Recommendation: A Year in the Life of J. K. Rowling

If you are about the same age as me (I was born in 1987) chances are that you are part of the Harry Potter generation! Clearly, most young people who enjoy the Harry Potter books could be called "the Harry Potter generation" but maybe there is something special about starting to read the book series when you are 11 years old, just as the main protagonist.

So for people like me around the world it is undeniable: the Harry Potter saga is coming to an end. It already did end in a way when the last book was released. No more midnight release parties! No more avoiding the internet for a few days before the book launch to not be spoiled by ominous carpet books. No more finding five different fan-written versions of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix online. Oh well, back when the last book came out I told myself: There will still be the movies.

Now that the last movie is due out this summer (THIS SUMMER!) there won't be much of anything out afterwards. Yes, I am hoping for J. K. Rowling to write that encyclopedia or maybe some cute book like "Hogwarts, a History" much in the same way in which she wrote Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch through the Ages, but there won't be any new books about Harry Potter at Hogwarts. Ah well! So as the summer release of the final Harry Potter film draws near, we are all a little bit sad. Right now I am doing some things that bring back memories, like rereading the books or watching DVD bonus material.

But one thing that I dug up again is the 2007 documentary "A Year in the Life of J. K. Rowling". I thought it's a really beautifully done documentary which follows the author through a critical phase of her career - namely the year in which she finished writing the final book of the Harry Potter series. It's almost surreal to see her sitting in a hotel room now, after the book has been released, actually finishing the very last bit of the novel. Then you get a brief look at how the manuscript was transported to the publisher and finally being printed as well.

Other than centering around the production of the Harry Potter saga the documentary also features J. K. Rowling's sister and husband and they're talking a bit about their family life. James Runcie also asks Jo a few very interesting questions and touches on the hard times in her life, after her divorce and the birth of her first child, when she faced depression and how she managed to keep going after all. Some insights on how Rowling's personal hardships in life and probably most of all the death of her mother influenced the book series are also given.

Overall, it is probably the perfect documentary to watch for a Harry Potter enthusiast who wants to know more about the author. If you are a fan like me and familiar with Rowling's basic biography you will probably already know a lot of the things that are talked about in this documentary. However, it is still an interesting watch. Especially scenes like the one where Rowling has the opportunity to visit one of her old flats again and is overwhelmed by emotion when she sees the Harry Potter books standing on a shelf there, shouldn't be missed by fans.

But even if you aren't a fan of Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling is an interesting woman. She has very interesting views on life and if you ever wanted to check out what the fuss is all about this documentary might be a good place to start as well.

Self-Aware and Self-Unaware Fantasy

Picture by Tom Woodward

If you are into fantasy books then you have a big problem. The genre is huge and has a lot of different sub genres and all of these harbour a lot of different styles of writing.

One thing, one underlying theme that just stuck out to me in fantasy is whether the author is writing fantasy in a self-aware way or not. It's really kind of hard to define but generally you have authors saying stuff like "Oh, it wasn't a conscious decision to write in this genre, I just want to tell a story! I write because I need to tell this story." or they don't say that.

It's usually people who are writing a kind of self-unaware fantasy who claim that they just want to tell you a story. That's not a bad thing at all. I'd put J. K. Rowling into that category of self-unaware fantasy writers and George R. R. Martin, too. Their stories are amazing and they can be amazing metaphors for what is going on in the real world, but they aren't consciously written as fantasy stories because they use the genre as a part of their construction, they are just written as fantasy stories because that's what the story is like. They are good stories and I especially like Harry Potter but I just find there is something fundamentally different about self-aware fantasy.

Self-aware fantasy would be stuff like The Lord of The Rings, obviously. J. R. R. Tolkien was not just a fantasy writer, he was a scholar and researched linguistics just as much as Anglo-Saxon culture. His Lord of the Rings can be seen as very awarely constructed work, just as you might look at the Middle English poem The Pearl. Some amazingly constructed piece of work like that, whose form alone is so extremely complex and yet perfectly corresponds to the content can only be the work of somebody who exactly understands what he is doing and what traditions he is drawing on when he is completing his work. Alright, The Lord of the Rings doesn't rhyme or have a certain number of lines or stanzas as far as I am aware of but it's a huge piece of work and draws on not one but many writing traditions. Tolkien incorporates elements from Anglo-Saxon culture just as he uses motives from World War I literature to create a critique of militarism and within that industrialism. The usage of that pastiche of elements and traditions is a commentary in and of itself. To create something like that, you have to have more than a "simple story" as a starting point. You must be aware of the writing traditions that you are drawing from, of the motives that you are using and what you are creating in the end is not a "simple story" but it is also a commentary on the genre itself.

It's hard to find somebody to liken to Tolkien and say: "Self-aware fantasy as it is written by Tolkien and..." yeah, by whom? Who else can we say writes fantasy in a way that is aware of the construction of the genre itself, its legacy and its potential? I might say that we could count Sir Terry Pratchett among these people. He doesn't strike you as somebody who just wants to tell you a story. I think he is very aware of the traditions of the genre and breaks them quite a lot. What I look for most in his books are his "moments" as I have come to call them. In every book, at least once, there will be a moment where the funny fantasy story in front of you just vanishes and it turns into a social commentary on our world. Those moments are why I read his books. And he doesn't do it in a lazy or obvious way either. When you read his works you realise that there is something behind it and that the author just has to be aware of it. It's like you are stepping behind a curtain and there you find the author, standing with you together and him saying: Oh yeah, I know. I am here, too. That's why I wrote it the way I did.

This idea of self-aware and self-unaware fantasy has been in my head for quite a while and I have never really found a way to exactly put it in a satisfying way. Even now I can't really make up a definition that always fits. In a way, a lot of it depends on what you think the author had in mind when they wrote something and this is something you will never be able to tell for sure, so I haven't decided how much merit this categorisation does have right now. It's important to stress though, that you can't tell the two apart by asking yourself whether the story can be an allegory for real life or not. Harry Potter is an allegory for a lot of things, among them J. K. Rowling deals with the terrors of the Third Reich in a very thoughtful way, but allegory and metaphor is not the same as self-aware fantasy. The author has to be aware of fantasy as a genre and specifically use that in their writing. The starting point isn't necessarily the story but the genre itself.

Also, self-aware fantasy doesn't necessarily have to be better than self-unaware fantasy or the other way around- Not at all. A skilled writer tells you an amazing story, whether they deconstruct the entire fantasy genre in the process or not. But let's just say, I don't think Stephenie Meyer was very aware about the genre and its traditions when she wrote her series.