Why, it's more exciting than the Second Coming

In all innocence yesterday I strolled into a noted Victoria bookstore yesterday and was met by not only a mass of juvenile attendees at a place that is normally populated by adult sorts of browsers, but also of staffers dressed in witches’ hats, and make-up of indiscernible (by me) origin, and various types of regalia and wondered, if only for seconds, what was going on, since Halloween had long-since passed and the next one wasn’t on the immediate horizon. It was the 21st of July, for heaven’s sake.

Well, silly me for being so out of the loop. It was, of course, the massively engineered and uber-hyped launch of the latest Harry Potter tome. Yet, judging by the crowds and their enthusiasm, you would have thought that Madonna had agreed to strip in the town square for all of those who might still actually care if she did doff bra and knickers.

This HP extravaganza was engineered, obviously, to create more mass ecstasy than Christ’s last foray into Jerusalem. It never ceases to amaze me how the ‘machine’ of crass and venal publicity can sway once it sets out to perform its wonders.

As I have written before, I have read none of the J.K. Rowling opus. Not out of any particular bias other than seeing the series as a series for children. Yet, I fully accept that adults sometimes like a foray into fantasy, and that is good. Indeed, I might even read one someday, out of curiosity as much as anything else. In other words, I think it is fine that a writer has been successful in creating and oeuvre that appeals, even at a mass level. HP is fashionable and, like all fashions, it will ultimately become passé for a time. But, if it is truly worthy, it will then assume a respectable place in the literary pantheon, as have the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Cool.

A virtue almost constantly trumpeted about HP is that it is “getting children to read.” Don’t be decrying “getting children to read” in this post-literate era. That’s akin to peeing on the tomb of Princess Diana, or daring to suggest that maybe Global Warming is something trumped up by the manufacturers of fluorescent overpriced lightbulbs and hybrid cars.

But, of the “getting children to read” argument, ‘Newfie Bullet’ columnist, Rex Murphy, writing in Saturday’s Globe and Mail about the HP onslaught and -- soothing to my ego -- sharing some of the opinions I had voiced to Wendy yesterday, stated that the problem with the ‘reading’ argument if indeed HP is actually “getting children to read,” is that the humongous HP hype takes reading away from what it is designed to be – a solitary act of entertainment, enlightenment, or relaxation. Reading is something carried out in bed at night if nothing more enchanting is happening, in front of a roaring fire, or to kill time on the train, or at an airport. It is not a group endeavor. Never has been.

My primary fear in that context is that HP ‘overkill’ will ultimately destroy whatever goodness has come from the HP phenom. It will be relegated to faddism, flavor of this moment in 2007, a literary (albeit far less hideous) Victoria Beckham, and then it will crash and burn, and children who might have actually gotten a bit interested in reading will turn away from the practice because the ‘machine’ no longer deems it current. HP stands in jeopardy, in other words, of “jumping the shark” or bouncing around on Oprah’s couch like Tom-Terrific did (and whose creds have never really recovered from that bit of misjudgment), and passing out of favor due to overkill.

When that happens the hypemeister boys and girls of marketing will move onto something else, and what could have been a ‘good’ moment in literary history, even an ‘enlightened’ one, will be discarded like yesterday’s, oh, Globe and Mail.

That would actually be sad. But, maybe that will be when I’ll pick up a copy in the remaindered bin and give old Harry a go. I might actually like it when finally nobody is telling me that I must.