July: Harry Potter Month

July is a great month. I have oficially christened July Harry Potter month, and that is what it will henceforth be called.


There's probably a lot of people out there who will still refuse to consider the Harry Potter series literature but putting that aside one can't deny it's success, and it's ability to make kids read a series in which several of its entries near a thousand pages. We have the fifth film in the series Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and the likely final conclusion to the series which we've awaited so eagerly with tears of joy and tears of sadness, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows within a week of each other.


J.K. Rowling's greatest strength is in her characters, and the way she progresses them through the months and the years. The movies have departed from the central thesis of her books, by streamlining and chopping the plot and making it into a thriller, when nearly every one of Rowling's actual novels is a thing of commonality. It's about daily life, it's about school at Hogwarts, which is indeed a magical school. Because, for every five hundred pages of character progression, of daily events sweet, and sad, and funny there is a mere one hundred for action. Yes there are ominous things always occurring, but then again every day there are sad things which we don't see unless we turn on the news. Hogwarts began as a place of shelter, and now in the seventh book we suspect it will be a place which is no longer a shelter, but a place that can no longer belong because, unles evil is defeated, nothing can ever be safe again.


With every book the Potter series has become, in my opinion, much less of a children's series than such plain good literature. It's created characters you care about just as good as Dickens did, it's created humuour that is not cheap but endearing and well remembered, just as Dickens and others did, it has created a world that, for all its impossibilities, (the very idea of apparation, appearing somewhere in a second causse a whirlstorm of problems, imagine if anyone from any country in the world could suddenly appear in New York this very moment. National Security would be impossible) is at its core truthful. It's a book that's scary, and imaginative, and makes you cherish every page and every chapter with more love every time you read it. Rowling has produced some of the only thousand page books that you will read in a week, or less. That you will want to read the whole series again, at least twice a year.


The only reason to see the movie is for the effects, and the music, and the drama and it's greatest accomplishments which is that Emma Watson is hermione and Daniel Radcliffe is Harry potter, and so on and so forth. Each installement becomes more and more dense and joyful, that to do any real justice to the novels beginning with the third an epic miniseries would be needed and, based on everyone I've asked, very much preferred. Or, at least a Lord of the Rings like effort which is to say, the film will be three hours and thirty minutes, and another hour and thirty minutes for the extended edition.


If there's one time when I cried at a movie it was at the very end of Return of the King not so much because the ending was sad, althugh it was in a beaitiful way, as that the journey was over, and was to be no more. Harry Potter, in my opinion, is just as much if not more an accomplishment as Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis' Narnia is. Because it's more about character and truth than anything. The most wonderful thing of all in a novel, is to while reading the sad, stirring, and if Rowling's opinion is anything, best and utter culmination of the entire series, will be thinking back when it's all over and all 756 or so pages of Hallows of the time when Harry first got on the platform 9 and 3/34 and you got on with them, to follow them for seven years, to see them argue and fight, and cry and to think which one of these friends which we have so much cherished will die is too sad a thought to think, to great a thought, because the world and characters Rowling created have become as real as any work of fiction can become, and will, as only literature and not film or television can, enchant people a hundred, two hundred years from now, just as the best of Dickens, of Bleak House of Our Mutual Friend do. And that, is why Harry Potter is a work of literature of great importance and strength and simplicity.


Thank you, thank you, J.K. Rowling for the world and the characters you have given to us.