Terry Pratchett doesn't like JK Rowling

[Digital M@]

I had a professor who called Harry Potter the literary phenomenon of the century.

I may have had an A in her class, but I dropped right after that.

Your professor was right. No where did he/she/it (your professor, say it was the best writing of the century, but it is a huge phenomenon and could have an immense and healthy impact on literature as a whole.


I find the books very entertaining, but I enjoy lots of childrens literature. The story is very straight forward, is filed with logical gaps (quidditch anyone?) and uses many of the same literary devices over and over, but they are still a fun read, which in the end is what they were supossed to be. Who knows why the populus is so gaga over them. Probably because of good marketing once the initial popularity was discoverd, but who knows.

 

[PatrickLawinger]

Its all about mass media - I doubt that HP VII would have sold some 30+ million copies of book six in the first 24 hours! without the month(s) of buildup in the media stirring things up.

Personally I know that without the media (and the movie) I would never have bothered to read the first book. I've only read Book 1 and really wasn't interested enough to read any of the others

First of all, it sold somewhere around 8.5-9 million copies in the first 24 hours between the UK, Canada, and the US. This is still an incredible block-buster, but it is certainly not 30 million copies in 24 hours.

Second, the books are decent. I would not call them literature, but they are a relatively fun read, particularly when it is something you can share and discuss with your children. If I didn't have kids absolutely thrilled by Harry Potter I don't know if I'd be so familiar with the entire series.

Third, the HP books have lead to an increased interest in books by kids in an age of computer games and electronic overload (not increased "literacy"). People have actually spent time and money studying this. I don't think the credit lies entirely with HP, but I do know children whose interest in books does track directly back to the first couple of HP books.

Finally, I don't think JK Rowling is a great writer, nor that it is all that original an idea or story, but my shelves are full of books that would fall into the same category. The idea that she is "subverting" fantasy or that she didn't recognize HP as "fantasy" is well, silly. I personally think she needs much better editing, but would you want to be the editor that pisses off the author that can sell 9 million books in the opening 24 hours?

Anyway, more fuel for the fire ...

Patrick

 

[Krug]

Gaiman gives some perspective into the whole deal.

Er, dunno. I read the Time article and thought it was astonishingly badly written and worse researched. The bit that puzzled me the most was that I remembered interviews with Ms. Rowling where she loved the Narnia books (it was a few seconds of Googling to find a 1998 Telegraph interview where she says, "Even now, if I was in a room with one of the Narnia books I would pick it up like a shot and re-read it.") as opposed to the Time version of 'Rowling has never finished The Lord of the Rings. She hasn't even read all of C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels, which her books get compared to a lot. There's something about Lewis' sentimentality about children that gets on her nerves.'

The version of the history of "fantasy" that the article's writer paints is utter bollocks, and I assume Terry decided that needed to be said. I didn't see it as a swipe at Ms Rowling, though, but as a swipe against lazy journalists -- but "Pratchett Anger At Shoddy Journalism" is a much less exciting headline than the one the BBC came up with.

(I remember when Terry said some very sensible and good-natured things about the power of fantasy at the Carnegie Medals (in this speech, read it first), the headlines were all along the lines of "Pratchett takes swipe at Rowling, Tolkien" [here's an example].)

Mostly what it makes me think of is the poem in Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest's NEW MAPS OF HELL, which went, from memory,

"SF's no good!" they bellow till we're deaf.
"But this is good." "Well, then it's not SF."

And it's an odd double-standard that applies to all genre work as much as to SF. It's always been easier for journalists to go for the black and white simplicities of beginning with the assumption that the entire body of SF (or Fantasy, or Comics, or Horror, or whatever the area is under discussion) is and always has been fundamentally without merit -- which means that if you like someone's work, whether it's J.G. Ballard or Bill Gibson or Peter Straub or Alan Moore or Susanna Clarke or J.K. Rowling -- or Terry Pratchett -- it's easier simply to depict them as not being part of that subset. I'm not sure that writing letters to the Times will ever fix that, though.

