Harry Potter Satire

There are still one or two questions left unanswered at the end of Harry Potter's last adventure. It cannot be giving anything away to reveal that we never discover how Eloise Midgen can be a martyr to acne at Hogwarts, a place where bones can be grown back and complex orthodontics effected with the wave of a wand.

With JK Rowling it has generally been niggling little questions of internal logic that give the reader pause, rather than the mysteries of her grander scheme in which that prime specimen of embodied evil, Lord Voldemort, slowly acquires the power he needs to defeat Harry Potter, his only adequately qualified adversary. By book seven, if you are familiar with Rowling's vast, ever-expanding parallel universe, it seems only to be expected

Didn't most eminent Victorian novelists fight just as greedily for their profits, become, in several cases, international celebrities, and see their better cliffhangers and denouements stimulate the nation into moments of collective delirium?

But as her critics point out, Rowling is no Dickens. That the welfare of Harry Potter should, each year, become a question of national importance has only deepened a suspicion, in some quarters, that Rowling's writing is not merely mediocre but contaminated by her participation in a crass celebrity culture. In 2000, Harold Bloom despaired for her readers. "In an arbitrarily chosen single page - page 4 - of the first Harry Potter book", he objected, "I count seven clichés, all of the 'stretch his legs' variety".

If his computations had continued, Professor Bloom's cliché tally might by now have run into the thousands; the books have got so long and Rowling's style has remained unsophisticated, with an irrepressible tendency to show and tell. You feel that simply by cutting intra-paragraph repetition and the number of times she describes an angry Harry saying something angry angrily, Rowling and her editors might have saved 10,000