Review of Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie is a significant figure in modern writing, and I recently read his Joseph Anton: A Memoir (my review). In it he mentions the conception and the development of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Amazon affiliate link), and how it related to the very real issues in his life at the time he wrote it.

As an English teacher I focused heavily on young adult literature, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories is aimed at younger audiences than I typically worked with, but that doesn’t mean that it is devoid of merit.

Where Rushdie gets things right is in having an ironclad story concept and premise. This is a book you can read to kids, because the surface-level action is top-notch and flows smoothly, the wordplay introduces new vocabulary while also adding comic twists on characters, and the deeper subtext is great for discussion and bears deeper themes.

To describe this book in one word, I would say that it is mythological.

It’s set in a world inspired by Rushdie’s Indian Muslim heritage, with a strong helping of literary references beyond that. It’s exotic without being needlessly so, and that helps contribute to an overall spirit of whimsy and discovery.

There are some darker themes and elements: there’s allusions to Rushdie’s life hiding from a fatwa calling for his assassination, but only in a very veiled and indirect form as part of Rashid’s troubles with his storytelling. A central conflict between light and darkness, which is resolved by both sides coming together in harmony, could be thematically scary. The protagonist’s mother leaves his father for another man at the start of the story.

With this said, none of the content in the book is gratuitous. It all takes place in a larger narrative, and its goal is to raise and answer questions, not just expose children to ideas without giving them the foundation from which to deal with a complex world.

Of course, as someone familiar with Rushdie, it’s clear that these are all taken from events in his own life. He handles them respectfully, without claiming to have perfect knowledge. The bond between Rashid and Haroun that develops over the course of the story is touching, and delves deep into the nature of fatherhood. Rushdie’s life as a condemned writer shows through the cracks as well.

It’s worth noting that the epic battle between good and evil is presented in a way that is very deliberately pro-freedom. Rushdie doesn’t condemn his opponents as single-faceted villains, and they’re given as much complexity as is possible in such a work, but he makes clear why they’re the villains and why it is necessary that people have the freedom to speak and to tell stories.

Reading the book as someone interested in Rushdie’s life and evaluating it for its use in the classroom or teaching, I found it quite enjoyable nonetheless on entertainment merits. Rushdie has a very clear and compelling style, and while he dresses it up in a fanciful, almost Seussian, manner for the sake of being amusing, he does so with a lyricism and authenticity that is infectious.

There were quite a few points where I had to just stop and guffaw at something that had been said. Rushdie makes sure that there aren’t obtuse things that only make sense to adults (and the book is free of crass double meanings), but there are definitely parts that are absurdly humorous or deeply profound that only more mature readers can fully appreciate.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a fantastic book, and one I look forward to reading with children. It’s tremendous for its storytelling, sublime in its language, lofty in its message, and meaningful to its core. There’s a few positively excellent bedtime stories in here, and beneath them lie deep depths of wisdom and artistic expression.

Review and Reflection: Harry Potter (6-7)

I finished reading the Harry Potter series on Kindle, finishing The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows in pretty rapid succession. It’s been almost a week since I finished reading the latter, so I’ve had some time to gather my thoughts.

I know that I’ve already talked about how I considered the Harry Potter series quite good (for more see my previous posts on the first three books and fourth and fifth books) when I went to read it. I was part of the target audience back when it first came out, but just never got around to reading it for a variety of reasons.

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Review and Reflection: Harry Potter (4-5)

Before reading the fourth and fifth Harry Potter books (The Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix), my opinion of the series was that it was quite good, but not quite what I would consider to be masterful work. I did quite personally enjoy the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, but the earlier two were of more academic interest to me: I enjoyed them, but no more than I would any average book.

For more on my thoughts, you can read the previous installment of my review and reflection.

Review

The Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix (Amazon affiliate links) are a lot larger and darker than previous books, clocking in at a combined 1400 pages and featuring a lot more peril.

I read The Goblet of Fire in an old-school print format, but I switched over to reading from Kindle on my phone for The Order of the Phoenix, something which helped since the book got a little large to comfortably take with me and I was able to sneak constant little reads of the text.

When I was reading the first three books, my interest was largely satisfying personal and academic curiosity before developing into a desire to actually read the books for their own merit, but I’m happy to say that the fourth and fifth book strung me along quite well. It’s been a long time since I’ve devoted hours-long reading sessions to a book on multiple occasions during a day; I tend to break up reading between little tasks, but The Order of the Phoenix in particular led to a few occasions of me sitting on my couch, my cat in my lap (or beside me, or diligently ignoring me) for hours at a time.

