Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Voldemort!

J.K Rowling has again cast her Novelus Blockbusterus spell on most of the English speaking, or at least the English reading world with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. There probably follows a two to three day plummet in the demand for electricity, as televisions and game systems are temporarily abandoned for the unpracticed pleasures of reading. Woe be it, also, to the author whose publisher thought so little of him as to release his book for sale this week, as both display and shelf space in bookstores will have been slavishly devoted to Pottermania to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

I'm not wild about Harry, having read and enjoyed the first book because of its clever inventiveness and charmingly offbeat characters but grown, well, disenchanted with each newer, longer, darker and more convoluted offering. I gave up somewhere around the fourth or fifth book, I honestly can't remember which, and my interest in Harry's fate or that of his friends isn't particularly keen. My guess, though, is that Rowling isn't nearly big enough of a goose to kill the wizard that laid the golden royalty check and that Harry will survive his "final confrontation" with He-who-must-find -a-good-plastic-surgeon just in case she decides, say, ten years from now that she misses the attention or is down to her last billion pounds.

In any case, Megan McArdle has written an interesting column in the (U.K.) Guardian, complaining about Rowling's muddled sense of economics in the Potter novels. I'm not sure McArdle, herself, is a economics wizard (her use of the term "opportunity cost" is a bit wierd), but she's definitely on to something amiss about the magical world Rowling has wrought. Why, for example, are the Weasleys poor? Why would any even semi-accomplished wizard want for material goods when they learn how to change inanimate boxes into mice and such in elementary school? Can changing lead to gold be that much harder? For that matter, why on earth would gold, itself, be valuable to such people, unless of course they were using it to buy goods from ordinary people, which apparently they do not. It seems they have their own self-contained demimonde society with shopkeepers and such. It is one thing, after all, if only a few people possess magical skills or such magic is clearly limited in its power. But in Rowling's world everyone has enough magical power to live in the style to which Rowling, herself, has since become accustomed.

McArdle's larger point is that there is no satisfactory explanation of the distribution of magical powers or their limitations in the books. There is no internal consistency, either. Rowling is forever inventing new gizmos and spells to resolve otherwise impossible situations. To paraphrase McArdle, Rowling can't get by with the occasional deus ex machina; she needs an Olympian pantheon of such plot rescuers time and again. On any sort of close scrutiny, the world she has created simply isn't believable, not because of the existence of magic but because of the sort of world the widespread prevalence of magic has supposedly created. It has, at best, a sort of ad hoc dream logic about it, so little wonder the dream turns so easily into a nightmare.

In a sense, therefore, one can understand Voldemort's perspective. What good is magic, after all, if the end product is no more than some sort of quaintly absurd pseudo-Victorian society where the economy makes no more sense than the officious but otherwise useless bureaucracy? What better way to put magic to use in such a world than to acquire power over such a dimwitted lot who, by the way, seem not at all troubled by their own effective enslavement of a different sentient species? Voldemort's ambitions may be ignoble, but at least they make sense.