You can’t help feeling sorry for A.S. Byatt. Just think of the enjoyment she’s missing out on, since she thinks Harry Potter is crap (thanks to Martin for the link). Apparently:
It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons and the exaggerated – more exciting, less threatening – mirror world of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.
Now, I must admit I’ve never read Byatt (maybe that’s her problem?), but I fail to recognise myself in the picture she paints (oh, that could also be her problem…). It’s been a while since I watched TV cartoons, I prefer a book (Proust, anyone?) to soaps, reality TV makes me dive for the remote (to press the OFF!! button) and uhm, well, I bought a celebrity gossip mag last week (for the first time, ever, as far as I can remember), but that was after getting up at five in the morning, four hours on a bus and five hours waiting around at the airport, so I think my mental state at the time could be described as “unusual”.
I’m not a great fan of Tolkien (read it, enoyed bits of it), and I’ve never managed to finish an Alan Garner – I did, however, enjoy Susan Cooper (I assume ‘Cropper’ is a misprint, if not Byatt is talking about a very obscure writer, that not even Google has heard about – unless ‘Loving and Losing a Pet’ is the book she’s referring to…), she really is excellent (and, yes, serious). Her choice of examples seem somewhat weird, though. Tolkien, at least, had an intended audience of adults. Garner and Cooper seem to have a target audience of “young adults” – I read Cooper long before I was 12 and had no problems with her – and I’m one of those people who suspect Rowling would have given me nightmares when I was 11.
Thanks to google, here’s the original article by Byatt in NY Times.
I see from The Leaky Cauldron that Fay Weldon admits to finding it “troubling” when she sees grown-ups reading HP. Why? Surely there is nothing inherently wrong with reading children’s books when you’re grown up? They are written by grown-ups, aren’t they? Does it not occur to these people that some authors are actually able to write books that are mulit-layered, on the surface simple enough that children can read them, at heart complicated enough that adults can find them challenging as well as entertaining?
What I find “troubling” is when seemingly intelligent people turn out to chose The Sun as their daily paper (and their main source of information about what’s going on in the world). This is worrying. Adults reading well-written children’s books is not.
And, as I said, Byatt is missing out – majorly.
Voice on the tv: George Michael – Careless Wispers