Color me dorky, but I love Harry Potter. I began the first book in the summer of 2001 when I was sick in bed. The next day, I roused myself only to go out for food, carbonated beverages and the second Harry Potter book. I was hooked.
I loved the characters. I loved getting sucked into their world, where homework means refining spells and potions, dragons can be kept as pets and student activists petition for the freedom of house elves. I was genuinely surprised by J.K. Rowling’s plot twists and I found myself whipping through all four books in a matter of weeks.
One of the best things about Harry Potter is that everyone and their mother read these books and, suddenly we all had something to talk about besides El Niño or local news happenings. Harry was an excellent ice-breaker for people in elevators everywhere. And, once again, I’m a dork, but it thrilled me to no end to see children carrying around these books (which were sometimes bigger than their heads) and reading instead of vegging in front of the television or begging their parents for the most popular plastic toy on the market.
And now, nearly two years later, I can pre-order the long-awaited fifth Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) to be released in June. All I have to do is click the right button on amazon.com and I can get forty percent off of the list price for this item, which is $29.99.
Hold it right there. I realize that this is a big book (896 pages to be exact) and it’s hard cover and everything, but thirty bucks seems a little steep, even for a die-hard fan like myself. The DVDs for the films don’t even cost that much!
Unfortunately, Harry Potter has grown from a series of well-loved books into an entire industry which includes action figures, stationary, wall calendars, stuffed animals, Legos, video games, statuettes, bed sheets, board games, apparel, puppets, puzzles, Halloween costumes and trading cards. A rare Harry Potter pocket watch can be yours — the bidding starts at only $525 on E-Bay. The books themselves are available in multiple editions (hardback, paperback, velvet-covered, etc.) in every language imaginable, including Latin. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to make an animated series based loosely on Rowling’s characters.
It is no longer accurate to refer to this as a literary phenomenon. In fact, the entrance of another book into this ever-escalating industry seems almost impossible. Now that we’ve seen the movies and played the video games and built our own Hogwarts out of Legos, how are we going to go back to words on a page?
Those of us who read the first four can barely remember where we left off (and those who never started are probably so inundated with Harry Potter that the last thing they want to do is read more about him).
So many have made spoofs (Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody) and bogus predictions (Harry loses his virginity with Draco Malfoy in book five!) in the extended interlude between books four and five that our expectations are now beyond high — they’re warped. We don’t even know what we want from this next installment in the promised seven part epic.
As the story goes (and as anyone can read in detail in one of multiple biographies currently on the market), Rowling was a poor, single mother who started writing about Harry and his adventures in a little café in Scotland. Now that she’s easily the most recognized Scottish writer of all time (sorry, Irvine Welsh), she has a lot to live up to. In other words, she created a story that appealed to people all over the world while living in obscurity, so how is she going to do it again with fame and mass-marketing breathing down her neck?
My main concern is not that Rowling has let the popularity go to her head. Sure, she has allowed Warner Brothers to reduce her brilliant, multi-faceted stories to images in an Xbox, but my main concern is that this kind of unprecedented multimedia fame will affect her writing. I’m concerned that there will be a significant dumbing-down of the dialogue among characters in book five or that Rowling’s flare for subtle foreshadowing will turn clumsy and heavy-handed.
I hope my fears are unfounded. I hope that somehow, Rowling has found a way to separate herself from the Harry Potter hype that has unfolded around her. I hope that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is as gripping as its predecessors. And lastly, I hope that children the world over will put down their remote controls and plastic toys to build up their back muscles lugging around the 800-plus page tome.