Goodwhere, Badwhere, Nowhere, Thiswhere

Dystopian novels are hot right now: my dad has been reading them like crazy—the Uglies series, the Hunger Games series (check out my review of The Hunger Games series: 1, 2, and 3), the novel Matched, and more and more. I liked them before they were cool—right?—I remember being in high school, senior year, reading 1984 and Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 and the rest.  Now we've seen an explosion of dystopian fiction.

The easiest answer for this sudden trend in popularity is this: most teenagers and young adults like them, and now that YA literature is hot, dystopian novels are hot, too. I can imagine why I as a young adult, just learning the shadier undersides of everything from economics to politics to religion to authority in general, would enjoy reading books where the entire world is slightly askew: to wit, it was the way I saw the world I was living in already anyway.

Harry Potter: What Measure is a House Elf?

For all the fantastic creatures contained in Hagrid’s textbooks, there are actually very few non-human characters in Harry Potter. Humans (wizard or muggle) remain the main heroes and villains of the story, and many monsters that might inhabit other series remain at the periphery. The Inferi seem to stand in for zombies and vampires and other undead—but then we never see much of them. Lupin remains our lovable werewolf—but outside of book three, there isn’t much to be made of this. Mermaids remain at the bottom of the lake; dragons and hippogriffs seem to be constantly getting shipped to other parts of the world in order to avoid liquidation. 

So the most interesting additions to the Potterverse are the House-Elves—distant seconds are the Centaurs and the Goblins. The House-Elves create an ever-progressing revision in the series. In book two, we’re first introduced to Dobby, clever and good-natured, if bumbling; in book five, we’re introduced to Kreacher, a servant as befouled and bigoted as Dobby is sweet-hearted and loyal. They both serve important plot points in book seven where—despite having astounding magic—the Dark Lord seems to ignore them almost entirely.

Harry Potter: Bullies, Bureaucrats, and Lesser Evils

Between Death-Eaters and Dumbledore’s Army, Harry Potter can seem something of a melodrama—the good guys are very good, the bad guys are very evil. The good wizard looks like an idealized combination of our favorite grandfather and Gandalf and SANTA; the evil wizard is an archlich with a noseless face and a sibilant hiss. In this respect, HP runs afoul of a constant temptation of the fantasy genre: in a world where the rules of physics can be bent, and in a world where even reality seems difficult to parse, the lines drawn between good and evil are as obvious as the Berlin Wall. And there’s never a doubt about which side you are on, either.

So it’s important to recognize when Rowling muddies these lines by creating characters who are somewhere in between: neither black nor white but a shade of gray. I’m talking mostly about the Bureaucrats: Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge, Dolores Umbridge, and Percy Weasley. In a world of stark morality, these characters tend to insist on stark legality—or stark prudence—or stark status quo.

Harry Potter: What Kind of Terrorists are the Death-Eaters?

 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince begins with Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic, visiting the “other” minister—the Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the first chapter of the book, Fudge discusses several acts of terrorism: the Quidditch World Cup, the Triwizard Tournament, a mass breakout from Azkaban, and then includes the collapse of a Muggle bridge and a hurricane, all ascribed to the Death Eaters.

Terrorism was, of course, on everyone’s minds in 2005, when Rowling wrote the novel. It seems like a simple, straightforward comparison. But what kind of terrorists are the Death-Eaters?

Historically, Fudge’s meeting with the PM of England is notable: it would have been John Major in 1996—and the terrorists on everyone’s minds in the 90s were the IRA in Northern England. On the other hand, if Rowling was thinking more about the time she was writing in—rather than about—then she’d be thinking about Tony Blair, who was less worried about the IRA (the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998) and more entangled in the American “War on Terror.”

This Writer: Resolution

In 2010, I decided that I wanted to write (the first draft of) a novel. I’d been in grad school for four years, focusing on classes and teaching freshman composition, and I hadn’t written much fiction since undergrad. Writing a novel seemed daunting.

But writing a novel in a year seemed less daunting: having the full year helped me relax—but also pushed me into complacency. So I subdivided the novel into pieces—too many pieces, it turns out—but a chapter of a novel per month seemed a little less daunting, and a subchapter of a novel per week even less so.

It was kind of like when I was younger and would wander into a cold swimming pool an inch at a time—it’d take me forever to get in, but I'd eventually get in. (Nanowrimo, by contrast, is jumping from the high-dive.)

Different people and projects take different strokes. One friend shoots to write a certain amount of time per day—and I find that this method works better for me when writing academic writing. Many of my friends find that they work better writing for a deadline with an audience—writing workshop, accountability partners, etc. At least one friend says that from now on he’ll write at a dead sprint until the thing is done, which helps maintain the continuity of his voice.

I’m glad to report that I finished the first draft of my novel just two weeks after the end of 2010, sometime in mid-January 2011. But there were snags along the way, which I’ll talk about in future posts. But at least I got my feet wet.