back with Harry (part 2)

[Editor's note: Following the wild success of Howl's first post on this topic, he has generously agreed to take us deep into The Chamber of Secrets. Enjoy!]

When I started reading the Harry Potter books about five years ago, I had expected and even wanted to dismiss them. As an aspiring writer I generally prefer my idols to be dead: buried and rotted, the competition is far less threatening.

But while The Sorcerer's Stone seemed to justify some of my prejudices, The Chamber of Secrets stunned me into respect. This book is, in my opinion, a miracle of pace and plotting. It is the novel I most often recommend to other would-be novelists, and it is the single book in the Harry Potter series that I am likely to read a third time. (The only other full-length novels I've read three times are Anna Karenina and Emma.)

Beneath its action and humor, The Chamber of Secrets has the narrative skeleton of a mystery novel: nearly every chapter solves one riddle while introducing another, and most revelations manage at once to be surprising and logical. This book, I've argued, can serve writers as a compendium of effective storytelling techniques; and it was by these technical accomplishments that Rowling won me over, seducing me despite her own pulse.

But if The Chamber of Secrets is technically Rowling's most successful work, it still doesn't hint at the emotional power that will make her later books so formidable. This introduces a messy topic, though, one that will have to wait for later posts.

A question I will raise here, however, is how much the dominance of one art form, specifically film or television, can influence the creation and reception of works in another, specifically books.

For a while now I've toyed with the idea that many books, including some that I've written, are thinly-disguised novelizations of unmade movies or TV serials. I don't think this of the Harry Potter series, but I do suspect that its popularity owes something to how well Rowling's style, which is highly visual and unfailingly accessible, suits the sensibility of an audience weaned on film and television.

The Chamber of Secrets has plenty of cinematic moments, but the best one for this discussion occurs after Hermione has been Petrified, when Ron works up the nerve to sneak into the Forbidden Forest: he "looked sideways at the empty seat usually filled by Hermione. The sight seemed to stiffen his resolve, and he nodded." In Rowling, as in film and television, inner conflict usually plays out briefly and externally; in Bellow and Dostoevsky, by contrast, such moments of decision can last fifty pages, whole chapters in which characters rarely bother to move about the room.

It is worth remembering, though, that Dickens sticks to the tangible world as much as Rowling does. Film and television had no influence his writing, obviously, but the sensibility that they've fostered may partly dispose us to keeping him in print.