Author: Matthew E

I am a writer in Canada.

On “Harry Potter” and Wizard’s Hall

Matthew ELeave a comment

So recently I read someplace about a book called Wizard’s Hall, by Jane Yolen. Yolen seems to think her book was an unacknowledged influence on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, of which you may have heard. I figured, well, I like Jane Yolen* and I like Harry Potter, so I should totally check this book out.

And I’m glad I did. It’s not a big read; it’s pitched young and fairly slim. Didn’t remind me of Harry Potter at all. There are some superficial similarities, it’s true: wizard school, and a few smaller details. Mostly Wizard’s Hall reminds me of, oh, The Last Unicorn and The Riddle-Master of Hed, and other fantasies of that vintage. A Wizard of Earthsea. Same kind of atmosphere.

Basically here’s what I think is happening. I think that the main premise of what Rowling was doing with Harry Potter has not been widely enough recognized. I mean, it’s no secret or anything, nor do I lay claim to any kind of special understanding. But in North America, we just aren’t as familiar with one of Rowling’s major ingredients, and in some cases may not even know that it is an ingredient. See, the “Harry Potter” series isn’t just a fantasy series. It certainly is a fantasy series, but that’s not the only thing it is. It is two things, in roughly equal parts:

1. A fantasy epic
2. A British school story

If you’ve read “Harry Potter”, but aren’t otherwise familiar with the school-story genre, it may sound like I’ve just said something stupidly trivial. Like if I said that The Lord of the Rings was both a fantasy epic and a Middle-Earth Ring story. But that’s not it. The British school story is an actual thing, a genre on its own. Wikipedia can tell you all about it that you have to know, but my point here is that it is an established genre that Rowling and her British readers would be largely familiar with, and that it has a lot of conventions.** Rowling’s particular stroke of genius was to realize that if you take a convention-heavy genre like the school story, and marry it to an imaginative, content-rich, convention-poor genre like fantasy, you could come up with something really exciting. Which she did.

So a lot of the stuff Rowling was doing in “Harry Potter”, she wasn’t just freestyling. The Quidditch, the chocolate frogs, the Hogwarts setting… she wasn’t inventing all that out of whole cloth, on the one hand, but she wasn’t ripping anybody off on the other. She was working within her genre and adapting its conventions to fantasy. And what she came up with wasn’t like anything else in fantasy and was at the same time unprecedentedly popular. And you couldn’t explain the popularity by the strength of the writing, which certainly got the job done but was sometimes clunky.*** So how to explain it?

Well, it’s hard to explain, if you’re trying to figure out how Rowling filled up this rich and vivid world, and you don’t know that she had this preexisting school-story paradigm to keep her on track. If you’re being very generous, or you’re well-disposed to Rowling, you might just say that she has a tremendous imagination.**** Or you may very well be tempted to say that she got this from this writer and that from that writer. But it’s really much simpler than that.

Conclusion: Yolen doesn’t have a beef: you can’t start at Wizard’s Hall and get to “Harry Potter” without going through school-story-ville, and if you’re going through school-story-ville, you don’t need to start at Wizard’s Hall.

(Note: I have no idea whether Yolen is familiar with British school stories or not. She’s a writer, so my basic expectation would be that she’s read widely, and has run into Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith or Blyton’s “Malory Towers” series or something. On the other hand: all my reasoning above. So I make no claims to have any idea what’s in Yolen’s mind with regard to all this.)
—

* try Yolen’s Briar Rose in particular, it’s very good
** not that kind of convention
*** certainly there are fantasy writers out there who are much better prose stylists, and much less popular, than Rowling. Yolen arguably among them
**** not that she doesn’t. A genre will only take you so far. She had to come up with all the details; the genre only gave her guidance for what kinds of details to come up with

On Blues-Rock

Matthew ELeave a comment

I don’t usually have the regular use of a car, but for various reasons I do at the moment, and so I’m listening to the radio more than I normally do. Here in Ottawa I haven’t found a radio station I really like, but the one I turn to is 101.9 DAWG FM, which plays blues-rock. Or what they think of as blues-rock, anyway.

[It’s going to sound, in this blogpost, as though I’m tearing several strips off of DAWG FM. That’s not my intention. Basically I enjoy listening to their station. I just have to shake my head at certain aspects of their operation, that’s all.]

Some of the stuff they play is legitimately bluesy. But some of it is just rock that they can make the argument that it’s kind of bluesy, though, even though it really isn’t. (Some obviously older and well-known; not sure how much new. “When Love Comes to Town” by U2 and BB King is one of their big favourites, if that suggests anything to you.) The announcers… they tend to get these extremely white-sounding people to do their DJing. Very soft, nonthreatening male voices, a little too close to the microphone, talking about how they went to IKEA on the weekend. This kind of thing. The station advertises their morning show, the Dawg’s Breakfast, with some kind of patter about how crazy it gets and maybe you better not listen to it because it’ll be too much for you. No it won’t; it’s the most sedate morning show I’ve ever heard.

And it’s fine. If they’ve determined that this is the kind of thing the people of Ottawa want to hear, I have no issue with it. I’m not trying to prove how Authentic I am or anything. Now, if <em>I</em> was running a blues-rock station, <em>I</em> might want to put someone on the air who’s <em>cool</em> in some way, in <em>any</em> way, but that’s just me.

One problem with the station is that they don’t seem to have the deepest catalog in the world. I only hear it for about fifteen minutes at a time, a few times a day, but even in that limited exposure I occasionally hear a song that I’ve already heard them play not long ago. That shouldn’t happen. Not without listening to it a lot more than I do.

Or then there’s what happened today, which had me shouting, “Come on!” at the car radio. See, one of the things they do every so often is they play the little sounder that says, “Another DAWG FM Soul Shot!” and then they play an old soul song. Which I’m all for, because I love old soul music. So last week, late afternoon, I’m driving along, and they announce another DAWG FM Soul Shot. Which turns out to be “Roll with It” by Steve Winwood. And I had to laugh, because I know soul music well enough to know that that ain’t it. I like Steve Winwood; I like “Roll with It”. If they want to play it, I’m happy to listen. But don’t try to tell me that this is freaking soul music.

That was last week. Today, again late afternoon, I’m driving home, and another Soul Shot comes along. This time it turns out to be…

… “Roll with It” by Steve Winwood.

What is this, they only know four soul songs? Of which one of them isn’t even? Silliness.