Posted by Peter Ceresole on October 12, 2004 at 20:57:22 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: RE: Is AR a 'childrens writer'? posted by Robert Hill on October 12, 2004 at 20:05:31:
To whoever it was who said they'd read the first Potter book and didn't want to read any more
Hi Robert- that was me!
I'd say that it's a terrible pity to dismiss the series on the basis of the first book.
I do take your point. But it wasn't just the book itself; more its genre- I've never been a great fan of than kind of fantasy. When I was adolescent I read Tolkien's LOTR and always admired the epic scale of it- and it helps to read it when you have a fever, in my case viral pneumonia. It's jolly real when you're in that half awake state.
But I have a mental disability- a kind of terminal seriousness. Around that time I was also reading the historical novels of John Dos Passos ("Manhattan Transfer" and "USA") and preferred them to Tolkien. I can no longer read either writer, although remembering both with admiration. Now I re-read AR, but confess to a fatal weakness for Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time". AR's prose is far superior but despite an occasionally fussy and convoluted language I am totally seduced by Powell's stories, his humour and his magically surefire sense of period, character and social interaction.
For me, the only writer in the same class for clarity and robustness as AR is John Strachey in "Post D", which I've promoted here in the past- and I re-read that as often as I do WH, which is saying something. But not as often as I re-read Powell's "Military Philosophers" and "Hearing Secret Harmonies", numbers 4 and 7 respectively in the "Dance" series.