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Are the Harry Potter books great literature?
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Is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, featuring books like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, great literature?
The answer is no – not great literature. The Harry Potter books can’t compete with works such as Homer’s The Iliad or Dante’s Inferno.
But this doesn’t mean that Rowling’s novels are not literature at all.
J.K. Rowling’s books about the boy wizard Harry Potter and his nemesis Lord Voldemort have already found the same place in our culture that books like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (included in my Top 10 Best Books list) have found.
And it’s possible that over the next twenty-five years, the Harry Potter books will climb higher in the culture’s judgment. If they do, it will be because of the following strengths and in spite of the following weaknesses.
Rowling’s Strengths
Above all, Rowling is a good storyteller, and good stories are what make books fun to read. Her major and minor plot lines are reliably compelling. If sometimes the pacing of the books lags and sometimes Rowling depends too heavily on exposition, these are problems that all long novels share and Harry Potter is really one long novel in seven parts. I can’t think of another author who’s written as much who has handled the form better, and the sustained arc of the stories from first book to last is impressive.
Rowling's characters are another one of her strengths. They are not always the most complex creations, but the characters in Harry Potter are persuasively human, they engage our sympathy, they are vividly drawn, and there are a lot of them.
There is one major exception to this assessment, however, and that’s the character of Albus Dumbledore, who becomes richer and deeper as the books progress, and who balances Harry Potter’s triumphant boy-hero role by becoming the series’ tragic figure.
Rowling’s Weaknesses
There is nothing wrong with Rowling’s prose style, but it does little more than move the story along efficiently. You don’t encounter sentences that you would re-read for the pleasure of the words themselves, other than some of Dumbledore’s dialogue, which sparkles with humor, intelligence, and generosity.
There is also nothing wrong with the themes and insights J.K. Rowling offers in the Harry Potter books, and they do enrich the stories, but there is nothing extraordinarily new in them.
Dumbledore repeatedly emphasizes, and Voldemort consistently mocks, the power that love gives to Harry, and Rowling is right to make love important in her stories. It’s just that we don’t know anything about love when we are done reading that we didn’t know before we started. The same is true of Rowling’s observations on the wizarding aristocracy’s fascism, on racism against magical non-humans, on the nature of celebrity or the perils of adolescence. All are interesting, all are true, none break any new ground.
Rowling’s Triumph
J.K. Rowling’s greatest achievement in the Harry Potter books is the depth, breadth, detail, and wit of the parallel magical world she has created.
If it lacks some of the fantastic, potent whimsy of the worlds Lewis Carroll imagined for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, it is only because so much of mundane (or “muggle”) life also touches Rowling’s wizard universe.
But the scale and the richness of Rowling’s imagined world are at least the equal of Carroll, as is the delight her inventiveness offers. The names she crafts for people, spells, places, creatures, and objects are a high pleasure by themselves. The roles these inventions play in the stories, from the central importance of the Horcruxes to the pure ornament of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, make them even more satisfying.
It is this inventiveness, even more than Rowling’s mastery of story and character (which is reminiscent of Dickens), that gives the Harry Potter books the best chance to grow in the culture’s judgment. Will they? We’ll know in a generation.
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