Reymma
Since: Feb, 2015
09/06/2023 00:00:00
This is very much why I never liked it; the basic setting is a very mundane one, while the magic and fantasy elements are too haphazard to be believable and have no sense of wonder or charm to them. (I will always point to [[Literature/Earthsea A Wizard of Earthsea]] for how to do fantasy that is both grounded and awe-inspiring.) It\'s just a quirky school, with likeable characters and some good mystery plots, and would have worked much better without the magic.
But it is odd how Tom Brown\'s Schooldays was so influential when it was written only as a prequel to the Flashman novels.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.Leave a Comment:
An achievement - but not for the reasons everybody quotes
These books make more sense when you realise that fundamentally, they're not really about magic or fantasy at all. (Except in the Terry Pratchett definition that every genre is fantasy at some level - you open the page and enter a new world, even if it's only a version of this one. your imagination does the rest.)
Rowling's achievement is that she single-handedly revived and reinvigorated a genre of English literature that had been a dead, dated, cliché - the English Boarding School Story. In which the heroes arrive aged eleven to the Boarding School, are faced with the struggle of a new and often hostile environment, a world in itself with its routines, traditions, customs and practices (which will appear strange, even ridiculous, from the outside). Not only at school but also living there, they are faced with struggles and challenges, and grow with them over the series until, at some point around the ages of sixteen-eighteen, they leave to go back into the big world as young adults. There will be villains and bullies among the other kids and among the teaching staff, but also lifelong friendships forged in adversity. Sport will be given prominence and a pupil good at Sport will be a School Hero.
The genre really began with Tom Brown's Schooldays in 1858, and had a little over a century of fictional dominance, passing through manifestations like Greyfriars and Enid Blyton's Malory Towers to Jennings. Echoes of and allusions to Arnold, Richards, Blyton and Buckeridge can be found profusely in Hogwarts. It isn't hard to deduce the sort of books Rowling would have loved to read as a girl.(Angela Brazil's novels may have featured prominently.) The Boarding School vibe is powerful here and drives the series.
This genre died in The '60s in a more egalitarian Britain and was preserved in libraries as a quaint reminder of how things used to be.
Then JK Rowling came along, four decades afterwards, and had a few genuinely inspired ideas as to how a largely moribund cliché could be given a new lease of life. And she succeeded, brilliantly.
These are boarding school novels. Magic and fantasy is just window-dressing. But very readably done!