Posted by Guy C. on September 29, 2003 at 07:00:28 from 81.113.177.5 user Astronomer_Guy.
In Reply to: Re: Harry Potter posted by Robert Hill on September 29, 2003 at 01:59:50:
The contrasts between Rowling and Ransome as writers (I'm big fans of both) are illuminating.
First is that Philosopher's Stone was Rawling's first book; Ransome had been a professional writer for 20 years before SA. In that sense the comparison is unfair to Rawling. On the other hand, comparing Philosopher's Stone to Ransome's (dreadful) pre-WWI works would be equally unfair to him, since she wrote as an adult while he was barely out of school when he produced his over-artsy "Hoofprints of the Faun" etc. By the time of SA, Ransome is a better stylist and scene-setter in large part because his journalism experience trained him to overcome his youthful excesses.
Second is that they were written in different times. Ransome came out of a tradition that (over) valued style and then embraced the 1920's reaction against excessive mannerism without him losing some of those stylistic impusles. Thus both he and his readers were prepared for his loving, if lengthy, descriptions. Rawling writes in a culture where the art of reading for its own sake is approaching extinction.
Ransome was inventing something new in his depiction of children's play and its reflection, or presaging, of adult issues of competence and commitment. Rawling is re-discovering two very old genres (E. Nesbit's magic stories and the Boarding School stories) and marrying them to the more literary coming-of-age genre.
I think the moral underpinnings of the books have very different sources, too. Ransome's earlier work shows that he was not a deep thinker (he was attracted by the philosopher's daughters, not by his ideas!). He was smart enough to understand this about himself, and so by the time of SA his philosophy had become, wisely, the rough-and-ready sailor's sense of right and wrong: support your shipmates and keep the boat afloat. For that reason, it is very accessable and enduring. The Potter universe deals with much more complicated serious issues, which ironically may be possible only because Rawling is *not* writing against a background of Depression and World War.
Finally, today's media fame machine has put Rawling under both benefits and curses that Ransome never had to deal with...