Why Harry Potter can't survive
This isn't a spoiler. While I have a copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", I haven't read it yet. I will, probably sooner rather than later, and I expect to enjoy it too, the clumsy errors in logic and plot notwithstanding. (Has anyone ever designed a more ridiculous game concept than Quidditch, where all of the activity of most of the players is completely irrelevant to the outcome? It's as if there was a sixth basketball player standing just off the court and launching tennis balls from 94 feet away that count for 100 points and end the game if they go in.) And Rowlings has a gift for articulating emotion, for giving the reader a sense of how her young characters feel, which is no doubt one of the secrets of its huge appeal.
But there is a very big difference between a successful novel and a great novel. It is very rare that a great novel is also one that is hugely popular with the masses. Umberto Eco, one of the very few authors who is capable of pulling off the feat, describes "mass culture" as being an inherent contradiction bordering on an oxymoron, which is why an author is wise to decide early on if he wishes to pursue critical acclaim or sales numbers. Success at either is unlikely in any case, but it helps to know what your goal is, as Dan Brown's rather cynical approach to writing "The DaVinci Code" demonstrates.
I very much doubt, however, that the "Harry Potter" phenomenon will outlast this generation of children, because at the end of the day, there simply isn't any substance to the books. Books that last for generations have memes that resonate with the reader regardless of his distance from the social environment in which the book first became popular; the Christian parable of "The Chronicles of Narnia" will cause them to resonate so long as Christianity persists while the power of "Anna Karenina" will last as long as men and women are tempted by infidelity.
But what is the essential meme of Harry Potter? Being orphaned by a dark lord? Being special? Improbable friendships? The always popular cliché of being true to yourself? There simply isn't one.
It's interesting to read books that were extremely popular in the past. Sometimes one can understand the appeal, more often one realizes that our predecessors had the same terrible literary tastes that we do today. "Day of Doom," written by the Rev. Michael Bigglesworth in 1662, is considered to have been the first American bestseller, as its 1,800 copies sold represented 2.2 percent of the population, which in today's terms would account for 6.6 million book sales, roughly the number of "Harry Potter" hardcovers sold for each book in the series. But no one reads Bigglesworth today, just as they don't read "The Lady of the Decoration" by Francis Little, the best-selling novel in America 100 years ago.
Harry Potter is nowhere near as awful as "The Mammoth Hunters," "The Bridges of Madison County," or "Desecration," to name three annual bestsellers from the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. It's light and amusing reading. But it is neither a classic series nor a collection of great books. It is merely the popular entertainment of its day and should be enjoyed for what it is while it lasts. If you want to read a truly classic children's novel, I highly recommend reading "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper before the movie from Walden Media appears in cinemas this October.