 

[jasper]

potter is literature. KIDS literature. Mouse and the motorcycle, Willie Wonka, Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh,
Beatrix potter, Little House on Prairie, Wind in the willows, Ms frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Cricket in times square, Charlotte’s Web.
Compare some of the titles I mentioned and see how Potter stacks up. He is right in there with the added bonus of modern language and background details. Ex play stations. Of course twenty years from now your grand kids will be reading the book and ask what is a playstation. So keep your console.

 

[Storm Raven]

I guess my big question is; why does she have to be innovative? If she is or isn't either one, that's not really a value judgement of her writing, IMO.

Because in the article, she apparently claims she was trying to "subvert the genre" and the writer of the article claims her take on fantasy is innovative. Whether or not she actually is innovative has no real bearing on the enjoyability of her books, but when someone makes a claim concerning something, then people will scrutinize that claim. In this case, the author of the article (and it seems Rowling) are making a claim concerning the series that is clearly unsupportable, and people are reacting to that.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Oh, I dunno. British boarding school fiction combined with fantasy is a new way of presenting either genre.

I guess my big question is; why does she have to be innovative? If she is or isn't either one, that's not really a value judgement of her writing, IMO.

Actually, I don't think Harry Potter is innovative at all in this regard. I read a novel about a kid going to a boarding school to learn wizardry long before I ever heard about Harry Potter.

Actually, there is a really old folk tale called the "School of Salamanca" which is about a boarding school of wizards (though in that tale it is a bit more sinister).

 

[WizarDru]

Actually, I don't think Harry Potter is innovative at all in this regard. I read a novel about a kid going to a boarding school to learn wizardry long before I ever heard about Harry Potter.

Actually, there is a really old folk tale called the "School of Salamanca" which is about a boarding school of wizards (though in that tale it is a bit more sinister).

I'm guessing you don't mean THIS School of Salamanca?

I've only found one reference to such a tale, in the list of some Italian Folktales...and I tend to wonder if it isn't a mockery of them.

 

[Desdichado]

It doesn't count if it's never been heard of.

Besides, I'm not trying to claim that boarding school fantasy is something she literally invented, just that it's clearly not common, well-known or cliche, thus it's arguably a bit innovative.

And as I have said several times in this thread, it certainly seems innovative if you don't really know very much about the fantasy genre except the most stodgy of cliche-ridden fantasies, and based on the interview, both Rowlings and the interviewer fall into that category.

I don't know Rowlings needs to be "refuted"--to someone like (probably most of) us who are more familiar with the modern fantasy genre, we can just laugh a bit at their naivety and not worry too much about it.

 

[ragboy]

I've only read Book 1 and really wasn't interested enough to read any of the others

That was my take, as well. I read the first book and didn't find anything new or different. The writing was fairly common (not great), the story was fairly common (complete with the chessboard trap scene), and the characters were slightly more interesting than most fantasy books. I read it and pitched it. However, hearing the book acted/read by Jim Dale is a whole different animal. There's a subtlety of character and even story that, for some reason, didn't translate well on the page. I'm about the read the fifth and sixth books, then listen to them, just to see if this holds.

 

[ragboy]

Because in the article, she apparently claims she was trying to "subvert the genre" and the writer of the article claims her take on fantasy is innovative. Whether or not she actually is innovative has no real bearing on the enjoyability of her books, but when someone makes a claim concerning something, then people will scrutinize that claim. In this case, the author of the article (and it seems Rowling) are making a claim concerning the series that is clearly unsupportable, and people are reacting to that.

What she innovated was not the genre, but the marketing and sales of the genre. By all accounts, she'll be a billionaire by the time the last book/movie/toy combination is out. That's quite an innovation for a little Victorian boarding school fantasy rip-off.

edit: And that's the measure of 'success' that the media seems attached to in all things, so...