Bloggarts

Jul. 28th, 2005 02:34 pm
hazelk: (Default)
[personal profile] hazelk
Reading around in the wake of the new Harry Potter I came across this excellent essay by [livejournal.com profile] minisinoo about style and heart in writing. It was posted with reference to an earlier discussion of JK Rowling’s work possessing the latter quality despite the stylistic deficiencies and made a lot of sense to me. I like the Potter books, they’re fun and they do seem to have some indefinable something for which ‘heart’ seems as good a word as any.

In the earlier post there was also some comparison of Potter with Susan Cooper’s ‘The Dark is Rising.’ As it happens they’re both series I’ve read first as an adult which makes an objective comparison easier than one with say UK le Guin’s Earthsea books. Cooper like Rowling is highly addictive, I think I ploughed through the entire series in 2-3 days. Both also deal with a magical world that exists in parallel to the modern one but other than that they feel very different. For me the great strength of ‘The Dark is Rising” is that sense of the world being on the verge of being swallowed by a great building darkness. The strongest section of each book come in the middle before that threat gets deus ex machina’d away. OK that’s a little unfair but the endings do feel a little too inevitable. Whereas with the Potter the best part usually is the last when all the plot threads miraculously fall into place. Cooper has some strong but subtle characterisation particularly of Will, the boy who finds he’s an Old One, in the second book and later of Bran the Pendragon figure. In general, however, the characters come across as a little indistinct compared with those of the Potter books, who are almost cartoonishly drawn.

The Cooper books are steeped in Arthurian mythology, while I don’t get the impression that Rowling has any closer acquaintance with the Matter of Britain than I do. Which is not zero but it’s mostly second hand. More often she (Rowling) seems to draw on her own experiences. The Dementors are supposed to be a representation of depression aren’t they? With the new book I wonder if the Pensieve isn’t a metaphor for writing. Storing little pieces of your thoughts in a form that others can share. Picture LJ users strung together by a web of those silvery threads. A slightly disturbing image – as Buffy once said, “if taken literally incredibly gross.” And the Boggarts, which transform into the observer’s greatest fear and are rendered harmless by the confusion engendered by audience diversity. A similar effect would seem possible with written forms of communication being open to all comers. But I quite like the idea. Being a masochistic bloggart.

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