Are These Children’s Books?
One of Mrs. Rowling’s great themes across the Harry Potter series is the redeeming power of love. She is absolutely right to consider love one of the most powerful forces in existence, and one of the most magical. As she is writing for children, I cannot fault her wanting to make the world more nearly black and white, with good guys and bad guys.
The books are, however, not really children’s books at all. I disagree with classifying the latter books as such, and am restricting my own children’s reading of them, keeping them at one book a year starting from when they turn eight. The first few books are fine; while there are some troubling things in them, it will largely go over a child’s head with little risk of influence or damage. However, as one advances through the books, there is more that requires mature judgement, because more and more, the characters are making decisions, and, in the case of the adults, revealing past decisions, that require the reader to recognise that good people can make bad choices, and, yes, bad people can make good choices.
On Adults in General
One of the challenges I have noticed across children’s and young adult’s literature is how to deal with adults. If you have a set of adults who are both competent and good, why would a child be the protagonist? Any adult in his or her right mind sympathises with Molly in wanting to protect the children from all that is harsh in the world. We may not carry it to the extremes that she does, but we understand her motivations. Thus when Dumbledore says that he wants to preserve Harry’s childhood,1 we want to believe him. For the alternative is to face the possibility that the man who leads the fight against evil is complicit in it.
To create a situation in which a bunch of teens must repeatedly save the world, Mrs. Rowling compromises all of her adult characters. Some of them are compromised by situation, but the majority have fatal flaws. It is a testament to her ability that so many of these characters never the less come across as good people struggling in really bad situations. In these Notes, I intend to pull no punches. I will expose these flaws for what they are. I am going to try to show which characters are good people who do bad things, and which are bad people who do good things. If, however, any of the adults in Harry’s life were really unreservedly praiseworthy, he or she, and not Harry, would be the main character from that point forward.
I have read a few fan fictions that try to find a middle ground. Essentially it consists of an evil, or at minimum a deeply misguided Dumbledore. One who differs from Riddle only in that neither can handle the other being in control, and in some of the details but not the general shape of their vision of the world. With two powerful forces acting against Harry, the competent adult is overwhelmed, and unable to fully shield him. I cannot say that is is entirely unbelievable. Dumbledore does, or more often fails to do, a great many things that make him an incredibly ambiguous figure. It is not a great leap to paint him as the Dark Lord of the prophecy, who has marked Harry, not physically, but metaphorically, as the one who could be his equal.2 While that was not, I think, fundamentally the direction that Mrs. Rowling intended, it is a reasonable interpretation of even the canonical series in some very real ways. That is, ultimately, simply yet another reason that this is not a children’s series (at least in its totality).