Harry and Jim and me

I was a little behind the curve with the Harry Potter phenomenon. It took a few years of hearing the name dropped by nieces and nephews (and their parents) before curiosity took hold and I got a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. It was right about the time Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out in hardcover. Since I grew up on Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. LeGuin and T.H. White (among many others), Harry Potter’s world was quite comfortable to me, and I decided that J.K. Rowling stood tall in the company of the authors of The Black Cauldron, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Sword in the Stone.

What settled it for me was the third title, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The second Potter book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, had seemed like little more than a rewrite of the first book, but Azkaban took Rowling’s artistry to a whole new order of magnitude. I was particularly impressed by the Dementors — malignant beings that suck away all happy memories until their victim is too crippled by sadness and despair even to attempt escape. Anyone who’s visited those dark shoals could see Rowling had spent some time there herself, and come away with a brilliant metaphor for the experience, along with a highly original type of monster.

After that, the books became bigger and flabbier. I found Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire rewarding, despite the overwriting, not least because I stood online for the midnight unveiling at an East Brunswick bookstore and enjoyed the spectacle of pre-teen kids standing in line to buy a novel several hundred pages long. Always go where the hardcore fans go — it adds to the fun.

But I’m afraid I got bogged down in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — so much so that I abandoned it halfway through, and thus missed out on the truly badass wizard brawl in the Hall of Mysteries. When Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, I didn’t even bother getting a copy.

But now, as everyone except the Taliban know, Rowling is about to ring down the curtain with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I wanted to get back up to speed. Fortuntately, some friends have all the Harry Potter audiobooks, and they loaned me the massive unabridged CD version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the penultimate Potter. It’s been a double blessing: not only have I regained my affection for Rowling’s stories, I’ve also discovered Jim Dale, who is a wizard in his own right.

I’d heard that Dale’s readings of the Potter books were in a class by themselves, but it turns out that isn’t even half of it. The guy is extraordinary. If audiobook readers divide into the straight readers vs. the enactors, then Dale is the emperor of the enactors. Every charatcer in Rowling’s crowded story gets a readily identifiable voice and set of verbal ticks, and Dale never loses track of them even as he reverts to his own voice for the narrative portions of the story. Bravura stuff.

And the book itself? I liked it just fine. Rowling has clearly known where she was going right from the start, and the pitch-black climax of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is very impressive not simply for its uncompromising grimness — Rowling has always been a tough cookie — but for the wholly unforced way it shows Potter groping his way back to hope and optimism after enduring a devastating loss. I have no doubt that Rowling is going deliver the goods, big time, for the seventh and final entry in the Potter series.

For me, the only question is whether I should buy the book or the audio version. While Jim Dale reading the story from my car stereo, the daily commute will be a magic carpet ride, and the blighted Hudson County landscape will become the grounds of Hogwarts. That will be an experience worth having again.

I agree wholeheartedly that reading aloud to children is one of the greatest services a parent can provide. But Jim Dale has reminded me of something else — how much fun it is to be read to.