As mentioned, I finished reading the first Harry Potter book -
Harry Potter and the Philosohthatsabigwordletscallitsourcerersinstead Stone a couple of days back.
Presumably I found it enjoyable enough, as I've now started on the second. So, thoughts.
In all honesty, it probably fitted my expectations, which weren't that high for the first book - I was expecting a kid friendly, entertaining book and got it. What I don't get is why the book set the world alight. I mean, it's certainly okay, but it's not startling to the level that I could get uber excited about it.
The Roald Dahlisms started to fade after the first chapter or so, but there was still plenty that smacked of his style of prose, but Harry Potter himself certainly isn't a Roald Dahl type hero. Compare Harry to James or Charlie - surrounded by monstrous characters but they wouldn't wish harm on them. In fact, Charlie was the kind of lad who expressed concern even for the monstrous brats he was having adventures with. Not so Harry Potter, who seems to spend most of the book wishing harm on people - be it Malfoy, Snape or Dudley, he always seems to be looking for a fight. While Charlie might have seemed too saintly, Harry comes across as rather aggressive and with a mean streak - literally his first line on being told he'll be able to do magic is not to express the desire to do something wonderful, but to curse his cousin.
Harry in the movie was a much more sympathetic character than he came across in the book for me. In the movies he comes across as shy and self doubting. In this first book, more obnoxious and jock-like than anything, good at sport, quick with a smart-ass remark, ready to pick fights, nursing grudges. It's funny because his in-book personality comes across slightly at odds with how twee and sickly sweet a lot of the rest of the book is. It's all very jolly hockeysticks, Enid Blyton (and at best a wannabe Tom Brown's Schooldays) in a way that's too sympathetic to be properly spoofing the public school genre. And I'd have given my right arm for there to be a decent Flashman type character instead of just Malfoy, who's fairly obnoxious, but hardly enough to justify the worst enemy *fistshakes* attitude from the central character. He's just a git and a fairly limp one at that.
Of course, the plot's fairly slight and it's mostly just a set up novel to introduce readers to the fantasy world of the character and in that it succeeds well. There's not really a whole lot that's original in the setting though - it seems more a lumping of cliches together, be they magical or public-school based, along with a generic big bad looming over everything. It all seemed rather derivative, but at least Rowling
stole remixed other works and mythology and mixed it together in a way that wasn't entirely lifted from other books. but there's just a few too many moment where it was "oh, that scene's like..." I felt the book lacked the original concept that would really make it something truly new, though.
And that's a little where the book falls down - it's brief for the benefit of children, but rather relies on the readers knowing about dragons and ghosts and what mystical castles look like without much descriptive prose. I rather like a wordy description to aid the imagination myself, but so I would have rather liked a better idea of what something like Diagon Alley looked like, but on the other hand, encouraging a healthy imagination is to be encouraged too.
It's interesting to see how the book compares to the movies, though. It's clear certain casting was inspired, other roles an improvement on how they're written in the book (despite Rowling's claim that she "always had Maggie Smith in mind" for McGonagall, that doesn't tie in with the physical description of her in the book at all, but the movie version is an improvement) and it's clearly that Michael Gambon's boisterous take on Dumbledore is a lot closer to how I read him in this book that Richard Harris' subdued version.
I'm still bemused by the decision to rename the book in the US though. The Philosopher's Stone is an actual alchemic concept, the US title's just generic.
Anyway, a harmless enough read, but I'm hoping for more from later books in the series. At the moment I'm hard pressed to see what the fuss is about.
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