my world had evolved into marriage, work, and babies, and I didn’t have time to pay much attention to current events. I probably would have never heard of the young wizard had it not been for the bad press he was receiving from churches and religious groups. It aggravated me to hear people passing judgment on something most of them had not even read. After all, I grew up on fantasy books and I turned out fine. I had no demons in my closet. But I did have two young boys I thought one day may want to read this book, so I had to read it first to make up my own mind about it. One little book about a boy who lived. Only seventeen chapters, no harm, right? Well, maybe I underestimated the hype because after one book I was hooked. Here, in black and white, were the fantasies of my childhood. A story about a miserable, mistreated little boy from Britain, of all places, who finds out he is a wizard, of all things, and his life is important after all. To top it off it was written by a woman about my age who went to a college I visited during the same time she was a student there. I might have seen her around campus. She wrote in a coffee shop in Edinburgh; I visited a coffee shop in Edinburgh. I could have written this book! It could have been me! Well, I wished it was me.
I read the first book in the series about the time the second book was coming out, so I was able to read the two fairly close together. Then came the movies. Again, hooked. I mean, here was the story alive with scenery, special effects, and a musical score to boot. Then the next book. I started pre-ordering my books for fear Books-a-Million would sell out on the first day and I would have to wait to read it. For the next eleven or so years I have spent my life in rotation, waiting on the release of the next book or the next movie.
I can’t pinpoint exactly what led me down this path, but I think what intrigued the most was how Harry aged from year to year. He matured with his reader. He wasn’t stagnant like a comic strip or a character from a serial novel. This made him more real to me. His story got darker as it, and he, matured. It transitioned from being fluffy happiness about flying brooms, dragons and magic wands to a tragic story of unyielding love, fierce loyalty and the epic battle between good and evil.
When the final book was released I began to feel a loss of sorts. It was like having empty nest syndrome. I read it very slowly while I recovered from gallbladder surgery. I was in a funk for days when it was done. (Maybe it was the pain medicine.) I wasn’t ready to give him up just yet. I had an idea. What better way to keep him alive then to share him with my oldest friend and travelling partner? That way we could talk about him like an old friend and keep his memory alive. I wanted to know if she would feel the same way. Would she feel the same connection I felt? Well, she read all of the books in about one week. I think part of her hates me now, because I was right. She felt it too, and for many of the same reasons.
In the end my affectionate attachment isn’t just because the fantasies of my childhood are mirrored in the pages. In all frankness it is the writing that captured me and holds me yet. The writing is brilliant. To me, Rowling is a genius in her own right. She kept a story going for seven installments, and even the most minute detail in any given book is an important piece of the puzzle in the very end. Brilliant. Yes, there is so much more to the story than magical mysteries solved by meddling children. This is no Scooby-Doo. To put it as simply as possible, in my personal opinion, it is the ultimate parable of good versus evil ever written in modern times. But simplicity is not what has driven the phenomenon for the past fourteen years. There is nothing simple about Harry Potter.
Now with the final movie releasing tomorrow, I have been taking trips into the pensieve, remembering my favorite moments in print and on film. These eleven years or so are coming to a close, coinciding with a woeful end of something in my real life, the death of my mother. Ironically, Rowling wrote her stories as a grieving process for her own mother. So, yes, like Luna and Harry, I can see the thestrals, too.
What better way to put it all to rest then to go back to the beginning in a way. Today I am travelling again. I am going to visit my oldest friend and travel partner. We have seen the last two movies together, which is amazing since she lives 1000 miles away. We are going to the midnight showing together. We will sit in the darkened theater and weep in our sadness of our young British boy growing up, and we will weep in sadness of leaving London yet again, and we will weep in sadness of losing my mother. When the lights come up we will wipe our faces, act like adults, and go off to find new adventures. In Ohio.
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