A lot of this comes from how invested one has become in the characters by the time you get to the fourth and fifth books. They’re realistic, deep, and invoke sympathy and vicarious reactions. Even when they jump to wrong conclusions (a trope Rowling uses reliably but sparingly) and “pick up the idiot ball” to borrow an expression I’ve heard used frequently, they still feel like they’re making decisions because of their own motivations, rather than choices that drive the plot.

Much of what I could say about Rowling’s writing I have already said: I consider it to be very vivid and practical; it’s not quite the most deep prose, but for its audience it is sufficient, and I would argue that measuring writing by the depth of its prose is a poor metric. It is generally improved in the later books by any account, even though it did not necessarily need to.

Further, the stories get more archetypal depth as they develop; this is not only a consequence of extended length, but a reflection of the process of Harry and his friends growing more mature and becoming more aware of the reality around them.

Reflection

One of the things that I’ve been enjoying about the Harry Potter series is looking at the deep characters and how they’ve grown even deeper.

I mention archetypal characters a lot: through my Loreshaper Games stuff I’ve written a short series on role archetypes, the possible roles that characters can take in a story.

What I love about Harry Potter as I get deeper into it is that there are really deep interactions between the archetypes: Potter as the Hero, Hagrid as the Herald, Harry (and occasionally other characters, like Ginny, as the plot rolls on) as the Underdog, Dumbledore as the Mentor, George and Fred as the Trickster, Hermoine and Ron as the Ally, a plethora of characters as the Villain (at least one per novel, somewhat unsurprisingly), Sirius and Snape as the Shapeshifter, various characters as the Outsider (Harry, Hermoine, Sirius, Lupin, etc), and through it all Voldemort as the Serpent.

It’s patient and willing to develop these interactions and roles quite a bit, and it sets up a Hero’s Journey that is both divided into segments and then later into a longer complete saga of Harry growing up.

I know a lot of people have expressed concern about the darkness of the universe, but I think that this is actually a strength of the Harry Potter franchise. Children know that there are things in the world that they cannot see if they are sheltered from them (and if they are not sheltered, then there is no harm in what is contained in Harry Potter to begin with), but in the series they are directly uncovered and confronted allegorically through the role of the Hero and the development that Harry has to undergo.

Jung speaks of confronting the Shadow, the secret part of us that we choose not to look at, which holds both strengths and sins that we do not want to explore.

Harry Potter’s fourth and fifth book do that wonderfully; Harry is confronted by his own limitations but also his own potential and must rise up to meet the call that he has received. He makes mistakes, and there is real suffering that results both as a result of his action or inaction and forces that extend beyond his control, but his ability to be a compelling and noble figure is drawn from the fact that he strives, not that he always succeeds without loss.

There is death, sacrifice, and loss in these books, and also wanton deliberate evil. That may seem like a dark thing to contemplate, but it is also part of becoming fully human: one cannot accept themselves if they do not confront their Shadow, and cannot be good if they have not realized what it is to be evil.

There’s a point in The Order of the Phoenix when Harry is in a fight with a Death Eater, one of Voldemort’s servants, and he tries to use a Cruciatus curse to inflict unbearable pain on the Death Eater.

He tries, and ultimately fails, not because his execution of the spell was off, but because his heart was not in it: the Death Eater retorts that in order for such a spell to be effective, one must really mean it.

It’s a testament to his nobility, and one which shows this exploration of the Shadow in the most meaningful way: to be in a fight but not wish malice upon one’s opponent requires a control and willpower that is part of the Hero’s journey toward light and away from darkness.

Wrapping Up

I find the Harry Potter books to be growing on me as I read them more; this is probably because I am an adult reading them for the first time and their target audience definitely gets older as the books move on.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but it’s also an enjoyable read beneath that, which is quite a merit in its own right.

Review and Reflection: Harry Potter (1-3)

One of the books that I simply never read as a child was Harry Potter, and I never saw the films either. I wasn’t that far away from it in terms of advertising demographic: it was a big deal in my social circles when I was in 4th grade or so, but I’d already read the Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia and was moving up to more difficult books.

However, I’ve been studying mysticism and alchemy recently as a way of trying to get an insight into the pre-modern mind, and since Harry Potter is theoretically aligned with that while also being l highly acclaimed and culturally influential in young adult literature, I figured I should jump in and see what all the fuss is about.

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Thursday Review: Tom Leveen’s Sick

Sick is a novel by Tom Leveen. It first came to my attention with a reference from a professor of mine over at Arizona State University in his class on young adult literature. It’s set in a high school at the outbreak of a zombie epidemic, and it makes for a remarkably good read.
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