I tried to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon back in college, half a lifetime ago, I got halfway through book 6 and gave up, not because it was a difficult read or I wasn’t used to reading long books (hello Wheel of Time, gave up that one too after about 9 books!), but rather I found it depressing and not all that interesting. Lately I was staying with friends and had nothing to read, she had the series so I gave it another go. The first three books are okay, but obviously the first work of a young writer, Rowling hits her stride in book 4 and never looks back. She has great characters in almost everybody but the title character! After all that time traipsing around in Harry’s head I don’t know much more about him than that he’s a generic angsty teenager, which I already have plenty of experience with in my own kids except they have a personality too, it is a sad day when Neville is more personable than Harry! The plot sort of meanders hither and yon, while there are some unique plot points, many feel trite or completely random, and ironically the characters themselves admit that most of it is luck. The world building is intriguing but shallow, sort of like the scenery for a play, cool at a distance but no actual depth. And the whole series the mood is very depressing and angsty, moody and uncertain, it is always November and never May! Can’t we see Harry have even a happy couple of months, maybe one uneventful game of quidditch? But my biggest issue with the series is its indifferent metaphysics, what the heck drives the characters, powers the world, does anything mean anything? Star Wars has the force, Lord of the Rings and Narnia are Christian spinoffs, Wheel of Time has a complex dualistic Ferris wheel, Spider-Man has pseudoscience, but what drives Harry Potter, teenage angst?, dumb luck?, the modern bureaucracy?
It is one thing to write a silly little story with no depth or deeper meaning and leave the philosophy, religion, and metaphysics well out of it, but it is quite another to delve into life and death, morality and ethics, the soul, the supernatural, etc with no thought or direction at all given to the underlying worldview. But it is secular post modernism you proclaim, no it is not, we have right and wrong, good and evil, where does that come from? Professor Umbridge and the Dursleys are secular post modernists, they define their own reality, but outside the bureaucracy everybody else seems to have set ideas about an external right and wrong. While we have a few mentions of churches, a couple bits of scripture, and celebrate Christmas and Easter, this is not a Christian book, the only mention of any sort of deity is surprised ejaculations referencing the first person of the Trinity without any sort of belief or reverence. You can’t be a secularist and admit you have a soul (major theme in the last book). But you can’t be a deist and have no idea who or what your god is. If you are going to deal with serious topics, you should do it in a serious way, but there is no depth, no meaning, no purpose, no reason to keep going, which is why I gave it up in the first place. The mood is so bleak because we are depending on luck to get us through, there is no hope, no purpose, no reason we should expect things to get better, no point in living even if they do. No, I was not happy with this series, it is trying to be Lord of the Rings, but instead of echoing the gospel and the Hope therein, rather we have something based upon the gospel according to modern, post Christian man, a superficially happy mishmash of cultural relativism but with no meat and no depth and no meaning. While many are ravenous for real depth, they rave about these books thinking they are the real thing, little knowing it is diet soda masquerading as the real thing. But so shallow is our cultural understanding of anything, few are those who realize splashing in the shallows doesn’t mean you understand the ocean’s depths; their feet are wet so they must be expert seamen.
