2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

*Note: The Harry Potter books are cheating, to which I'll fully admit. For my rationale behind why I'm reviewing them now, go here.

Whenever I open the first pages of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the haunting tinkling of the movie's score tumbles out at me. Ba bum ba ba bum ba bum bum, bum ba ba bum ba bum. I've been a member of enough geeky-fangirl movements to know that devotion to the movie as much as the book, that ignoring the small difference between the text and screen, that ignoring the effect that the movie has on our imaginations - all these are kinds of sacriledge. While I can be a purist with the best of them (hellooo, Star Wars prequels), I when it comes to Harry Potter, the books and movies are irrecovcably intertwined. Since I can't ignore or change that fact, I've come to embrace it.

Which is why, when I started reading the Sorcerer's Stone the other night, I found myself delighted (once again) with how much richer are the books than the films, even the very first. Outside the restrictions of the screen, the shading of the character is so much more interesting, subtle, clever. And while I love all the movies (even the first two, widely panned Chris Columbus vehicles), I love the books even more.

We all know the story: orphaned Harry lives with his wretched aunt, uncle, and cousin in the terrifically named Little Whinging and is identifiable by way of the lightening bolt scar on his forehead. His life is pretty rotten, so imagine his surprise when he discovers that his parents were magical parents, that he is a wizard, and that he, at age eleven, has been accepted into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Much of the first book is taken up with introducing us into this new world, from the strange, whimsical names of places and people, to the various magical locations such as Diagon Alley and Hogwarts itself, to the learning of spells, to the intricacies of the game Quidditch. It stands to reason then that the first half of the book is a little light on plot and quite heavy on episode and detail; in fact, Harry and Ron Weasly don't even befriend Hermione until the half-way point, a detail I'd completely forgotten. A writer with a lesser imagination or a more tenuous grasp of language wouldn't have been able to get away with this; however, J.K. Rowling packs so many of her imaginative creations into every page, that we can't help but keep turning if only to see what she'll give us next. We're also helped along by Harry's breathless wonder: Rowling knows the power of a good protagonist, and she uses Harry shrewdly during this first half.

That Rowling is confident enough to open her series with 150 pages of (largely) exposition and discovery tells us several things. First, Rowling is well aware that she's not writing a single 300 page novel; rather, she seems to have a pretty good grasp on the expanse of the series (thousands of pages), and in that light, 150 pages of exposition seems almost paltry. Second, the sheer breadth of the world she's created is astonishing, and she simply need those 150 pages just to get it all out of her head.

Still, Rowling has enough grasp of plot to begin the threads in the first couple chapters, and though she wears those threads pretty thin after a while, the plot really gets rolling about halfway through. We discover with Harry that his parents were killed by a dark wizard who, far from being dead, seems to have re-appeared and is regaining his strength. This is tied somehow to a mysterious package being hidden at Hogwarts, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione's quest to discover what that package is, who's trying to steal it, and how to stop that someone takes up the remainder of the book. Despite the fact that the climax lands all three students in a fairly dangerous situation (as will become a trademark of the series), Rowling keeps her tone perpetually light and witty. There may be danger lurking around the corners of the story, but it's never something that can't be overcome.

This lightness of tone (and, it should be said, awareness of the book's audience) lends itself to a little too much neatness, particularly in the ending. Harry's confrontation of the nefarious Professor Quibbel smacks of the Bond villain spilling his secrets, and the wizard "obstacle course" the three students must navigate in order to find the Sorcerer's Stone seems too easy to believe. After all, if the Sorcerer's Stone is so important and valuable, one would think it would be better protected, at least such that eleven year olds couldn't get to it. But then we wouldn't have much of a story, would we?

But these are small quibbels in a vast sea of brisk storytelling and startling ingenuity. More than any of the other Harry Potter books, The Sorcerer's Stone reads like a young adult novel, as well it should. Rowling seems to have an instinct for toeing the line between children's fantasy and adult awareness; she's like the literary equivalent of Pixar. The best part, however, about finishing The Sorcerer's Stone this time was the knowledge that though this book may be finished, I still have six more Harry Potter books waiting to be read. And that's comforting.